The Reception of Darwinism in Uruguay

Abstract

The reception of Darwinism in Uruguay followed the familiar Latin pattern of a debate between positivist and religionist intellectuals in the late 1870s and 1880s, with a significant and interesting exception. Before the intellectual debate began, another debate over Darwin’s merits had already taken place among the cattle breeders who were members of the Asociación Rural-the Rural Association. That organization had been founded in 1871 with the intent of stimulating the modernization of the agrarian sector. Among its 165 founding members were members of both political parties, cattlemen, industrialists, and lawyers, all of whom subscribed to the objectives of the Association. Fifty-three of the founders were foreigners, including twenty-one Englishmen and ten Frenchmen. The Association favored the “concourse of all ideas,” and its statutes prohibited any religious or politically motivated manifestation.¹This explains, I believe, the surprisingly open debate over Darwinism in the pages of itsRevista, in its first twenty volumes. The Association’s library contains an almost complete collection of Darwin’s works, in the same French edition by Reinwald that influenced all sectors of the Uruguayan intelligentsia.²