Elías J. Palti is Professor of History at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes and the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and Principal Researcher at the CONICET, Argentina. He is the author of fourteen books, including An Archaeology of the Political Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Columbia University Press, 2017). He is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Ideas. Palti received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and the Pensamiento de América ""Leopoldo Zea"" Prize in 2021, conferred by the Pan American Institute of Geography and History at the Organization of American States (OAS). He served as the Director of the Center for Intellectual History at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina from 2016 to 2022.
El´ias Palti has presented the most complete critique of Latin American philosophy written in the last twenty years. In his new book, the Argentine historian extends his analysis in An Archeology of the Political to the intellectual history of twentieth century Latin American thought. This is a masterful exercise that marks a before and after in research on the subject. * Santiago Castro-G´omez, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana * El´ias Palti is arguably the most philosophically engaged Latin American historian of his generation. In this engaging book, he organizes a genealogical interpretation and critique of the philosophical 'grounding' of Latin American intellectual history, with its characteristic preoccupation with imitation, politics, and singularity. * Claudio Lomnitz, Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University * A tour de force. Palti deftly probes the Thracian well of 'Latin American' thought-from nineteenth-century liberalism and positivism to dependency theory and the 'decolonial' philosophy-and what he finds is typically discomfiting: the slippery ground on which it stands is, like everywhere else, its own muck. No serious student of Latin Americanism can safely ignore this book. * Mark Thurner, Distinguished International Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, History, and Humanities, FLACSO, Ecuador *