Private Property, Social Revolution, and Nation: The Origins of Andean Socialism in Nineteenth-Century Peru

This research takes a new look at the formation of nineteenth-century socialism in Peru. Although previous studies have shown that since at least 1848 this intellectual current redefined the political language in the West and other more developed nations of Latin America, little is known about how Peru, a country with an indigenous peasant majority, gave room to some of the most radical socialist projects in the world by the 1920s. Through a study of newspapers, monographs, and government documents, this article argues that by the end of the nineteenth century, despite the absence of a vanguard party and a robust working class, Peruvian society had developed sophisticated ideas about socialism in which European but also “pre-Hispanic” traditions that reformulated modern interpretations of private property, social revolution, and the nation. These visions of Peru would become more recurrent and politicized in the twentieth century.