The transformation of races in America

The Transformation of the Races in America (1908) traces a moral history of the human species in general terms to focus on the moral origins of the situation of early twentieth-century America. Agustín Álvarez states that:

“Fear was the secret spring of tyrannies; fear was the result of the religious superstitions of the Colonial Society, led in habitual obedience by chronic or customary fear of rulers of divine right, consecrated by time and by the Church, who ceased suddenly by the revolution and were replaced by accidental directors who took advantage of the old superstitious spirit. The new revolutionary power, constituted on the basis of undeveloped political intelligence, was not equivalent to the old one and failed little by little; Then the customary form reappeared without the traditional prestige, which was naturally replaced by a greater dose of terror. The usurper was forced to replace the speed acquired from the consented fact, which is the force of one species (and which is always missing from the new fact when the environment has not changed), by an equivalent complementary force, of another species, which in our case was designated by the name of “extraordinary faculties”. Thus chronic terror, which was sufficient for the chronic fact, is transformed into the acute terror necessary for the acute fact.”

And Álvarez wonders under what principles to build a vigorous society in which the moral order is a key element.