Trained as a political scientist and holding an appointment in the Centro de Estudios Internacionales at El Colegio de México but working as a historian of political ideas and a self-described historiographer, Roberto Breña has given us a volume of 18 essays with much to chew on. The essays have been modified from the forms in which they first appeared over the last few years in online journals, conference proceedings, edited volumes published in Chile, Colombia, Spain, and Germany, and several academic venues in Mexico. His central focus, as it has been for much of his scholarly career, is on the protean meanings and instantiations of liberalism: the term in its modern sense first appeared not in London, Paris, or Philadelphia but at the Cortes of Cádiz in 1810. He stresses the inseparability of political events in early nineteenth-century Spain from those in its disintegrating Spanish American empire and the processes of colonial emancipation, particularly in Mexico. Although he is also the author or editor of several other books, the essay form suits Breña well since the condensation of the pieces allows his strong authorial voice to shine through. The 18 essays range in length from nearly 50 pages—on Simón Bolívar's increasingly disillusioned political thinking about republicanism in Spanish America, portraying him as a sort of illiberal liberal—to 10 pages—an admiring but nonetheless critical engagement with the late Charles Hale's account of liberalism in the young Mexican republic. The authorial voice is that of a natural-born controversialist: skeptical, critical, a deconstructor of conventional wisdoms and teleologies, insistent on specifying historical circumstance and contingency. Regarding Mexican liberalism, one of the great covering myths of Mexican state and nation building since the time of Benito Juárez, Breña remarks that it embraces “un debate que, entre otras cosas, en lo que respecta a la historia de ‘nuestro’ liberalismo, deje de mirar reverencialmente a ciertos autores del siglo XX, que sin duda aportaron mucho en su momento. Su momento, como diría Perogrullo, no es el nuestro” (p. 19). He is therefore not reluctant to take on some of the vacas sagradas of Mexican historiography—including Edmundo O'Gorman, Ernesto de la Torre Villar, and above all Jesús Reyes Heroles—as well as some prominent Anglophone historians, among them Jonathan Israel and James Sanders (whose ideas Breña characterizes as “pretentious” and “vacuous” [p. 142]), while lauding his intellectual heroes, among them François-Xavier Guerra and Hannah Arendt. His historiographical appreciation is so wide and so deep that reading the plentiful footnotes, let alone his engagement with other scholarly work in the main text, is an education on his themes.Breña's variations on his central theme of Hispanic liberalism—constitutional monarchy, parliamentary regimes, individual liberties, inclusive, active citizenship, and so forth—and revolutions are so many that they cannot all be done justice in a brief review. One of his major arguments is that within an Age of Revolution framework (1775–1825), the fact that the Hispanic revolutions in Spain itself, Spanish America, and Brazil came after the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions (the last the most radical of all, a counterexample for Hispanic revolutionaries) does not mean that they were derivative of the earlier upheavals, an effect of contagion. He points out that the nearly 150 years of Anglo-American experience with local forms of representative government had little parallel in Spanish America and that the US Constitution had a relatively minor influence in the colonial emancipatory processes in the former Spanish colonies. On this question of the “anxiety of influence” (the term is the late literary critic Harold Bloom's)—or “connectivity,” as Breña would have it—the influence of the Enlightenment is also seen by him as doubtful, specifically the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although the influence of Britons such as John Locke and Edmund Burke (an Irishman) can be seen in the thinking of Spanish reformers and tratadistas such as Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, Francisco Cabarrús, and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Breña finds that “nationalist historicism” was a key element of Spanish liberalism and that during the Cádiz Cortes debates of 1810–12 the Spanish neoscholastics, among them Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suárez, and Juan de Mariana, figured prominently. Another major issue among many that Breña tackles, specifically for Mexican emancipation, is whether Agustín de Iturbide's action in finally sundering New from Old Spain in 1821 was a “consummation” of the movement initiated by the priest Miguel Hidalgo in 1810 and continued by José María Morelos until his death in 1815. He concludes that it was an ending but not a consummation, since Hidalgo's ideas were never entirely clear, perhaps even to himself (pace the magisterial biography of the insurgent priest by the eminent Mexican scholar Carlos Herrejón Peredo), Morelos's ideas were a mix of the traditional and the liberal, and Iturbide's movement was actually highly conservative, a Creole reaction to the Spanish liberalism of the Constitution of Cádiz.Among the 18 essays, although all reward reading, are many especially notable pieces. Chapter 1 is a masterful tour d'horizon of the historiography on the Hispanic independence movements within the context of the Age of Revolution. Chapter 6’s 35-page panoramic treatment of Mexican independence, intended as a popular survey, is one of the best essay-length accounts I know, and the chapters dedicated to Simón Bolívar, Fray José Servando Teresa de Mier, and Charles Hale are eloquent and illuminating. The final chapter in the volume is a “coda” discussing the indissolubility of liberalism and democracy in the modern world and looking at the distortions introduced into liberal democracy by populist leaders, including Mexico's current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Unlike many other Mexican scholars and public intellectuals, Breña does not condemn populism root and branch, but he does note that AMLO's essentialist reduction in his writings and public rhetoric of historical figures into blocs of liberals and conservatives is an “atrocious Manichaeism” (p. 559).