## 1. An Overview



Liberal ideas first became widespread in Latin American with the
influence of the liberal Cadiz constitution of 1812 which
was in force in the Spanish empire for two years until the
reestablishment of absolute rule. At the beginning of the century,
"liberalism" in this context primarily meant what Spanish
liberals meant by it in the debates that took place in the
Cadiz Courts, which met as a sovereign national assembly in
response to the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808.
It was in this setting that the term "liberal" was for the
first time employed in a political sense to refer to a political group
(Brena 2012). Since the Cadiz constitution was, in turn,
heavily influenced by the political ideas of the French Revolution,
the first liberal ideas in Latin America had likewise primarily this
origin. Ideas such as popular sovereignty, civil equality, individual
representation, the conventional nature of political authority,
freedom of thought and of the press, and a division of powers that
privileges the legislative became central to early Latin American
liberalism. The latter was by no means identical to Spanish liberalism
or to the political ideas of the French revolution, but these two are
its main initial sources.



The crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies upon the
Napoleonic invasion set off the process of independence in most of
Latin America and opened the way for the free circulation, for the
first time, of modern political ideas in the region (the Spanish and
Portuguese inquisitions had prohibited freedom of thought and of the
press). Though the Cadiz constitution was influential in both
Hispanic (i.e., Spanish-speaking) and Portuguese Americas, liberalism
developed in quite different directions in these two regions because
of the two quite different ways in which the Spanish and Portuguese
monarchies responded to the French invasion. While the flight of the
Spanish king tossed the empire into a political crisis, the Portuguese
were able to maintain political stability by transferring the capital
of the empire to Brazil. Thus, questions about the source of
legitimate political authority became pressing in Hispanic America,
but were not as critical in Brazil. Although the initial answers that
Hispanic Americans offered were framed in terms of traditional
scholastic political thinking, they soon began to appeal to the
political ideas of the French revolution, specifically to the notion
of popular sovereignty. According to the scholastic traditional view,
sovereign authority rested on a pact between the king and its people,
and in the absence of the king, sovereignty returned to the people. On
this traditional view, the sovereign authority of the king was limited
by natural, divine, and teleological (i.e., common good)
considerations. The transition to the modern conception of unlimited
and indivisible popular sovereignty marked a radical break in the
political thinking in the Spanish colonies. Similarly new and
revolutionary was the related conception of individual representation
in a constituent assembly, as opposed to the traditional corporate
representation before the king, to which the American subjects were
never entitled.



The end result of this political process was the independence of all
Hispanic America (with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico) within
two decades of the Napoleonic invasion through armed revolt. Brazil,
by contrast, obtained independence in the same period without
bloodshed when the Portuguese prince-regent proclaimed it. This
difference in the sequence of political events accounts for the fact
that the liberal ideology in Hispanic America was deeply committed to
carrying out a radical break with the colonial past while a salient
feature of Brazilian liberalism is the continuity of monarchical rule.
While liberals in Hispanic American uniformly rejected monarchism and
embraced a republican form of government (i.e., non-monarchical)
grounded on popular sovereignty, Brazilian liberalism remained
monarchical until the closing decades of the century. The
egalitarianism implicit in republicanism favored the abolition of
slavery and of noble titles in the new republics. By mid-century
slavery had been formally abolished in all of them, though practices
of slave/serf-like labor continued in some regions, such as
Mexico. In Brazil, slavery was finally abolished in 1888 after
decades of contestation and gradual decline.



After having embraced the doctrine of popular sovereignty and the
natural rights language of the French revolution, most liberals
followed Benjamin Constant in his critique of the doctrine of popular
sovereignty and his defense of a limited government. His writings on
constitutionalism were closely followed in the design of Latin
American constitutions, both liberal and conservative. Though French
liberalism exerted the greatest influence overall, some Latin American
liberals were also much influenced by British parliamentarism. Most of
them also admired the North American republican experience.
Montesquieu and Jeremy Bentham were, along with Constant, among the
most cited European authors in the first half of the century (Safford
1987: 68). From Montesquieu, liberals took the idea of separation of
powers and his critique of despotism. Though they did not adopt an
explicitly utilitarian language, they admired and followed
Bentham's rationalistic approach to legislation (Jaramillo 2001:
120). In the mid-century, the political problem that came into focus
and that gave liberals an identity against the conservative opposition
was the religious one. The question was how to deal with a powerful
Church that, in some regions, posed the most powerful internal
challenge to the authority of the newly established republics, given
the Catholic uncompromising rejection of liberalism. The Catholic
Church had condemned liberalism, secularism, freedom of thought and
toleration, among other "evils" in Pope Pius IX's
Syllabus of Errors published in 1864. Liberals demanded freedom of
religious worship and, in some cases, the separation of church and
state. At this point in time, they had for the most part distanced
themselves from the natural rights discourse and from contractualism
in light of the criticisms by the British utilitarians (especially
Bentham) and French liberals (especially Constant). They turned their
attention to the German historical school of law (Friedrich Karl von
Savigny and his French follower Eugene Lerminier) and, above
all, to Auguste Comte's positivism, which became the most
influential philosophical doctrine (Hale 1984) along with Herbert
Spencer's evolutionism. After decades of civil unrest, a
doctrine that emphasized the maintenance of order in combination with
progress appeared highly attractive. Liberalism had ceased to be an
ideology in combat against an enemy, either foreign (Spain) or
internal (the conservative political faction), and had become the
triumphant ideology of national building (Hale 1984). In the closing
decades of the century, positivism displaced liberalism in Brazil,
while some Hispanic American liberals carried out a synthesis of
liberal ideas and positivism that has often been considered the
decline of liberalism.



In the early twentieth century, Latin American liberalism became the
subject of strong criticisms. Critics argued that Latin American
societies had not been successfully transformed according to liberal
ideas because the former provided a hostile ground for the latter. On
this view, liberalism was a foreign ideology that was not adequate for
Hispanic American realities. This is a criticism against nineteenth
century liberalism that has remained forceful to this date. By
mid-twentieth century liberalism had been displaced by the emergence
of alternative political movements and ideologies:
corporativisms of various sorts as well as socialist,
Marxist, indigenous, agrarian, and populist. In the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries, liberalism has experienced a modest
revival in political discourse in Latin America. This is manifest in
the discourse that affirms the pluralism of forms of life and the
demands for protection of the rights of minorities. In the sphere of
academia, the works by English speaking liberal scholars, such as John
Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Joseph Raz, have received much attention
and have been amply discussed in academic publications. However, Latin
American scholars have so far not related their current endorsement of
recent Anglo-American liberalism to the nineteenth century Latin
American liberal discourse. For the most part there is a sharp divide
between current work by historians on nineteenth century Latin
American liberalism, on the one hand, and systematic reflection by
philosophers and political theorists on recent Anglo-American
liberalism, on the other.


## 2. The Influence of Spanish Liberalism



In response to the French invasion in 1808, Spanish liberalism
developed as an ideology of liberation against a foreign invader. This
was the first powerful liberal movement in the Spanish empire and the
very first serious questioning of absolute rule. In a society that had
almost no experience in political representation, liberals sought to
end despotic rule by replacing it with a parliamentary monarchy. They
denied sovereign authority to the King and declared it to lie in the
nation, which, in turn, was conceived of as having the faculty to make
and remake its own fundamental laws. Traditionally, representation in
the Courts had been corporate (nobility, clergy and the
municipalities), while liberals stood for individualistic
representation. Against despotism, liberals also favored a division of
powers and an independent judiciary. Spanish liberalism was a
revolutionary ideology that marked a radical break with the
monarchical status quo. Liberals sought to end a corporate society and
to create an individualistic one by abolishing corporate privileges
and immunities and by replacing them with legal equality and economic
freedom. The liberal position was expressed in the
Cadiz constitution of 1812.



The most important philosophical influence that shaped the liberal
position was the political ideas of the French Revolution and, more
specifically, the 1791 Constitution (Varela Suanzes 1995). The
Cadiz constitution exhibited the influence of
Enlightenment rationalism, the rationalist natural rights discourse,
and the political ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau, to name the most
salient referred to authors (Varela Suanzes1987). The liberal deputies
embraced the idea of individual rights that were natural and
inalienable. They also affirmed the natural equality of all men and
the doctrine of national sovereignty. Following the French model, the
Cadiz constitution established a division of powers that
privileged the legislative as the power that represented the nation.
The constitution established a unicameral legislature in which there
were no special provisions for the traditional preeminence of the
clergy and the nobility. While the monarch, as the executive, was
subordinate to the legislative, the judiciary was held to be
independent, echoing Locke and Montesquieu (Varela Suanzes1983).



However, there are two crucial features that notably distinguish the
Cadiz constitution from the French model. The former, by
contrast with the latter, was grounded in an appeal to history and it
exhibited the weight of Catholicism. As regards the first feature, the
Cadiz constitution presented itself in its preamble as in
continuity with fundamental old Spanish legislation that had allegedly
been subverted by despotism. According to the traditional view, the
authority of the monarch rested on a pact with its people from which
pact followed the fundamental laws of the monarchy that the king had
to observe. The liberal appeal to historical legitimacy was clearly at
odds with the doctrine of national sovereignty according to which
sovereign authority is unlimited--the ultimate source of
authority. In fact, liberals introduced a conventional conception of
political power that subverted the traditional scholastic one
according to which political power was natural and historical.
Nevertheless, the presentation of the Constitution as in continuity
with fundamental legislation tempered the break with the past (Varela
Suanzes1987).



As regards the second feature, the Cadiz constitution continued
the imperial protection of the Catholic religion to the exclusion of
all others despite the fact that it also ended some privileges and
immunities that the Catholic Church had traditionally enjoyed. It has
been argued, however, that religious intolerance was not a feature of
Spanish liberalism, but a concession that liberals had to make to
traditionalist political forces in the Cadiz Courts (Varela
Suanzes1987). Nevertheless, the religious language that pervades the
constitutional text reveals the influence of Spanish scholasticism
according to which there are exterior limits to sovereignty (natural,
divine, historical, and teleological). This influence was even
stronger in Spanish America since the intellectual elite around the
time of independence had been educated in Spanish scholasticism.
Religious toleration was a matter of bitter disputes even among Latin
American liberals themselves and the religious language continued to
be present in legal documents throughout the nineteenth century.



Early Latin American liberalism must be seen through the influence of
the Spanish liberalism that developed in this political context,
although the former's two strands developed in different
directions. While the Hispanic American strand (i.e., the strand in
Spanish-speaking America) was firmly committed to a radical break with
the colonial past, the Brazilian one was marked by crucial points of
continuity. Let us consider the Hispanic strand first. The mark of the
Cadiz constitution was evident in most Hispanic American
constitutions in the first half of the century (Safford 1987: 62). All
of them claimed sovereign authority to lie in the people or the nation
and protected some basic individual rights (such as freedom of thought
and of the press) that were considered natural. They all maintained
protection of the Catholic religion as the official one as well as
most of the corporate privileges of the Catholic Church. They also
established a separation of powers and departed from the Spanish model
by creating bicameral systems. However, there are at least two
important points of contrast between Spanish and Hispanic American
liberals. The first one is that Hispanic American liberals could not
buttress their constitutionalism with appeals to historical
legitimacy. They could not present the constitutions that they
produced in continuity with the fundamental medieval laws of the
Spanish monarchy. Independence from Spain pushed, after three
centuries of colonialism, to conceive of the liberal institutions as
something completely new that lacked any historical precedent. By
contrast with Spanish liberals who looked both to the future and to
the past, the Hispanic American ones made a break with the past and
looked to the future only where emancipation and progress were
supposed to lie. Liberal constitutions held the promise of a society
fully transformed away from the colonial structures and in accordance
with the protection of individual freedoms and legal equality. When
Hispanic American liberalism became the ideology of a political group
in the mid-century, its identity was importantly centered in this
forward looking attitude. Liberal political actors often referred to
themselves as "the party of progress."



The second point of contrast is that Hispanic American liberalism was
more radically egalitarian. Hispanic American liberals rejected a
monarchical option and very early abolished slavery and noble titles.
By mid-century slavery had been formally abolished in all independent
countries. Hispanic American liberalism became synonymous with
republican government, which meant a commitment to legal equality,
political representation, and the rejection of monarchism. After three
centuries of despotic monarchical rule, Hispanic Americans associated
monarchism with despotism. They feared that one-person rule, even when
limited by a parliament, would inevitably become despotic--as it
in fact happened in the short lived monarchy in Mexico right after
independence. This egalitarianism, however, did not translate into the
establishment of a rule of law that guaranteed equal legal treatment
to all citizens. Nor did the egalitarian discourse translate into the
democratic inclusion of all citizens in the exercise of political
rights. Most Hispanic American liberals firmly believed in the need of
property or literacy qualifications for voting and for running for
public office. They were consistently skeptical about extending
political rights to a population that they regarded as incapable for
republican citizenship.



While early Hispanic American liberalism defined itself by its
rejection of the colonial heritage, Brazilian liberalism, by contrast,
acquired its identity in the confrontation with the advocates of
monarchical absolutism. Brazilian liberals did not challenge
monarchism. Instead, they sought to establish parliamentary limits to
monarchical authority (Cyril 2012), thus favoring a representative
monarchy. Though absolutists and liberals agreed on the need for a
written constitution, the protection of some fundamental liberties
(such as freedom of the press), and a legislative body that
represented the nation, the differences between them turned on the
extent and limits of the executive authority. Liberals sought to
subordinate the king to the legislative authority, while absolutists
pushed for the opposite balance of forces. Brazilian liberalism became
strongly identified with economic freedom, whereas absolutists favored
governmental intervention in the economy along the lines of the late
eighteenth century reformist absolutism. While Brazilian liberals
wished to emulate North American federalism, absolutists were firmly
committed to political centralism and, hence, to the political control
of the entire nation by the monarch. In the second half of the
century, Brazilian liberals defined themselves by opposition to
"conservatives" who favored political centralization, the
perpetuation of oligarchical privilege, and resisted the emancipation
of slaves, among other issues. However, it has been maintained that
the differences between the two political groups "were
essentially rethorical" (Viotti da Costa 1986).


## 3. Early Hispanic American Liberalism



The liberal discourse received from the French Revolution via the
Cadiz constitution provided the language in which political actors
demanded emancipation from colonial rule in the early nineteenth
century. This is why liberalism, though a diffuse ideology with no
clear contours, commanded the assent of many who favored the cause of
independence. The discourse of liberation appealed to the notion of
popular sovereignty in order to justify emancipation from colonial
rule (Palti 2007: ch. 2). Representation and legal equality were
heartfelt demands in a region that had had little if no experience in
political representation while a colony, except for the brief interval
when the Cadiz constitution was in force from 1812 through 1814 (Palti
2007: ch. 4). The natural rights to freedom of thought and of the
press were considered fundamental after centuries of tight control by
the Catholic inquisition, which had curtailed the free circulation of
ideas. A republican form of government with a division of powers was
considered an antidote against one-person despotic rule and a clear
sign of emancipation from monarchical absolutism. Some of those who
were later considered "conservatives", such as Lucas
Alaman in Mexico, or "republicans", such as
Simon Bolivar in Venezuela, shared in this early liberal
consensus. Both of them affirmed, at least initially, the core ideas
of popular sovereignty, some natural rights, and a republican form of
government with a division of powers. Conservative constitutions, such
as the Chilean one from 1833, affirmed these core ideas as well.
Liberal ideas thus provided a shared perspective in relation to which
the various political positions that were to develop later defined
themselves.



The philosophical sources of this early liberalism are quite diverse
since public intellectuals referred to all sorts of authorities that
could support their own positions. Though the list is long, the most
widely referred to authors were Rousseau, Montesquieu, Constant, and
Bentham (Safford 1987: 68). From Montesquieu they took the defense of
a division of powers and the critique of despotism; from Rousseau the
idea of popular sovereignty, the social contract, and the natural
equality of men; from Constant the critique of popular sovereignty and
the defense of a limited government; from Bentham the rationalistic
approach to legislation. It should be noted, however, that the
influence of these authorities was not limited to those who
consistently subscribed to liberal views. Such an influence also
extended across a political spectrum that acquired more definite
contours in later decades. The echoes of Rousseau are apparent among
those who advocated an egalitarian strand of liberalism that demanded
equal political rights for all males, as in the 1814 Apatzingan
Constitution in Mexico, which was never in force. This constitution
mentions the need for a virtuous citizenry, who, when in disagreement
with specific laws, must submit to them as a "sacrifice of
particular intelligence to the general will". But Rousseau was
also highly influential among those who defended clearly authoritarian
forms of governance, such as Bolivar, who established a
lifetime executive in the 1826 Bolivian Constitution. The same holds
for Constant, who was an authority for liberal intellectuals, such as
Jose Maria Luis Mora in Mexico, but also for some of
those who designed "conservative" constitutions, such as
the Mexican constitution of 1836. Constant's notion of a
"moderating power" was also picked up by the Brazilian
monarchy. This indicates that intellectuals often drew from the same
philosophical sources in order to develop political positions that
were, in fact, quite different from each other.



It is a matter of debate among scholars whether the notion of early
Hispanic American liberalism is only a retrospective reconstruction or
whether it is apt to refer to the initial usage of some liberal ideas
for political and legal purposes as a sort of
"liberalism". As mentioned, at this early state in the
first half of the nineteenth century there were no political groups
that self-identified as "liberal". The political
usage of the term was not yet well established in the region. The term
"liberal" still carried with it its original moral meaning
associated with noble qualities of generosity and magnanimity, which,
in the Hispanic-Portuguese Catholic tradition, were virtues that the
monarch had to have (Fernandez Sebastian 2009:
703-4). In this moral sense, "liberal" was opposed
to tyranny and despotism. From the perspective afforded by this
widespread moral usage of the term, it became difficult for Hispanic
Americans political actors to identify themselves as
"liberals" along the lines of Spanish liberalism. Although
this may seem paradoxical, the reason is that the liberal Spanish
Courts came to be seen as "illiberal" since they had
grudgingly granted representation rights to as few American deputies
as possible in the Cadiz constitution. Early Spanish liberalism
proved not to be incompatible with empire. This led some Hispanic
American liberals to claim distance from Spanish liberalism despite
the fact that the greatest impulse for the spread of liberal ideas in
Latin America was the Cadiz constitution. According to their own
self-perception, for instance, Colombian liberals owed nothing to the
latter. It was only in the twentieth century that historians have
demonstrated the inaccuracy of this self-conception (Martinez
Garnica 2006).



The moral meaning of the term "liberal" provided a
perspective from which Hispanic American liberals construed their
vision of the Spanish monarchy as a paradigm of tyranny and despotism.
From the point of view of liberal ideas, more broadly, they came to
see the colonial past as an age of obscurantism, ignorance, and
backwardness (Lastarria 1844; Samper 1861; for discussion see Collier
1967: ch. 5). This negative conception of the Spanish heritage became
a constant feature of the Hispanic American liberal frame of mind. In
light of their abhorrence of the colonial past, liberals insisted on
the need to construe completely new political institutions and to
instill a new political mentality in the population. They were also
prone to blame the colonial heritage for the great difficulties that
they faced in carrying out these purposes. To be sure, this dismissive
attitude towards the colonial past was not exclusive of liberals since
it was Bolivar who famously blamed the ills of Hispanic America
on the colonial past. In his *Jamaica Letter* he claimed that,
as a consequence of the colonial heritage, "institutions which
are wholly representative are not suited to our character, customs,
and present knowledge" (Bolivar 1815). As some
conservatives often complained, the repudiation of the Spanish
heritage prevented liberals from positively valuing aspects of their
society that could help build stable political institutions, such as
the unifying force of Catholicism.



In light of this view of the character and customs inherited from the
colonial times, the liberal faith in the capacity of written
constitutions to fully transform their societies away from the
colonial structures and in the direction of progress went hand in hand
with strong a pessimism about the capacity of the majority of the
people to live up to the demands of such institutions. Since the
majority of the population shared the moral values of the colonial
society and lacked even the basic skills of reading and writing, the
elite judged them to be backward and ignorant. Most liberals indeed
deemed the majority of the people to be unfit for republican
citizenship. To be sure, the latter was a widely shared view among
European liberals who also advocated a limited franchise. Most
Hispanic American liberals endorsed the French doctrinaire's
argument that most of the population lacked the needed independence of
judgment to exercise political rights either because of lack of
instruction or because of their subservience to masters, or both,
which was usually the case. A notable exception to this dominant view
was the short lived liberal Colombian constitution of 1853 which
granted universal male suffrage following the French example after the
1848 revolution (Bushnell 1993: 108). The same year, a local
legislature in Colombia also granted women the right to vote for the
first time in the Americas though the measure was turned down by the
supreme court (Bushnell 1993: 163). By contrast with their European
counterparts, however, the Hispanic American liberals'
conviction about the political incapacity of the masses was compounded
by their belief that the cultural practices inherited from colonial
times were a formidable obstacle for the realization of liberal
political ideas. This perception motivated the disenchanted conclusion
that liberal institutions were not suitable for Hispanic American
societies, as Bolivar put it, and as many other conservatives
repeatedly complained against partisans of liberalism.


## 4. From Constitutional Optimism to Alternatives for Social Change



In the aftermath of independence, most Hispanic American nations
produced written constitutions as early as 1811 in Venezuela, New
Granada (subsequently Colombia), and Chile. At the time, political
actors shared the belief that a written code of law had the power to
transform their societies in the direction of liberal ideas. They
believed that good legislation was the way to promote individual
liberties and economic progress. According to this, former subjects of
a colonial regime would come to see themselves as the bearers of
individual rights and liberties as soon as the latter were
constitutionally protected. Likewise, on this optimistic view,
economic progress would naturally develop as soon as individuals were
granted the economic freedoms to work, to contract, and to accumulate
wealth. This initial constitutionalism did indeed bring great changes
with it: the constitutional protection of freedom of thought and of
the press ended the traditional limits on the free circulation of
printed materials and allowed for an explosion in the number of
periodical publications in which people for the first time openly
discussed political issues. Nevertheless, the liberal legislation also
faced strong opposition by established social powers (such as the
Catholic Church), the new republics were marked by great political
instability (regimes were often overthrown), and economic progress did
not materialize. By mid-century this initial constitutional optimism
had waned and political actors looked for alternative solutions. The
two most salient liberal proposed alternatives went beyond
constitutionalism though in different ways. According to the first
one, it was necessary to transform social practices first in order to
prepare society for republican institutions. According to the second
proposal, by contrast, it was necessary to engage the State in the
task of social and economic reform. While the former alternative seeks
to produce social transformation from below (in civil society), the
latter deepens the strategy of producing social change from above (by
the State). Juan Bautista Alberdi advocated the first kind of strategy
as suitable for the specific situation of Argentina. In Mexico,
Jose Maria Luis Mora affirmed the second alternative
(section 6).



Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810-1884) was a public intellectual, a
legal theorist, and a diplomat. He laid the theoretical foundations
for the Argentinian constitution of 1853, which is the most long
lasting liberal constitution of the period (still current albeit with
important reforms). His proposal for constitutional reform in
*Bases and starting points for the political organization of the
Argentine republic* (*Bases y puntos de partida para la
organizacion politica de la Republica
Argentina*, 1852) turns on two central ideas. The first one is
that the South American republics should lower their aspirations:
instead of a "true" democratic republic, they should aim
for a "possible" one that would pave the way towards the
former. The second idea is that for a true democratic republic to have
any chance of success, society must be ready for it. On his view, the
transformation of civil society must take place before granting
political rights to the totality of the male adult population. Alberdi
claimed that the much needed social transformation could take place
through the interaction of the local population with northern European
immigrants who would bring with them the habits of order, discipline,
and industry that were necessary for economic progress and republican
citizenship. Strongly influenced by the effects of massive immigration
in California, Alberdi maintained that South America could become
civilized through the transplantation of Northern European culture in
American soil. Thus, his proposed solution was to promote massive
immigration from northern Europe in a nation that was for the most
part sparsely inhabited. Hence his famous claim that "to govern
is to populate".



Alberdi's thinking was importantly influenced by the German
historical school of law (Friedrich Karl von Savigny and his French
follower Eugene Lerminier) that repudiated both natural law and
the widely held idea that a society could be transformed on the basis
of legislation that did not reflect its own state of civilization
(Alberdi 1837). His distinction between a "possible" and a
"true" republic is based on the idea that political
organization must not be oriented by high and utopian ideals, but must
be grounded in historical reality. On his view, law has to be adequate
to the society that receives it. Since he also held that an
examination of the situation of the South American republicans shows
that they are not civilized enough to govern themselves through
democratic institutions, he maintained that a possible republic should
not grant equal political rights to all citizens. He favored a sort of
government that was republican in form, but highly authoritarian in
practice. This, he thought, was apt in light of what he considered the
historical reality of Hispanic America. He famously referred
approvingly to Bolivar's dictum that "The new
states of formerly Spanish America need kings with the name of
president" (Alberdi 1852: 415). In the end, he favored a
combination of federalism with political centralism: a certain degree
of autonomy to the provinces combined with a strong executive, since,
on his view, both federalism and centralism had important historical
roots in South America.



According to Alberdi, the goals that should guide the political
organization of a possible South American Republic must be responsive
to the latter's history and state of civilization (i.e., level
of material and political progress), which establish the limits of
political possibility. On his view, the most important goal of a
possible republic is to educate the population for representative
democracy. By "education" he meant the improvement of the
local population's level of civilization up to the level
required for a true republic. He advocated two main means of
civilization: the promotion of commerce and industry, on the one hand,
and massive European immigration, on the other. Alberdi opposed the
idea that the population could be made fit for democracy through
formal schooling, as many other liberals indeed maintained. Domingo
Sarmiento, the other dominant intellectual and political figure in
Argentina at the time, favored formal schooling as the main means of
civilization (Sarmiento 1849; Botana 1997). By contrast with
Sarmiento, however, Alberdi held that the best means of moralization
were industrious work and the constant interaction with people who
already had the habits of order, discipline, and industry. In passages
that evince the influence of Adam Smith, he maintained that social
prosperity was not the work of governments, but a spontaneous result.
He was completely skeptical about the possibility of civilizing the
local population without the interaction with people who were already
civilized. He summarily remarked that "whatever is not European
in America is barbaric."



Alberdi's diagnosis about the best means for preparing the
population for a true republic guides his recommendations for
legislation. At the heart of his liberalism is his strong defense of
free trade and industry. Such a defense was grounded on both economic
and moral considerations: he regarded freedom of trade and industry as
instrumental for material progress and for the improvement of the
morals of the local population. Crucially, freedom of trade and
industry was also indispensable in order to attract the desired sort
of European immigrants. The protection of civil rights and liberties
to everyone was part of his conception of a possible republic but also
instrumental for promoting immigration. Though he favored religious
toleration in order to attract non-Catholic Europeans, he also
maintained that Catholicism should remain the official religion. On
this point, he differed from most Hispanic American liberals who not
only advocated the end of the official recognition of Catholicism but
also, in some cases, the separation between Church and state. Again,
Alberdi's views were grounded on the realities of the
Argentinian nation where the Catholic Church was relatively weak and
did not pose a political threat to the republic in the making. In this
respect, the situation in Mexico and Colombia was completely
different.


## 5. Liberals, Conservatives, and the Religious Problem



What gave Latin American liberals and liberalism a clear identity
around the mid-nineteenth century was their opposition to an
adversary. In most of Hispanic America there emerged a
"conservative" reaction against the dominant liberal tide
as well as the political and social instability that
characterized the initial constitutional experiments. A salient
exception to this general trend is Argentina where liberals faced no
such strong opposition and the liberal identity was for this reason
less clearly defined (Halperin Donghi 1988). Though liberals
and conservatives shared some political ground, the latter were
usually the champions of order and stability, favoring gradual social
change and the preservation of traditional hierarchies and privileges
- including those historically enjoyed by the Catholic Church.
Liberals, by contrast, favored a faster pace of change, the full
protection of individual liberties, and the dismantling of the
Church's privileges and immunities. In Hispanic America,
liberals and conservatives agreed on the need for a written
constitution, the conventional nature of political authority,
individual representation, and the separation of powers, among other
ideas. In Brazil, the two political groups agreed on monarchical rule,
though conservatives favored political centralism, the maintenance of
oligarchical privilege, limited political participation, and also
opposed the emancipation of slaves. By contrast, Brazilian liberals
favored more provincial autonomy, political participation, religious
freedom, secularization, and the end of slavery and of oligarchical
privilege (Viotti da Costa 1986). Radical Brazilian liberals founded a
republican party that called for the end of the monarchical system and
the abolition of nobility titles.



In Hispanic America, what in particular was meant by
"conservatism" varied across the region depending on what
was politically at stake. In Chile, where the conservatives had been
successful in maintaining order and economic prosperity (1831-1861),
"conservatism" primarily meant authoritarian and
centralized rule. Correspondingly, liberals pressed for the full
protection of individual freedoms, parliamentary limits to executive
power, and wider political participation. The 1833 Chilean
conservative Constitution, which established a strong presidency,
official religious intolerance, and a highly centralist system,
remained in force for almost a full century and was often praised as a
model for neighboring republics. Though Chilean liberals were
anti-clerical while conservatives were not, the religious issue was
not as divisive in view of the relative weakness of the Catholic
Church. By contrast, in Colombia, where the Catholic Church had deeper
roots, conservatism also meant, in addition to authoritarian and
centralist rule, a strong pro-clericalism that advocated a central
place for Catholicism and the Catholic Church in the republican order.
Thus, the identity of Colombian liberals correspondingly centered on a
combination of profound anti-clericalism with a defense of individual
liberties and federalism. The Colombian 1853 liberal constitution
abolished slavery and established religious freedom and the right to
divorce. The more radical Rionegro constitution of 1863 confiscated
Church property, established absolute freedom of the press, took
federalism to the extreme (more so than any other constitution in the
Americas; Bushnell 1993: 181), and limited the presidency to a two
year term without the possibility of immediate reelection. Chilean
liberals took control of government in 1870 and were able to deepen
the process of secularization. By contrast, Colombian conservatives
won out in 1885 and remained in power until 1930. The 1886
conservative Colombian constitution remained in force until 1991 with
its strong centralism and privileging of the Catholic Church.



While all conservatives in Hispanic America favored a strong and
centralized rule that could maintain peace and political stability,
and also opposed the full protection of individual freedoms, they did
not look back in nostalgia to the destroyed colonial and Catholic
order, arguably with the exception of Lucas Alaman in Mexico
who also favored a return to monarchism (Collier 2003: 123), Nor did
they confer the Catholic church a central place in the new republican
order, again with the exception of Alaman but also of Miguel
Antonio Caro in Colombia, and Gabriel Garcia Moreno in Ecuador.
While the liberal forces of secularization had won out in most of the
region by the end of the century, the confrontation between liberals
and conservatives played out in Colombia until the end of the
twentieth (Del Par 2010). Though the difference between liberals and
conservatives was sometimes not clear cut, it has been maintained that
the only issue that consistently placed them at opposite sides in
Hispanic America was the religious one (Bushnell 1996, 288-289).



The religious problem in Hispanic America was, in some regions,
primarily about religious toleration and individual rights, where the
liberal position regarding religion centered on the demand for freedom
of religious worship. This was the case in Argentina where the local
Catholic Church was relatively weak. By contrast, in some other
regions, such as Mexico or Colombia, where the church was much
stronger, the religious problem was more complex and not merely a
matter of individual rights insofar as the church was powerful enough
to destabilize the new republican governments and to challenge their
legitimacy. Where it had the power to do so, the church sought to
mobilize the moral religious sensibilities of the majority of the
population against the attempted liberal reforms. The church opposed
civil equality in order to protect its own legal privileges and
immunities, rejected the freedoms of thought and of the press as
threats to religious morality and clerical authority, fought against
economic reforms that endangered its position as the largest landowner
and wealthiest corporation, favored a form of government that mirrored
its own hierarchical structure (i.e., absolute monarchism), and sought
to maintain official recognition and support by the state. The
challenge posed by the church to the new liberal republics combined
claims to political and economic power with the defense of morality
and religion. In sum, the church opposed all aspects of liberal
ideology in the name of the religion of the vast majority. By contrast
with France at the time, liberal Catholicism did not develop in the
Americas.



Though liberals and conservatives could agree on the need to protect
freedom of religious worship, as sometimes they did, they held
opposing views regarding the sorts of institutional supports, if any,
that the State ought to provide to the dominant Catholic Church.
Liberals favored the abolition of the church's privileges and
immunities in the name of legal equality, various degrees of exclusion
of the church from official schooling, the establishment of a civil
registry and civil matrimony, the possibility of divorce, and the
secularization of hospitals and cemeteries. In the name of economic
progress and freedom, liberals sometimes advocated the confiscation of
church property not directly related to religious worship in order to
make it available for in the market. In places where the conflict with
the church was most profound liberals pushed for the complete
separation between church and state as well as the
"neutrality" of the state in religious matters. The latter
meant that the state should not explicitly favor or disfavor religion
as such. This liberal position, though clearly anti-clerical, did not
necessarily entail hostility to religion. Though some liberals
undoubtedly held anti-Catholic sentiments, the attack against the
church was political insofar as it aimed to place the latter under the
authority of the state. Conservatives, in turn, defended the
privileges traditionally enjoyed by the church, which included
establishment and the church's alleged duty to spread religious
morality through official schooling. They also opposed the
confiscation of church property. Though some conservatives favored the
church from authentic conviction (such as Miguel Antonio Caro in New
Granada, the most prominent conservative intellectual there), many of
them did so from instrumental considerations. Conservative
politicians did not wish to antagonize what could be a useful
ally in the maintenance of order. This pragmatic view was Diego
Portales', the architect of Chilean political stability (Collier
2003), and apparently also Lucas Alaman's, who famously
referred to Catholicism as "the only link that binds all
Mexicans when all others have been broken" (Safford 1987: 100).
In the long run, those regimes that contemporized with the church
indeed proved to be more stable than the liberal ones that antagonized
it.


## 6. Liberal Anti-Clericalism



The region where the confrontation between liberals and conservatives
over the religious problem was most violent was Mexico, where the
colonial church had been the most powerful. The first confrontation
with the church took place in 1833, but the decisive blow to the
church came with the "Reform Laws" in 1855-1863,
which, among other measures, nationalized most of its property and
established a separation between church and State. The political
challenge that the church posed to the liberal regimes pushed some
Mexican liberals to move beyond their constitutionalism and to press
for social and economic reform. This was the case of Jose
Maria Luis Mora (1794-1850), the most prominent Mexican
liberal and whose liberal identity came to be centered on his
anti-clericalism. He was a historian, politician, legislator, and a
priest. His liberalism was strongly influenced by his admiration of
the Cadiz constitution of 1812, the writings of
Montesquieu and Constant, and by the course of political events that
led him to assume anticlerical views. Mora began his career as a
liberal intellectual as a partisan of constitutionalism. A constant
theme in his writings is the defense of the "absolute"
liberty of opinion and the criticism of any limits to freedom of the
press. He argued that it is impossible to limit the freedom to think
and to have opinions since men cannot divest themselves from their
opinions through external force. Thus, he claimed, it is neither just
nor convenient to prevent them from expressing their thoughts. The
crucial point for public order, in his view, is that men observe the
law regardless of the opinions that they may hold. He maintained that
no principle of justice can ground the prohibition of doctrines
considered false since men are fallible and the best or only means for
arriving at knowledge of the truth is to subject doctrines to
examination in a free discussion. The amendment of wrong opinions
cannot be attained through prohibition but through the free
circulation of ideas (Mora 1837: 491-5). Following Montesquieu,
Mora placed great emphasis on the security of the person and affirmed
the conception of civil freedom as the faculty of doing everything
that the law does not expressly prohibit (Mora 1837: 504-6).



As an admirer of the Cadiz constitution, Mora espoused the idea of
popular sovereignty but, following Constant, claimed that the latter
was not unlimited. In his engagement with Rousseau, Constant had
affirmed the notion of the general will as the source of legitimate
political authority, but had denied the unlimited authority of society
over the individual. According to Constant, individual rights are the
limits that the political authority must not trespass. Mora warned
that any unlimited authority was essentially tyrannical and, following
Montesquieu, characterized despotism as the lawless, absolute, and
unlimited use of political power regardless of the hands in which it
falls and the particular form of government that it takes (Mora 1837:
475). According to Mora, individual rights and liberties limit the
exercise of political power lest it become despotic. As was
conventional wisdom in nineteenth century French liberalism, Mora
argued for a franchise limited to proprietors who, in his view, were
the only members of society capable of exerting an independent
judgment, of displaying true civic virtues, and of caring for the
public good (Mora 1837: 633-4). At the same time, however, he
strove for the improvement of "the moral condition of popular
classes" through various forms of education. However, Mora
departed from the conventional wisdom of nineteenth century French
liberalism in various ways. First, he rejected monarchism, continued
to regard individual rights as natural, and subscribed to the doctrine
of the social contract. He held that men's purpose in
establishing society is the preservation of their "liberty,
security, equality and properties" (Mora 1837: 475). Second,
Mora explicitly rejected Constant's defense of a
"conservative power", which was one of the latter's
most popular conceptions in Latin America, though not among liberals
(Mora 1837: 681). Constant had conceived of the constitutional monarch
as a neutral power that could moderate conflicts among the executive,
the legislative, and the judicial branches. As already mentioned, this
notion was adopted by the Brazilian monarchy.



The third way in which Mora departed from French liberalism was his
anticlericalism, which was motivated by local political events.
Despite his admiration for the Cadiz constitution, Mora
criticized the fact that it did not abolish the special privileges
enjoyed by the military and the church. With respect to the latter in
particular, Mora reacted against the church's opposition to the
establishment of republican values and came to regard it as a power
capable of destabilizing the republic, to subvert its laws, and to
turn the mass of the population against it (Mora 1837: 66). He
regarded the church as having a *esprit des corps* that was
opposed to both the national spirit and the representative system
insofar as the church sought to maintain special privileges and
immunities that were contrary to civil equality. He emphasized the
church's refusal to submit to civil and criminal law, its
opposition to freedom of worship as well as to freedom of thought and
of the press. On his view, the church opposed these freedoms because
their exercise threatened the former's rule over consciences. In
the same vein, Mora regarded the church as an obstacle to public
education insofar as education was instrumental to the masses'
emancipation from priestly power (Mora 1837: 63). He also considered
the church as an obstacle to colonization of scarcely populated
territories in virtue of its opposition to freedom of worship. He even
criticized the clergy's celibacy, which, on his view, isolates
its members from society insofar as family ties are the "primary
link that binds men to society" (Mora 1837: 61). Mora advocated
the confiscation of the church's property on the grounds that
the clergy was not a productive class and lacked an inclination to
industrious work. In Mexico, the church was indeed the wealthiest
financial agent and the largest single proprietor in the nineteenth
century until most of its property was nationalized in 1859.



Despite his multifaceted condemnation of the church, Mora's
anticlericalism did not entail hostility to religion. He held that the
church should be free to devote itself to its spiritual mission since
"religious beliefs and principles of conscience are man's
most sacred property considered as an individual" (Mora 1837:
74). His concern was to argue for the separation between the religious
and the political "principles." He maintained that the
church should have no share in the exercise of political power, nor
should it have any power to coerce citizens either in the form of
forced economic contributions or punishments that are not solely
spiritual. He warned that the religious principle degenerates when it
is not kept separate from the political one. By contrast with the
Argentinian Alberdi, who did not have to deal with a similarly
powerful Catholic Church, Mora advocated a strong reformist state
capable of curbing the opposition to liberal values by established
social powers. According to Mora, a reformist state had to create the
conditions for citizen's freedom and equality. This was a
position that was contrary to Alberdi's commitment to more
*laissez faire* liberalism.



Indeed, those countries in which liberalism became the dominant
ideology in the late nineteenth century implemented secularizing
reform laws that emancipated official institutions from control by the
Catholic Church. Such reform laws created a civil registry,
established civil matrimony and, in some cases, the possibility of
divorce. Church property was often confiscated, convents and
monasteries closed, and the Catholic Church's legal immunities
abolished. Central among such reforms was the secularization of
official schooling, which became "laicist". This process
of secularization, along the lines suggested by Mora, took place
comparatively early in Mexico (beginning in the 1850's
-after a failed attempt in the 1830's) and Colombia
(1850's and 60's). In both countries the process turned
bitter and violent since the Church was powerful and was able to
oppose resistance. The "laicist" State was consolidated in
Mexico with the total defeat of the conservative pro-clerical
adversaries, while in Colombia the secularizing reforms were almost
fully reverted with the triumph of pro-clerical conservative
"Regeneracion" (1885-1904). During the 1870's
and 80's similar processes of secularization took place in
Venezuela and the Central American republics. Much less
confrontational and violent were comparable changes in Chile,
Argentina, and Uruguay in the 1880's, and in later years in
Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru (where religious freedom was
established only in 1915). The process in Brazil was rather different
since the monarchy had maintained control over the Church through the
patronage system (priests received State salaries and the monarch
appointed clerical authorities, among other measures). The
establishment of the republic in the late 1880's, strongly
influenced by positivism, brought with it full religious freedom and
the separation of Church and State. With the exception Colombia, the
liberal forces of secularization won out during this period displacing
the Catholic Church from its traditional participation in the ruling
of society through official political institutions.


## 7. The Influence of Positivism



In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, there took place a
fusion of liberalism with positivism in some parts of Latin America.
"Positivism" was the name for a scientific approach to the
solution of social and political problems that was based on experience
and observation. As developed by Auguste Comte in his *Course of
Positive Philosophy*, positivism claimed that it was possible to
uncover the laws of social phenomena and to organize society according
to them. Comte's thesis that it was possible to combine liberty
with order and progress exerted great influence in Latin America along
with Herbert Spencer's evolutionism. While some liberals, such
as Victorino Lastarria in Chile, sought to reconcile individual
freedom with positivist philosophy, some others, such as Justo Sierra
in Mexico, frankly subordinated individual liberty to the maintenance
of social order. Comtean philosophy was most influential in the field
of higher education, where social reformers introduced new curricula
that privileged the study of the empirical sciences. Such innovations
were intended for the education of the elites. Educators believed,
following Comte, that the key to ending social disorder was mental
order: education was instrumental to ending mental anarchy by
emancipating individuals from prejudice and introducing them to
"a common reservoir of truths" (Zea 1968: 125). However,
Hispanic American educators inspired by Comte did not embrace his
religion of humanity. The latter had the greatest impact in Brazil,
where positivism displaced liberalism.



Jose Victorino Lastarria (1817-1888) was the most prominent
Chilean liberal intellectual in the nineteenth century. He was a
lawyer, a public intellectual, a central literary figure, and a
politician who held official positions. His thinking was importantly
influenced by John Stuart Mill's rendering of positivist
philosophy in his *Auguste Comte and Positivism*, and by
Emile Littre, who popularized Comte's positivism.
Along with Federico Errazuriz, Lastarria wrote the "Basis for
Reform" (1850), which is a liberal manifesto containing the much
desired reforms to the conservative Chilean constitution of 1833.
Above all, they demanded the protection of individual liberties and
limits to the executive power but did not call for universal male
suffrage. Instead, this liberal program endorsed literacy requirements
for voting. When liberals came to power in 1861 they took the path of
constitutional reform instead of drafting a new constitution. As has
been noted, Chilean liberals privileged the way of reform, as opposed
to revolution, to press for their own political ends (Jaksic and
Serrano 2011, Jocelyn-Holt 1998).



Lastarria's most important theoretical work is *Lessons in
Positivist Politics* (*Lecciones de politica
positiva*) published in 1875. The influence of positivism is
manifest in this work. By contrast with Comte, however, Lastarria was
a thorough individualist who extolled the perfection of the individual
and the value of individual liberty. He refused to subordinate
individual liberty to social order and maintained throughout his
political writings that society should protect the full exercise of
individual liberty. The central idea that Lastarria took from Comte is
the thesis that modern societies need to be guided by experience and
scientific observation. According to this, politics must be an
experimental science based on experience and observation, which are
the only solid basis for social organization. Following Comte,
Lastarria maintained that it is possible to comprehend society's
progressive movement by uncovering the laws that govern social
phenomena. On his view, in order to examine a particular form of
social organization, it is necessary first to determine the laws that
govern humanity's progress. The most fundamental law that
Lastarria identifies and that, according to him, impulses humanity
forward, is "moral liberty": the tendency to augment and
develop all of our faculties (*Lecciones*, 3rd
Lesson). Social progress, on his view, is a product of this
development. This is a perfectionist conception of the human person
according to which perfection is not only an individual end but also
the most important social end.



Lastarria conceived of his own epoch as one of painful transition
towards the triumph of liberty. Following Comte, he subscribed to the
view that society progresses through three stages: theological,
metaphysical, and positive. At the theological stage, society is
subject to the authority of spiritual dogmas and is governed by force.
According to him, this is the most vicious state because it is
contrary to man's moral nature and stops social development. He
associates the metaphysical stage with the French spirit and
criticizes it for its anarchy and confusion. In particular, Lastarria
criticizes the revolutionary conception of liberty as popular
sovereignty which he regards as an absolute power incompatible with
the rights of man, properly understood. The attack against the old
theological order and the anarchy in the ideas characterize the epoch
of transition towards a third, positive, stage. He identifies the
latter as "liberal" insofar as it is founded on human
liberty, which, on his view, is ideally exercised in what he calls
"semecracia" (self-government). By the latter he not only
means individual self-government but also government of the people by
the people, which he saw realized in the North American republic that
he greatly admired.



Lastarria maintained that liberty consists in the exercise of various
rights: the right to make decisions about one's own person
(personal liberty), the right to exercise one's own intelligence
and to examine received beliefs, the right to work and to acquire
property, the right to associate with others, and the right to demand
equality before the law (*Lecciones*, 5th Lesson).
He was particularly concerned with freedom of religious worship. He
held religion to be a fundamental idea in society but also an intimate
and private one. Following the example of North America, he advocated
the separation of church and State both in order to maintain the
independence of the church in the carrying out of its spiritual
mission and the neutrality of the State with respect to religious
dogma. As many other Hispanic American liberals, Lastarria established
a connection between freedom of thought and freedom of teaching: on
his view, just as the State should abstain from favoring any religious
doctrine in particular, the State should also refrain from imposing
any political doctrine through official schooling. Though this view
pushes towards the disappearance of official schooling, he granted
that the State had a duty to finance basic schooling but should leave
all other instruction in private hands.



Lastarria's individualism was an exception among those Hispanic
American liberals who subscribed to positivist philosophy. The latter
came to see society as an organism, of which the individual is a part,
subject to fixed laws that determine its development. In their defense
of a scientific approach to social problems that was based on
observation and experience, they claimed that law had to be adjusted
to social reality, not the other way around. They thus rejected the
"utopias" of earlier liberals and came to regard the
"old" defense of natural rights and popular sovereignty as
metaphysical abstractions that were out of touch with reality. In the
extreme, positivist liberals sided with the defense of authoritarian
governments in the name of order and progress. In Mexico, positivist
philosophy became the official creed of the governing elite, the so
called "scientists", who did not repudiate their liberal
credentials. Their positivist version of liberalism, which they called
"conservative" liberalism, served as the ideological
framework for the justification of dictatorial rule. In Brazil, by
contrast, positivism displaced liberalism as the ideology of the
ruling elite with the fall of the monarchy and the advent of the
republic in 1889 through a military coup. As has been maintained,
Brazilian republicans, in their attacks to the oligarchy and distrust
of the masses, were attracted to the positivist idea that
scientifically grounded social reform had to be carried out by a
technocratic elite (Krebs 2002: 269).


## 8. The Decline of Liberalism, its alleged failure, and contemporary conceptual debates



After having been the triumphant ideology of nation building in most
of Latin America in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth,
liberalism entered a phase of decline. In most of the region the
liberal political and economic order was made unstable by social
movements that contested the oligarchical nature of the regimes and
pressed for both democratization and the inclusion of the masses in
the benefits of economic growth. For reasons having to do with each
particular national context, critics objected that the sought after
transformation of Latin American societies in light of liberal ideas
and values had been a failure. Where the liberal order had led to
authoritarian regimes, as in Venezuela and Mexico, critics maintained
that liberalism had proved inadequate for these societies. In Mexico,
this skepticism emerged from within the liberal establishment itself
(Rabasa 1912). In Venezuela, the positivist sociologist Laureano
Vallenilla famously argued that authoritarian forms of governance were
more suitable for Hispanic American societies (Vallenilla 1919). In
Chile, the liberal parliamentarian regime that had successfully
limited executive power in the 1870's and 80's was
gradually eroded and finally displaced by a new presidentialism in the
1920's. Chilean liberal parliamentarism proved unable to manage
social unrest and criticism (Correa Sutil 2004 & 2008). There
began a new conservative narrative that glorified the authoritarian
regimes of the 1830's and served to legitimize authoritarian
rule (Edwards 1928). In Argentina, the liberal oligarchical regime was
displaced in elections in which universal male suffrage was mandatory
for the first time. The Brazilian republic, which had been established
through a military coup, was in turn overthrown by another military
coup and replaced with a dictatorship in the 1930s. By midcentury,
corporativisms of various sorts as well as socialist,
Marxist, indigenous, agrarian, and populist political movements and
ideologies had become dominant and displaced liberalism in the
region.



The idea view that liberal reformers had failed because liberal ideas
were "imported" and not adequate for Latin American
societies has not ceased to occupy interpreters ever since (a
discussion is in Hale 1984). A notable exception to this dominant view
is the reconstruction, by an official ideologue, of Mexican liberalism
as the official and triumphant ideology of the political regimes
emanated from the 1910 revolution (Reyes Heroles 1957). However, there
is currently a growing tendency to abandon the "failure"
view of liberalism and to focus on the reconstruction of what
nineteenth century liberals aimed and accomplished, as a recent
collection of essays shows (Jaksic and Posada Carbo 2011b).
Scholars have engaged in conceptual debates regarding the adequate
framework for a more sympathetic and accurate reconstruction of
intellectual political history. The starting point has been the
criticism of the "traditional history of ideas" that
allegedly presumed political ideas to have a definite content subject
to little, if any, historical change (Detailed discussions are in
Palti 2005 & 2007, Linares Londono 2021). On this
"traditional" view, which is usually attributed to
intellectual historian Leopoldo Zea, liberalism was some sort of
political "model" originated in Europe and Anglo North
America that was transplanted and adapted to Latin American societies,
which were, the view goes, unsuitable (Escalante 1992, Montalvo Ortega
1995). Whatever resulted in this "adaptation", this
traditional view continues, was a "deviation" from the
original model. As a commentator puts it in a recent work when
presenting this view: "the importance of studying Latin American
ideas does not lie in their contribution to western thought but in the
'mistakes' that the former contain in relation to the
latter, that is, in the refractions or deviations that Latin American
national circumstances impressed on the original ideas" (Linares
Londono 2021: 47). The traditional history of ideas, thus
understood, would make at least three mistaken assumptions: First,
that the meaning of liberalism can be established conceptually, apart
from the historically changing conditions in which the notion has been
deployed; second, that liberal Latin American political actors sought
to "apply" this already complete model of liberalism to
their own societies; and third, that to understand Latin American
liberalism is primarily to trace its intellectual sources or
"influences" in European and Anglo North American liberal
authors and political movements.



Scholars who have sought to distance themselves from the traditional
history of ideas thus understood have been motivated by various
theoretical concerns. Some political theorists have attempted to
show that Latin American liberals were not mere
"imitators" engaged in the application of foreign models
but also did produce "original" ideas that are relevant to
"western thought" (Aguilar 2000 & 2010). Intellectual
historians, on the other hand, have been motivated to avoid
anachronisms that inevitable arise when current definitions are
assumed in the reconstruction of past political thought and movements
(Palti 2005 & 2007). They have also been reluctant to impose
preconceived theoretical dichotomies in carrying out this
reconstruction, such as tradition/modernity and
organicism/individualism, and to avoid teleological approaches that
regard history as pointing towards the triumph of liberalism. Instead,
intellectual historians have attempted to offer sympathetic
reconstructions that seek to capture what intellectuals and political
actors meant (explicitly or implicitly) when they advocated or
criticized liberal ideas and institutions. There has been a growing
interest to seek to understand what nineteenth century liberal
political actors and intellectuals meant when they affirmed a liberal
view or other in the particular circumstances in which they did so.
Some authors have purported to engage in professional history
distancing themselves from national ideologies and political
mythologies (Hale 1968 & 1989). Others have engaged in
constitutional history for the sake of comparative analysis
(Gargarella 2010 & 2013). Intellectual historians have engaged in
debates regarding what should be the subject matter in this
reconstruction, whether the uses of the term "liberal",
the concept of "liberalism" regardless of the terminology
that political actors and movements in fact employed (Fernandez
Sebastian 2009), or the political languages in which they
articulated their own views (Palti 2007 & 2007).



These multiple approaches have called into question the historical
stability of what we mean by "liberalism" and have raised
the issue whether anything that political actors and intellectuals
called "liberal" can rightfully be considered as such for
scholarly purposes. Some have resisted this conclusion and insisted on
the need for a prior definition of liberalism in order to properly
identify the subject matter of reconstruction (Aguilar 2000 &
2010, Gargarella 2010 & 2013). On approaches of this sort,
definitions of "liberalism" are taken from twentieth or
twenty-first century authors and applied retrospectively to discern
what can rightfully be considered "liberal" and what not
in nineteenth century Latin America. From this perspective, whatever
does not fit the preferred definitions readily falls out of view, such
as liberal social and economic reformism. Unsurprisingly, the failure
view has to a great extent been nurtured by this kind of approach
(Escalante 1992). In general, historians have been more willing than
political theorists and philosophers to take as bona fide
"liberal" positions whatever political actors and
intellectuals claimed to be so. Some historians have assumed rather
wide understandings of liberalism (Collier 2003), and have called to
free the discipline from the grip of the failure view (Hale 1989).



The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a modest
revival of a liberal political discourse that is partly due to the
decline of socialist and Marxist political movements and ideologies.
Two salient instances of this revival in political discourse are the
recognition of the pluralism of forms of life and the demands for
protection of the rights of minorities. In the sphere of academia,
many scholars have enthusiastically welcomed the influence of
Anglo-American contemporary liberalism. The works by John Rawls,
Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, and many others have received much
attention and have been amply discussed in academic publications. It
is interesting to notice, however, that there is a sharp separation
between the reconstruction of nineteenth century Latin American
liberalism, which largely continues to be the province of historians,
on the one hand, and systematic reflection on liberal ideas and values
by professional philosophers and political theorists, on the other.
Little effort has been made to relate current work on liberal ideas
and values inspired by Anglo-American authors to the nineteenth
century Latin American tradition.