Abstract

The authors of the first constitutions of the Spanish-American world, in New Granada, were also scientists who published articles on geography, natural history, political economy, population or medicine. From this observation, the article seeks to show how these scholars understood how to apply the new naturalistic knowledge to the regeneration of society in their constitutional work. This ambition entailed the need to destroy the supposedly artificial and despotic hierarchies of the Ancien Régime, based on the genealogical transmission of dignities and infamy, in order to replace them with others that were "natural". This device did not mean the constitutional triumph of equality, since, to take up a formula of Madame de Staël, equality before the law would mean nothing other than the reestablishment of natural inequalities. The article firstly deals with the works of the Enlightenment of New Granada and of Baron Humboldt to understand the assumptions of their naturalistic anthropology on the "American man", which later served to think, in revolutionary times, about certain political topics such as federalism, the rights of man and the limits of citizenship. It ends with a re-reading of the Discurso de Angostura by showing how this naturalistic knowledge, influenced Bolívar's constitutionalist thought.