In this valuable study Charles A. Hale endeavors to unravel the tangled skein of Mexican liberalism from 1821 to 1853, a period dominated by the brilliant liberal theoretician José María Luis Mora. Hale traces the threads of Mexican liberalism to Benjamin Constant. This postrevolutionary French writer sought ways to guarantee the rights of the individual against the new-found strength of popular sovereignty—a concern which led him to emphasize political constitutionalism. But Hale also finds that the sources of Mexican liberal thought in this formative period lead directly back to the Spain of Charles III, with its reliance on the centralized power of the state to bring about economic development and with its strong stand against the Church.
The author begins his study by examining liberalism in Mexico at the time of the war with the United States. Along with distinguished Mexican intellectual historians such as Leopoldo Zea, he believes that liberals and conservatives finally took their irreconcilable stands against each other during these years of foreign invasion. From the agonized self-examination brought about by defeat in the war there arose a new mood of militant conservatism based on the conviction that Mexico had failed because it had departed from its traditional Spanish Catholic heritage. Hale regards Lucas Alamán, the protagonist of this view, as the major political and intellectual figure of his day. According to Hale, the weakness of the liberals’ position, which endorsed anticlericalism and the bringing in of European settlers, is that they departed from their own principles when they confronted Indian problems, whereas the conservatives remained consistent.
After thoroughly discussing the European background of Mexican liberalism, the author takes up the role of Mora in formulating liberal theory. He depicts Mora as a strong supporter of individual liberty, which he believed could best be safeguarded by giving political power to property holders. But Mora’s early constitutionalism gave way to increasingly radical views when he realized that holders of vested interests, especially the Church and the army, would not reform themselves. By 1833 Mora was counseling the use of force against those who stubbornly opposed the reformist government of that day. By then, the author observes, Mora was no longer looking to Benjamin Constant and postrevolutionary France for his inspiration, but to Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and eighteenth-century Spain. Hale is at pains to point out, however, that Mora’s new drive to use a strong state against entrenched privileged classes also imperiled the liberals’ cherished individual rights or laissez-faire.
In discussing the influence of the United States on Mora’s liberalism the author concludes that the American experience was so alien as to provide little or no assistance as a model. According to certain interpretations of American history, the United States was born liberal and therefore did not have to invent the institutions needed to acquire liberalism, as Mexico did. Turning to race relations, Hale feels that the basic attitude of the liberals towards the Indians was indifference. He finds it difficult to explain why Juan Rodríguez Puebla, the distinguished Indian professor, should have fallen out with the liberal egalitarians in 1833 who wanted to abolish the privileges which the Indians had inherited from Spain while removing the prejudices which accompanied these privileges.
The author sees Mora as an economist who battled monopoly and industrialization and advocated low tariffs on doctrinaire rather than practical grounds. He regards Alamán, with his Banco de Avío, as a pragmatist. The book closes with the idea that despite the general view to the contrary, Mora and Alamán, the opposing champions of Mexican liberalism and conservatism, had a good deal in common before 1846. Liberals and conservatives, Hale suggests, were both members of an elite ruling group equally opposed to radical democratic ideas. He sees the struggle between constitutional limitations on authority and the dictates of a reformist state as the major modern legacy of liberalism from the era of Mora.
Hale’s book must be warmly welcomed as shedding much needed light, on a dark period in Mexican history. Solidly based on the published writings of the major liberal and conservative Mexican authors of the day, it presents in reasonably readable form a dispassionate appraisal of liberal thought in early nineteenth-century Mexico. At times, perhaps, the author is so intent upon liberal theory that he finds it difficult to understand the more complicated and less logical actions of the liberals themselves, as in the case of Juan Rodríguez Puebla or the return to federalism in 1847. There are some minor errors such as the statement that Valentín Gómez Farías was from Zacatecas. The book will nonetheless prove invaluable to those working in this period and thought-provoking to scholars interested in more recent Mexican history.