ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how a new kind of subject, the republican citizen, was made possible in the midst of a Catholic and colonial Latin American society. It makes the givenness of educational subjects by exploring the complexities that played out in making the early Argentinean republican citizen. The chapter analyses republican awards, governmental prizes given to distinguished people and established in the name of the Republic, to describe how pastoral notions of salvation and inclusion became rearticulated as a thesis of cosmopolitanism that included the idea of progress and national belonging. The chapter utilizes Ian Hacking’s historical ontology to analyze republicanism as a style of reasoning that makes up the Argentinean republican citizen, in order to explore the birth of the Argentinean republican citizen. Republican awards attempted to shape enlightened republican citizens from three perspectives: the republican awards as a technology of government; the double gesture of inclusion/exclusion; and the emergence of a soft power to govern citizens.