Research

My research explores the idea that human societies progress through a series of historical stages, or developmentalism. More specifically, I study how Latin American political thinkers reworked, adopted, and deployed these ideas to envision epic social and political transformations in their respective historical contexts. In doing so, my research asks three overarching questions: (1) What strategies did Latin American political theorists employ to revise developmental ideas?; (2) How did the modification of developmental ideas connect to positive or negative valuations of Spanish colonialism and Anglo-American neocolonialism?; (3) And, in revising developmental ideas, what novel social and economic institutions did Latin American thinkers theorize, and in what ways were these expected to contribute to societal transformation? To answer these questions, I bring together various theoretical perspectives, including political theory’s study of developmentalism, the Marxist tradition, and the history of ideas in Latin America. Methodologically, I draw on comparative political theory to cultivate dialogue between political theory’s longstanding historical canon, on the one hand, and non-Western texts and thinkers, on the other.

Archaic Developmentalism: 20th-Century Andean Marxism and the Invocation of the Incan Empire

Developmentalism refers to the idea that human societies progress through a series of historical stages, along one path or multiple paths, which allows for the comparison and hierarchization of different populations. Political theory has scrupulously documented how developmentalism, in its various guises, was called upon to justify Europe’s domination of non-European societies. More recently, however, there has been a reappraisal of developmentalism, which has analyzed how non-European political thinkers took up developmental ideas, such as liberalism and Darwinism, to achieve various emancipatory political ends.

With this in mind, my dissertation investigates the ways in which José Carlos Mariátegui, Tristán Marof, and Fausto Reinaga reworked developmentalism based on their reimagination of the Incan Empire as a communist utopia. Through my reading of these thinkers, I argue that 20th-Century Andean Marxist thought offered original theorizations regarding how the region could skip a mature capitalist stage of history and proceed directly to communism, thereby challenging the dogmatic and economically deterministic strand of orthodox Marxism championed by the Soviet Union. In addition to offering a history of Andean Marxist theories of development, my project develops a theory of archaic developmentalism, which captures the frictional convergence of capitalism and archaic modes of production by elucidating how outdated socio-economic forms can be exhumed to theorize new communal futures that resemble the past but do not exactly duplicate it. 

In 20th-Century Andean Marxist thought, archaic developmentalism can be productively disaggregated into three components: (1) a utopian remembering of the Incan Empire; (2) a condemnation of Spanish colonialism and postindependence political and economic arrangements for plunging Indians into servitude; and (3) the modelling of modern communist institutions on archaic Incan institutions.