Utopia Writes Back: José Manuel Peramás on the Limits of Republicanism
- Book Title:
- Brill's Companion to Classics in the Early Americas
- Book Editor:
- Format:
- Book Chapter
- Year:
- 2021
- Publisher:
- Brill
- Place published:
- Leiden
- Language:
- Abstract:
Catalan Jesuit José Manuel Peramás (1732–93) spent the end of his life in exile in Italy, where he wrote voluminously in defence of the activities that his religious order – the Society of Jesus – had carried out in Paraguay from 1609–1767. In March 1793, just two months before his death, he completed an extensive study of the indigenous Guaraní of Paraguay, which measured their civic practices and institutions in the Jesuit missionary communities or reducciones against an idealized Platonic state cobbled together from details found in the Republic and the Laws. While its title may have an esoteric and sober ring, De Administratione Guaranica Comparate ad Rempublicam Platonis Commentarius (“A Commentary on the Way of Life of the Guaraní Compared to Plato’s Republic”) offers a trenchant commentary on the nature and limits of the republican form of government in an effort to present American lessons that might save Europe from its quixotic pursuit of revolution. For Peramás, classical antiquity was not a distant object of study, but rather the very fabric of contemporary intellectual discourse and a cornerstone of European ideological self-fashioning. Likewise, his years spent living in the Americas, and in particular in the Guaraní reducción of San Ignacio Miní, set him apart from other European chroniclers of Paraguay, few of whom crossed the Atlantic let alone ventured deep into the interior and away from the colonial capitals. In writing De Administratione Guaranica (DAG hereafter), Peramás brings his own experience living among the Guaraní to bear on a longstanding European discourse in which Paraguay was an exotic and abstract other, a Foucauldian heterotopia, no more real than Plato’s Kallipolis/Magnesia or Thomas More’s Utopia.
- Who (Jesuits):
- What (Subjects):
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- Worldcat URL:
- Publisher URL:
- Page Range:
- 50–72
- ISBN:
- 97890044685739789004468658
- DOI:
- Comment:
- Series: Brill's Companions to Classical Reception, v. 21