Summary: Professor Nicola Miller discusses the reception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Latin America. It is well known that many of the leaders of the Wars of Independence invoked Rousseau in support of their challenge to colonial authority, but how exactly were Rousseau's works read and interpreted in early nineteenth-century Latin America? This lecture identifies variations in how his ideas were adopted and adapted by different actors, in different parts of the region, in order to explore the problems and possibilities of explaining how and why ideas travel.
