Leopoldo Zea on the role of Hegel's Master–Slave Dialectic in the philosophy of Latin American history

In one of the most influential works in 20th‐century Latin America, Leopoldo Zea draws on Hegel's Master–Slave Dialectic to construct a philosophy of Latin American History from colonialism to the present. Yet his motives for organizing his work around these brief but suggestive passages from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit have not been well understood. In this article, I explore these motives with the aim of shedding light on Zea's philosophy of history and on his strategy for appropriating Hegel in a post‐colonial context.