Contemporary Global Revolutionary Significance of the Political Thought of Simon Bolivar

The Historical Ideological Context

In the age of Simon Bolivar, the Glorious Revolution of England, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution had enduring effects worldwide on the political ideas, social morals and revolutionary practice of all great men. This was the glorious triumph of bourgeois, democratic capitalism over all previous modes of production, especially over ancient slavery and feudalist, absolutist serfdom.

These momentous, revolutionary changes had a lasting impact on political expectations, government and liberty of the respective social classes, but also on the minds of European colonial subjects and subjugated peoples, especially in America and the Caribbean, as can be witnessed by the political thought of John Locke, Thomas Paine, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Jefferson, etc.

All of them were profoundly influenced by the social and moral, democratic, capitalist principles of the age-old Magna Carta, the famous English Bill of Rights (1689), the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791). Of course, history has verified over and over again, and now more than ever, that these human rights and liberties were never intended by the capitalist ruling classes to be applied to all colonial and neocolonial peoples.

The liberal democratic ideology that resulted from all these historic events historically led to North American independence; in France, where Francisco Miranda fought, it eventually led to constitutional monarchy, to democratic despotism, to the Napoleonic empire. Eventually, virulent, contagious nationalism disseminated itself across Europe and elsewhere, especially in Latin America, by means of bloody wars of voracious conquest, but also of national independence, inspired by Hegel's "World Spirit" on horseback, by Napoleon Bonaparte. It was temporarily repressed under the Congress of Vienna and the Concert of Europe, but flowered again in the Revolutions of 1848.
In North America, against the colonial British Crown, the following type of critique was voiced by the "founding fathers":

“Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.