Conclusion

This chapter draws several conclusions about the history of knowledge through a survey of landscapes of knowledge in Spanish America over the hundred years or so after independence. It discusses the recognition of knowledge that matters as much as the production or distribution in analysing outcomes of past and present struggles to extend access to knowledge. It also clarifies how certain ways of knowing are deemed worthy of being received as knowledge and who decides what counts as knowledge, even before it is subject to validation. The chapter emphasizes that a nation-state can be revealingly interpreted as a community of shared knowledge, providing a more flexible and more grounded analytical framework of an imagined community. It stresses that the knowledge order of a society will affect its capacity to achieve integration, constitutional legitimacy, and political participation.