Abstract

The question about the role of the rural majority in the Dominican nation project was a major concern of liberal intellectuals since the 19th century. In our understanding, this question refers to a crucial aspect of the nation-building processes in the Dominican Republic. In this work we try to present, in the first place, some lines of reflection around the conformation of a discourse of "peasant indolence" as a reverse and complement to the "ideology of progress" in Dominican liberal thought. Second, we intend to contextualize the debate on small property by referring it to the political consequences of that discourse, which posed the objective of national-state consolidation from the perspective of the dominant classes.