Abstract
In the first half of this article I will argue that the collapse of the monarchy (1810-1819) and the establishment of the republican system in the early nineteenth century gave way in New Granada (present day Colombia) to a new experience of time which contemporary actors characterized as precarious. In the second part I will examine the intellectual response to such precarious temporality by approaching the work of Colombian Jose Eusebio Caro (1817-1853), philosopher, poet, publicist and one of the historic founders of the Conservative Party (1848). Caro was an astute and skeptic observer of the "political and moral revolutions" of the Spanish American republics and became a prime ideological resource for Colombian conservatives in the subsequent period known as the Regeneration (1886-1930).
Keywords
Jose Eusebio Caro; Morality; Republic; republicanism; Conservative Party; Colombia; History of Concepts