Old Europe,new America: Domingo F. Sarmiento's utopia of well being

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento has forever held a revered position as the “father of civilization” in Argentina’s history. This paper offers a revisionist interpretation of Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845). After a century and a half, the scholarly interpretation of Facundo continues to be hindered by its early-onset canonical status in the history of Argentine political thought. In particular, the convention of reading Facundo within a nationalist framework and for its perennial significance therein have closed off an approach to the text as a bundle of speech acts situated in the important context of the European blockade of Buenos Aires during the 1840s. By centring the analysis on this momentary context, and refusing to assume the book’s reception as simply an artefact of nineteenth-century nation-building, this essay reinterprets Facundo as a piece of considered, transcontinental imagining, rooted in the imperial dynamics of the post-independence South Atlantic. Sarmiento utilizes the language of utopian desire to describe the best conditions for cities to thrive; the text’s utopian ideas are not aimed at providing an escape from reality but at bridging the forces of civilization and barbarism