Simón Bolívar · Politics

Ploughing the Sea: The Paradox of the Liberator

Bolívar’s final disillusion - the 1830 verdict that America was ungovernable and that to serve a revolution was to plough the sea - and the deepest paradox of his career: the liberator who assumed a dictatorship, and warned that liberty without a people prepared to sustain it collapses into chaos.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that in his final year Bolívar wrote that America was ‘ungovernable,’ that ‘he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea,’ and foresaw descent into mob rule and petty tyranny; and that the arch-liberator had himself assumed dictatorship in 1828, embodying the paradox of liberty won by…

Leads to Thomas Hobbes.

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