Krausismo

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Krausismo

Alter the revolution of 1868, the Spanish government sent Julián Sanz del Río (1814–1869) to Germany to study the philosophy of education with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For reasons not completely clear, Sanz ended up studying in Dresden with Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832), whose eclectic philosophy he brought back to Madrid. By a strange fluke the Puerto Rican Eugenio María de Hostos happened to be in the Spanish capital during those years and became one of Sanz's disciples, imbuing his novel La peregrinación de Bayoán with a call to harmony and order, tenets integral to Krause's worldview. Soon thereafter the Cuban patriot José Martí, as a result of his revolutionary activities, found himself exiled to the peninsula, where he also came into contact with the Krausist doctrine of harmonic rationalism which he applied to anti-colonial proposals.

Later, others, such as the Mexican Alfonso Reyes, the Uruguyan José Enrique Rodó, the Peruvian Alejandro O. Deustua, and the Argentine Alejandro Korn absorbed Krausism in varying degrees either during trips to Spain or in Latin America itself. Reyes, for example, spent time at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid and with many graduates of the Institución de Libre Enseñanza, the premier Krausista think tank. For his part, Rodó corresponded with important Spanish Krausist intellectuals such as Leopoldo Alas, Rafael Altamira, and Miguel de Unamuno. There were also women Krausists such as the Peruvian Aurora Cáceres's writing after the 1920s, a result of her interest in Unamuno's philosophy, and before her, the Ecuadorian Marieta de Veintemilla. In Spain, Krausism was a philosophy of educational, social and political reform. It functioned analogously in Latin America, yet in the dissimilar regions of this hemisphere it took on wider and more varied forms and meaning according to the context, representing all the while an idealist challenge to North American utilitarianism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abellán, José Luis. "La dimensión krauso-positivista en Eugenio María de Hostos." Cuadernos Americanos 16 (1989): 58-66.

Alvarez Guerrero, Osvaldo. El radicalismo y la ética social: Irigoyen y el krausismo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Leviatán, 1986.

Ardao, Arturo. Espiritualismo y positivismo en el Uruguay, 2nd edition. Montevideo: Universidad de la República, Departamento de Publicaciones, 1968.

Gómez Martínez, José Luis. "Pensamiento hispanoamericano: El caso del krausismo." In Actas del II Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía Española, edited by Antonio Heredia Soriano, pp. 155-172. Salamanca, Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1982.

Oria, Tomás G. Martí y el Krausismo. Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1987.

Roig, Arturo Andrés. Los krausistas argentinos. Puebla, Mexico: Editorial J. M. Cajica, Jr., 1969.

Salazar Bondy, Augusto. "La obra filosófica de Alejandro Deustua." In his Historia de las ideas en el Perú contemporaneo, 2nd edition. 2 vols. Lima: Francisco Moncloa, 1967.

Stoetzer, O. Carlos. Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and His Influence in the Hispanic World. Köln: Böhlau, 1998.

Ward, Thomas. "El krausismo en las Américas." In his La teoría literaria: Romanticismo, krausismo y modernismo ante la globalización industrial, pp. 53-91. University, MS: Romance Monographs, no. 61, 2004.

Thomas Ward

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture