SOURCE: Jaksić, Iván. Introduction to Selected Writings of Andrés Bello, by Andres Bello, translated by Frances M. Lopez-Morillas, edited by Iván Jaksić, pp. xxvii-lv. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Jaksić examines Bello's life and works, arguing that Bello's primary concern in all his writing and political work was creating order.

Andrés Bello was a central figure in the construction of a new political order in post-independence Latin America. A quiet, unassuming, self-effacing man, Andrés Bello was nevertheless a person of enormous influence, a mentor to generations, an advisor to powerful political figures, and a builder of institutions. Andrés Bello was also a product of his times, a man whose long life straddled the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries; who lived long enough to have known and participated as an official in the Spanish imperial bureaucracy; who was an...