Historia Crítica

Hist. Crit. | eISSN 1900-6152 | ISSN 0121-1617

Ideas about the law and the nation in the construction and consolidation of the Chilean Republic, 1810-1860

No. 36 (2008-07-01)
  • Marco Antonio León León
https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit36.2008.05

Abstract

The period from 1810 to 1860 represents a period of significant transition toward modern republican and penal forms that still maintained a pejorative and stigmatizing perception of popular groups from the colonial past. In our view, these existing prejudices were a direct antecedent of all the critiques, distrust, and fear of the poor and their poverty (which were in fact criminalized) that found greater “scientific” support in the diffusion of positivist criminology starting in the 1880s. Articles in the press and other writings from this period, as well as current bibliographic references, make it possible to sketch an outline of how, in the shaping of a socio-political order that established measures and made decisions regarding the lower classes, ideas took hold that interwove both republican and colonial notions, rationalizations, and subjectivities.

Keywords: Social history, political history, criminality, criminology, lower classes