Las ideas sociales contemporáneas en México

This book joins a series of the Tierra Firme collection devoted to the history of ideas in America. The title is somewhat misleading, since a good deal more space is devoted to prerevolutionary social thought and to the evolution of social problems than to post-revolutionary social thinkers. Aside from this stricture, the book is valuable and worth owning. The author traces the development of what he believes are Mexico’s principle social problems— land distribution, the indigenous population, industrialization, and the working class—and discusses with objectivity and intelligence the social thought that arose from these problems. Dr. Alba does not intend either to be exhaustive in his treatment, or to impose much interpretation on events or actors; rather, he presents an outline that will be useful to those who have need of a reference work or an introduction to the history of social thought in Mexico. In this aim he succeeds very well. The principle protagonists of social reform are included from Hidalgo to Cardenas, and on the way movements, constitutions, reactions are all described and placed in proper relationship. Enhancing the value of the study are a long, selected bibliography and a name index. The author presents his opinions on the course of the ideas he has described in a final chapter. This, too, is intended merely to arouse further study, but the theses are significant and help to give shape to the preceding outline. In fact, the principle thesis is basic to Dr. Alba’s intentions: that ideas have tended to be imported but invariably have been “Mexicanized” through the exigency of domestic circumstances. If his estimate of this and other conclusions he derives are accurate, then some comparison of Mexican and American social ideas would be a worthwhile undertaking, for we seem both to have reached similar viewpoints and similar impasses by midtwentieth century.