Timo H. Schaefer’s Liberalism as Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Legal Rule in Post-Colonial Mexico, 1820–1900, is an important addition to the growing and stimulating historiography on the liberal experience in nineteenth-century Latin America. The Mexican case, which the book addresses, has drawn the most attention and has been the focus of some of the key works available on liberalism broadly conceived. Among these other key works, the list of authors is extensive and distinguished, including Mexican and American scholars such as José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, Roberto Breña, Karen D. Caplan, Daniel Cosío Villegas, Michael Ducey, Peter Guardino, Claudia Guarisco, Charles A. Hale, Florencia E. Mallon, Carlos Monsiváis, Jesús Reyes Heroles, Guy P. C. Thomson, and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez. Schaefer’s highly creative case study considerably enriches the field by focusing on liberalism as reflected in legal culture. The emphasis is on the legal culture brewing in the three spaces and social settings that the author deems most critical for nineteenth-century Mexicans’ sociopolitical interaction with one another and with state institutions—namely, mestizo towns or municipalities without indigenous corporate traditions, indigenous towns, and hacienda (large estate) settlements. Mestizo towns are the subject of chapters 1 and 2, and hacienda settlements and indigenous towns are central to chapters 3 and 4, respectively. These various chapters address day-to-day liberal (or illiberal) frames of mind surrounding social conflicts, military recruitment, property rights, land privatization, politics and the army, and state-local relations, taking the narrative all the way to the 1840s. Chapter 5, in turn, looks at continuities and changes in the post-reform era, especially during the dictatorial regimes of Porfirio Díaz from 1877 to 1880 and then again from 1884 to 1911. Throughout, the author focuses on empirical evidence on the work of local courts, police forces, and municipal authorities from the mining regions of Guanajuato and San Luis de Potosí in Northern Mexico. He relies also on evidence from the southern state of Oaxaca.

Defining legal culture as “the ways Mexicans practiced, talked about, and otherwise interacted with the law” (17), the book discusses the habits, interests, and systems of value embraced by ordinary people in each of the three aforementioned settings. It evaluates the extent to which such “ethical imaginaries” (15) made it possible for egalitarian institutions to flourish and, more generally, for liberal state formation, including the rule of law, to succeed and consolidate itself. Schaefer traces, in particular, connections between work- and family-related ethics and values, on the one hand, and liberal institution building, on the other.

Schaefer notes the intensely legal nature of the Mexican and other revolutions for independence in early nineteenth-century Spanish America, and the transitional nature of the legal order (and related “systems in which rights and prohibitions attached to peoples” [13]) forged in Mexico during the postindependence period. But he posits that popular life experiences in the period under study included at the same time an important “extra-legal” cultural fabric (14). This fabric was made up of values, practices, interests, and forms of speech emphasizing industriousness and domestic responsibility and care, which informed various Mexican citizens’ interaction with the law. Those cultural elements—reflected in the words uttered and in the behaviors observed daily by ordinary peoples, including peasants, dayworkers, artisans, soldiers, civic militia guards, and local merchants—provided indeed the glue “articulating” the populace to legal and political institutions. However, the traces of liberal culture found among a variety of non-bourgeois Mexicans did not go uncontested. Instead, they had to compete with alternative and less egalitarian values, especially those attached to private property, corporate identity, wealth, social prominence, and education. Still, except for the illiberal and autocratic traits characteristic of the era of Porfirio Díaz, liberalism seems to have won the contest overall, only with differential strength according to region and social sector.

The author celebrates that the rule of law generally reigned in the postindependence period and ascribes to Mexico’s legal culture at the time a vital and egalitarian liberal ethos, especially in mestizo towns, but much less so in indigenous towns and hacienda settlements. Hacienda residents and indigenous commoners were less favorable to liberal ways, as was also the case with urban elites (“patricians”), hacienda owners, and native elites, all of whom, without attacking formal legal equality as such, favored privileges tied to education, wealth, social precedence, or ethnic attributes.

The book’s prose is fine, the documentation is profuse and sound, and the empirical evidence is accompanied by solid theoretical analysis, valuable comparative insights, and appropriate mid-level generalizations. If its price were not as prohibitive as tends to be the case with hardcover publications these days, it would be ideal for adoption in upper-division courses on the history of modern Latin America, surveys of Mexican history, and graduate seminars on legal and social history and even historical methods. Its acquisition is indispensable for any research library.