Writing in the 1930s, the Mexican philosopher Antonio Caso lamented the fact that individual rights, as the hallmark of the French Revolution, were being discarded in favor of increased state power. At the same time, Jorge Cuesta, in an attempt to vindicate Mexican constitutionalism, insisted that wherever antiliberalism dominated, one could observe an intellectual divorce between politics and high culture. Both figures, discussed by José Antonio Aguilar Rivera in a chapter on Mexican liberals, were emblematic of the time, as they attempted to propagate the values of liberalism while rejecting the excesses of democracy and distancing themselves from the more radical ideas of men such as Lázaro Cárdenas. As Mark Mazower stresses in The Dark Continent, the liberal politician was assaulted with revolutionary ideologies and the tactics of mass mobilization from both the Left and the Right in interwar Europe. Mazower argues that “Liberalism seemed too individualistic to cope with the demands of a more collectivist age” as new political programs arose which provided legitimate alternatives to nineteenth-century paradigms of constitutional governance. The edited collection Los desafíos de la libertad pushes forward similar claims, engaging with the multiple challenges faced by a generation of European and Latin American liberals from the turn of the century through the 1930s.Predominantly political in scope, the text offers exegesis of political theory and national historiographies as well as structural analysis of a wide range of countries from Italy and Portugal to Argentina and Mexico. The transformation of the state, the economy, and education, especially as witnessed by the foremost intellectuals of the epoch, occupies the majority of the 17 chapters. The editors begin by emphasizing that comparative historians, in moving away from insular national studies, have shown that fundamentally analogous processes of political development shaped fin-de-siècle Europe as well as Latin America. Thus nineteenth-century liberals’ distrust of the people vis-à-vis politics — what José Ortega y Gasset subsequently disparaged as the “rebellion of the masses” — frames much of this work. Even the novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, according to Scheherezade Pinilla Cañadas in the penultimate chapter, portrayed the people as an enigma, capable of horrible extremes. With the rise of social science and positivism, conservative liberals began to break with more radical interpretations of popular sovereignty as enshrined in the Constitution of 1812 in Spain or that of 1822 in Portugal. They embraced the notion that governance in an age of increasing specialization and bureaucratization must be the concern of a class of educated elites. Yet this was not a monolithic movement; a number of the contributors, including Dario Roldán and Rui Ramos, emphasize the plurality of liberalisms that appeared throughout the course of the nineteenth century, with influences ranging from Benthamite utilitarianism to the philosophies of Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville.While the first two chapters take a broadly comparative approach, more might have been done to draw out the connections between the national case studies that follow. For example, the authors that cover Italy, Portugal, and Chile note that liberalism has been considered a failure, because weak state institutions inhibited a successful transition to democracy in the first third of the twentieth century. This is precisely the argument that has dominated the literature on nineteenth-century Spain, yet it is not mentioned by way of comparison. Furthermore, liberals in Spain as well as Portugal manipulated elections by relying on corrupt local bosses (caciques) and excluding mass-based political parties. In Italy, Spain, and Portugal, the political balance of power rotated between conservative and progressive liberal parties with the complicity of the monarchy. However, these fraudulent systems, known as trasformismo in Italy, rotativismo in Portugal, and the turno pacífico in Spain, are not compared explicitly until chapter 12; earlier in the book, they are discussed separately by Renato Camurri, Ramos, and Javier Moreno Luzón. Because some authors focus on specific nations while others compare and contrast, facts and figures are repeated in many of the chapters.In reassessing George Dangerfield and the decline of liberalism in England, María Jesús González Hernández hints at the blasé attitudes Europeans exhibited toward their empires. Dangerfield famously claimed that the English, always in favor of peace, preferred their wars to be fought as far away as possible and in the name of God (he also was a misogynist). Yet no chapters are devoted to women or to discourses on gender and imperialism as corollaries to liberal thought. In order to recover different histories of liberalism, scholars such as James Dunkerley and Florencia Mallon suggest building upon an expanded theoretical framework and decentering high politics. Methodologically focused on the state, this volume nonetheless makes the case that historians should embrace a transnational perspective, just as their cosmopolitan intellectual forebears did in the midst of the manifold crises of the early twentieth century.
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Dec 29, 2017
David S Contreras Islas 
Open Access
