This small volume, sponsored by the Colegio de Abogados, contains four essays of varying quality and length written by Mexican jurists for the centennial of the Constitution of 1857. The first essay (one-half the book) by Lie. Gonzalo Obregón chronicles the participation of most of the thirty-one members of the Colegio who were also deputies in the 1856 Constituent Assembly. The author is not concerned with interpretation nor does he discriminate between the varying viewpoints of these lawyer-deputies. Two other short contributions deal with the Rights of Man in the 1857 Constitution and with the agrarian problem in Mexican liberal thought.
The final essay, a scant fifteen pages by Felipe Tena Ramírez, is an exceptionally clear and suggestive schematic interpretation of Mexican constitutional history. Mexican liberalism in the nineteenth century, argues the author, was in the difficult position of pursuing two diverse objectives. The first was to recover for the state its sovereignty, lost to the forces of corporate privilege (principally the church and the army) at independence. The second was to weaken the state in favor of individual liberty by means of constitutional restraints. The first objective was achieved by the Reforma. However, apart from the juicio de amparo, the second was not achieved, except in the economic sphere, because of the exceptional authority which had to be granted the State in order to triumph over entrenched colonial privilege, and also because of the political inexperience of the Mexican people. The result, if I interpret Tena Ramírez correctly, was excessive State authority and the weakening, for instance under Díaz, of civil liberties, municipal vitality, federalism, and other constitutional checks on the State. In the economic sphere individual liberty did triumph, and overwhelmingly so, until the Mexican State, having “acquired maturity,” discarded laissez-faire, and became the champion of social and economic reform. Tena Ramírez stops at this point; but it seems necessary to pursue his scheme one step further and raise a final question. Is not the principal problem facing present-day Mexican liberalism to keep this “matured” and perhaps necessarily authoritarian State from being captured, as it was in the Díaz period, by a small group of economic liberals for their own benefit?
