few economists and some poets, historians, and philosophers have defended liberty against its many foes.56
This book presents sixty-four essays and writings on liberty and liberalism from the early republican period to the late twentieth century by key authors. The first period (1820–40) comprises the founding of the Republic and the early constitutional experiments. The most important authors in this creative and turbulent period were José María Luis Mora, Lorenzo de Zavala, Valentín Gómez Farías, and Lucas Alamán. During the era of liberal hegemony, in the second half of the century (1845–76), the most significant figures included Mariano Otero, Ignacio Ramírez, Francisco Zarco, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Guillermo Prieto, José María Lafragua, and Benito Juárez. The rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1912) provided lively debates over the nature of the liberal legacy. As noted above, the authors more relevant for this period were Justo Sierra, José María Vigil, and Emilio Rabasa. Important authors during the twentieth century (1930–90) include Jorge Cuesta, Antonio Caso, and Octavio Paz.
Unless otherwise noted, all footnotes in the texts are those of the authors.
Tepoztlán, Mexico, January 2010
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| Acknowledgments |
I would like to thank Emilio Pacheco for his intellectual encouragement and continued criticism. Several people made this book possible. Laura Goetz provided valuable editorial insights. Janet M. Burke, Arizona State University, and Ted Humphrey, Arizona State University, were wonderful colleagues, and I was fortunate to work with them because they are among the very few persons able to proficiently translate complex legal and political texts from the nineteenth century. Also, I am indebted to Roberto Mostajo, Fabiola Ramírez, and Esteban González for their invaluable assistance in compiling, reviewing, and editing this volume.
José Antonio Aguilar Rivera
Professor of Political Studies
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
(CIDE)
Mexico City
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| 1 | The Founding and Early Constitutional Experiments: 1821–1840 |
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| JOSÉ MARÍA LUIS MORA |
José María Luis Mora (1794–1850), the leading liberal thinker during the first federal republic (1824–53), was ordained as a priest and received a degree in theology. Later he studied law and became a lawyer. He was a member of the provincial deputation of Mexico and later was elected as a deputy to the constituent congress of the state of Mexico. He participated in the making of the state constitution and in the drafting of important laws.
Mora edited and published essays in newspapers such as Semanario Político y Literario, El Indicador, and El Observador de la República Mexicana. He played an important role as an adviser during the brief Gómez Farías administration (1833–34) when the government put in place the first reform policies against the privileges of the Catholic Church.
The essays gathered here were published as unsigned newspaper articles between 1821 and 1830. While Mora’s positions were very close to those of Benjamin Constant at the beginning of his career, he later realized that fighting the privileges of the Church and the military required an active government. Two of the essays, “Discourse on Public Opinion and the General Will” (Discurso sobre la opinión pública y voluntad general) and “Discourse on the Nature of Factions” (Discurso sobre los carácteres de las facciones), have been attributed to the Spaniard Alberto Lista because they had appeared earlier in the Spanish daily Lista edited, El Espectador Sevillano. However, we decided to include the essays because they received prominent placement in El Observador, of which Mora was the editor and the arbiter as to what to include and where. Clearly, Mora believed the essays expressed important ideas with which he agreed and of which his readers should be aware. That is, he gave the essays his imprimatur, even to the point of allowing readers to assume that the essays expressed his own views, inasmuch as he did not
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attribute them to someone else or otherwise suggest that they were not his or that he disagreed with them. Furthermore, the views that the essays express are integral to Mora’s overall argument on factions and on the proper conception of how public political and social opinion is to be formed and brought to action.
We present nine newspaper articles written between 1821 and 1827.
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| 1 | Discourse on the Independence of the Mexican Empire * |
The custom among civilized peoples, in making some substantial change to their government, has been to reveal and clarify before all other nations the reasons that justify those changes. Inasmuch as such change cannot be limited to the internal effects that constitutional alterations produce in a state, and inasmuch as such change is necessarily very important to foreign societies because of the established relationships that unite the peoples of the world and have more or less influence on their prosperity or decline, the right of self-preservation indisputably authorizes those other societies to inform themselves of the motives that drove their neighbors to establish the new constitution and also to remove the obstacles that the constitution might pose to their just aspirations.
The Mexican Empire, upon entering into the enjoyment of the rights that fall to it as an independent nation, could not feign ignorance of an obligation or consideration so important. It therefore endeavored to make clear to the world, through explanations and public declarations, the justifications that supported it in requesting and effecting its independence from the Spanish monarchy. To this end, its deputies have pursued independence with firmness and persistence in the cortes of Madrid, its writers have defended it in Mexico against the charge of treason and rebellion, and its soldiers have contended for it on the battlefield with arms in hand. But despite not having been able to give a solid and satisfactory response to the arguments that justify independence, despite having now proven itself by the force of arms, a necessary effect of the extent and rapidity with which the opinion that favors independence has spread, many consider that independence unjust and unlawful. Even the legislators of the [Iberian] Peninsula, those illustrious
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patriots who have known how to liberate their own country from the yoke that oppressed them, refusing to recognize the principles sanctioned in their Constitution and openly proclaimed to the world, cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that laws deduced immediately from those principles have their effective fulfillment on the American continent, which urgently demands they be observed.
Those
