6 Yet these people-none of whom fails to be very patriotic-do not realize, apparently, that what they are complaining about is, in fact, the very existence of their own country. Similar ideas are commonly expressed by Ecuadorians. 3 In a later work he adds that on separating from Spain, Hispanic America was left “without a national tradition, without soul and without historical unity.” 4Īnother ex-President of Ecuador-who would have been Velasco’s principal opponent in the frustrated 1964 elections-Camilo Ponce Enríquez, exalts in the same vein the glories of la patria colombiana, and attributes its decease to “caciquismo,” asserting that “for every intelligent builder there are ten destroyers who sacrifice the grandiosity of what pertains to the Fatherland in favor of their mean ambitions.” 5 Velasco Ibarra attributes the breakup of Bolívar’s Colombia to caudillismo. In the case of Ecuador it is then, perhaps, pertinent to cite José María Velasco Ibarra, an intellectual who was elected four times as President of the Republic, and whose fifth election can be avoided, apparently, only through amending the Constitution. This obligation particularly concerns those who, in the field of education, politics, or literature, exercise a marked influence on the rest of the people. We can affirm then that a society that wants to know itself should know its own, common past in which it originated, by which it was formed. Even fanatical reformers feel obliged to make concessions to existing realities and the Cartesian ideal of tabula rasa on which to build a new, perfectly rational system which would forever remain unchanging, has succeeded, so far, only on paper. Now, speaking of society-and in particular, of its national form- it is evidently the result of a long historical process, and not the fruit of extemporary creation. These colleagues, apparently, never had any doubts about the usefulness of their own specialty.
1 This is, of course, a typically nineteenth-century Comtian positivist attitude. It seems our colleagues of the so-called behavioral sciences are strongly questioning the usefulness, and consequently, the right to subsist, of historical studies.
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