Abstract
After its introduction into Venezuela in the early 1860's and until the 1930's, positivism grew in importance in liberal intellectual and political circles, where people saw it as something that could restore Venezuelans' belief in social, political, and technological progress. Among historians, Rafael Villavicencio (1837-1920) played a leading role in the application of positivism and its notions of order and progress to the study of Venezuelan social history, while his contemporary Adolfo Ernst (1832-99) directed the first positivist journal, 'El Cojo Illustrado,' on which successive generations of Venezuelan positivists collaborated. The work of José Gil Fortoul (1862-1942) and Laureano Vallenilla Lanz (1870-1936), who also became members of dictator-president Juan Vicente Gómez's government in the 1920's, marked the second and third generations of Venezuelan positivism, notably Vallenilla Lanz's 'Cesarismo Democrático' (1919), which argued for a dictator who represented the people in the face of the landowning oligarchy.