Liberalism as Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Legal Rule in Post-colonial Mexico, 1820–1900

Abstract

In a 1988 article David A. Brading, drawing on J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), pointed out that patriotic liberalism in Mexico during the second half of the nineteenth century was a form of classical republicanism, given its defense of egalitarianism, its consideration of the municipality as the bastion of civic liberty, and its emphasis on citizens' political participation over the pursuit of self-interest. Yet Brading saw this republicanism as an elite matter, an exercise in state building rather than nation building. From the 1990s onward a growing number of studies asked to what extent liberalism permeated the lower echelons of society. Florencia Mallon, Peter Guardino, and Guy Thomson, among others, researched the social bases of liberalism, with a focus on the participation of peasant soldiers against the Conservatives and European intervention.A second generation of studies, such as those by Karen Caplan, Daniela Marino, and Leticia Reina, has looked at the everyday workings of local government and justice, gauging the spread of liberalism during calmer times. Both generations of studies argue that liberalism transformed colonial politics and show how egalitarianism advanced but also faced limits. These included the loss by some of the municipalities most empowered during the 1850s and 1860s wars of their enhanced capacity to enforce the rule of law, which led them to suffer increasingly authoritarian state and federal governments in the late nineteenth century.Timo Schaefer's Liberalism as Utopia is a welcome addition to these second-generation studies. Mostly examining judicial archives in four states (Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, Oaxaca, and Querétaro) from 1820 to 1900, the book presents a broad picture of “legal culture” derived from the quotidian dealings of ordinary citizens (including soldiers, civic militiamen, peasants, peons, and even women) demanding or enforcing local justice. Chapters 1–4 focus on “mestizo towns,” “family and legal order,” “haciendas,” and “Indigenous towns,” respectively. Chapters 2 and 3 are perhaps the most original. In the second chapter, Schaefer considers law enforcement via the military draft and local police forces known as civic militias. An examination of the military draft as punishment for various offenders, including men who beat their wives, demonstrates how ideals of industriousness and domestic responsibility underpinned local justice. In the third chapter, covering haciendas, where labor relations most recalled colonial precedents, we learn how a few peons made legal claims, which shows how liberalism was making timid but telling inroads.In chapters 1 and 4, Schaefer carefully states that his distinction between mestizo and Indigenous towns refers to the absence or presence of legacies of colonial Indian pueblos' corporate politics rather than the populations' ethnic identifications. Yet I am not entirely convinced that the distinction between mestizo and Indigenous towns is always useful. There are in this book at least two conclusions regarding mestizo towns that I would extend to Indigenous pueblos in states such as Puebla and Oaxaca. The first regards emphasis on the expansion of liberty. Schaefer argues that for “non-patrician sectors” in mestizo towns, the question was not whether liberty should prevail over equality but rather “whether liberty would be a right of citizenship or a privilege for the wealthy” (p. 48). The second pertains to the importance of the municipality for the rule of law, as when Schaefer states that those “who fought for a federalist system of government did so not because they were parochial or hostile to a liberal political culture but because . . . only local, popular governments were able to guarantee the rights and freedoms that independence had promised” (p. 61). Extending these two arguments to some Indigenous towns would be compatible with Schaefer's conclusions about the latter, particularly given his compelling claim that “corporate traditions” and “individual rights” were not “inevitably opposed” but instead could be “mutually sustaining” (p. 160).Chapter 5, “Dictatorship,” considers what remained of republicanism in the 1890s and highlights the cases in which “auxiliary and municipal justices” continued to uphold the rule of law (p. 201). Schaefer argues that increasing authoritarianism was a result of nineteenth-century conflicts rather than colonial legacies. Whereas Mallon found an alternative, subaltern form of liberalism in nineteenth-century Mexico, Schaefer's persuasive examination of “legal culture” is instead on the side of Guardino, Thomson, and Caplan, who saw “popular” or “local liberalism” as part of national liberalism rather than a stark alternative. In Schaefer's telling, ordinary people's liberalism, rather than a more democratic alternative, is simply their appropriation of the more utopian aspects of liberalism, including a strong egalitarianism and the rule of law: they took elite promises at face value and tried to make them true. Schaefer's tightly argued book will be useful reading for upper-level undergraduate courses as well as for graduate students and the wider scholarly community.