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1. Introduction: How Not to Write the History of the Spanish American Enlightenment -- 2. Science: Three Degrees of Modernity: The 1735 Franco-Hispanic Expedition to Quito and the question of universal science -- 3. History: Conjectures on Commerce and the "Stages of Civilisation": Philosophical Histories of America -- 4. Periodical Press: Faith and Knowledge in the Mercurio Peruano -- 5. Law: Prologue to Revolution: Mariano Moreno Translates Rousseau -- 6. Literature: The Idle Noble and the Noble Citizen: El periquillo sarniento and the Invention of the Mexican Individual -- 7. Conclusion. .

This article examines the applicability of Habermas' concept of the public sphere to the periodical paper the Mercurio Peruano in 1791. It compares the conditions of production of Habermas' 'model' eighteenth-century European bourgeois public sphere to those of a colonial, ancien régime Lima complete with Inquisition censorship. It suggests that Habermas' literary—rather than political—public sphere, training ground for a critical civic public reflection, is the more fruitful concept. Moving beyond contextualist explanations, it argues that the Mercurio's Enlightenment meditations on the capital's 'civil system'—on its commerce and its cafés—construct the public sphere through and in the productive force of critical reason itself. In its patriotic pages we glimpse both the signs of a 'modern' public sphere of civil society in the interstices of formal politics before independence and a reminder that the public sphere, based on a reason that exceeds any determinate historical structure, is never exclusively modern.

This book commemorates the bicentenary of the landmark Spanish Constitution of 1812. Drafted by Spanish and colonial Spanish American liberals (and non-liberals) holed up in Cadiz as Napoleon's troops occupied the surrounding hills, this war-time Constitution set out radically to redefine 'the Spanish nation' for a new age. In the event, it divided Spaniards and threw into sharp relief the question of Spain's legitimacy in her American colonies. Cadiz 1812 is a defining moment in the modern h