Creole Revolution, Independence, and Militarization
Joshua Simon’s book is a provocative study of the political thought of Alexander Hamilton, Simón Bolívar, and Lucas Alamán (the last-named was a lesser known historian and politician in nineteenth-century Mexico) and the ideology of what Simon calls “Creole revolution.” Drawing on approaches developed in the fields of comparative political theory and the history of political thought, Simon bases his work on historical contextualizations and close readings of texts that are for the most part well known, though rarely studied together. The hemispheric perspective allows Simon to bring into sharp relief an ideological convergence between the revolutions in the North and the South that can get lost in the complexities of social history, differences in philosophical affiliation, and the misleading teleologies afforded by hindsight.