Fuente: Imagen creada con IA.
Año 1, núm. 12, julio de 2026
ISSN 3122-3583
entre-mes
Self-Rule Is Not Liberalism: Mexico, the United States, and Two Ways of Building Freedom
Heidi Smith *
Mexico and the United States were both born from independence struggles, but they built freedom in different ways. Heidi Smith argues that American liberalism sought to limit state power, while Mexican liberalism also had to build a state capable of creating citizenship and dismantling privilege.
El día de hoy se cumplen 250 años de la fundación de los Estados Unidos. En ocasión de ese aniversario, publicamos este texto de Heidi Smith en el que se comparan las ideas que dieron vida a ese país con las que se gestaron en la Independencia mexicana.
Nota de la redacción: El Diluvio publica este ensayo en su idioma original en reconocimiento de que algunas ideas pertenecen a la lengua en que fueron formuladas, y de que la conversación sobre América del Norte no puede ocurrir solo en español.
Every Fourth of July, the United States celebrates the Declaration of Independence as the birth of modern liberty. In Mexico, Independence Day evokes a different story: national sovereignty, the break with Spain, social inequality, state-building, and the long search for a political community capable of governing itself. Both countries were born from independence struggles. Both invoked liberal ideas. Both spoke of popular sovereignty. Yet liberalism, democracy, self-rule, and state formation did not mean the same thing in each case.
The central difference can be stated this way: in the United States, liberalism developed largely as a theory for limiting the state; in Mexico, liberalism was also a theory for building it. The American tradition feared that public power could become tyrannical. The Mexican tradition feared something different: that there would not be a state strong enough to dismantle the colonial order, create citizenship, limit corporate privileges, and sustain a politically integrated nation.
This historical difference explains why two traditions that share words —liberty, rights, sovereignty, representation, equality before the law— produced such different institutions and political cultures.
Self-rule answers who has the right to govern; liberalism asks what limits should protect people from power.
Self-Rule: Who Has the Right to Govern?
Self-rule answers a basic question: who has the legitimate authority to govern?
In the British colonies of North America, the answer in 1776 was: no longer the king or the British Parliament, but the American people. The Declaration of Independence held that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” and that, when they destroy the rights they are supposed to protect, the people have the right to alter or abolish them (1).
In Mexico, the insurgency made a similar claim against the Spanish monarchy. José María Morelos declared in Sentimientos de la Nación that America should be free and independent from Spain and that sovereignty emanated from the people (2). But Morelos added something that deeply distinguishes the Mexican tradition: laws should moderate opulence and poverty. In other words, political independence was not enough; freedom also had to be connected to social justice.
In both cases, self-rule meant independence from imperial authority. But self-rule does not by itself determine how an independent community should govern. A country can be sovereign and authoritarian; independent and unequal; possess a flag, territory, and its own government, yet still lack effective rights or capable institutions.
Liberalism: How Should Power Govern?
Liberalism answers another question: what limits should political power have once a people governs itself?
In the United States, this question was answered through the tradition of natural rights. Locke was central: individuals possess rights prior to government, and government exists to protect those rights, not to create them (3). Jefferson translated that theory into political language: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That is why American liberalism was born with a deep suspicion of concentrated power. The enemy was tyranny: the king, taxation without representation, standing armies, judges dependent on the Crown, and distant imperial authority. The institutional solution was to divide power: federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, independent courts, and individual rights.
In Mexico, the problem was different. The country did not inherit a society of colonies with relatively strong local institutions and extensive experience in self-government. It inherited a deeply hierarchical, corporate, and fragmented colonial society: ecclesiastical and military fueros, regional power, the Church as an economic and educational actor, racial inequality, Indigenous communities, haciendas, caudillos, and weak fiscal capacity.
That is why Mexican liberalism could not simply say “less state.” Its question was harder: how can a national state be built that replaces the colonial order with a common citizenship?
Mexico: Liberalism as State-Building
Nineteenth-century Mexican liberalism was anticorporate. José María Luis Mora, Valentín Gómez Farías, Benito Juárez, Melchor Ocampo, Ignacio Ramírez, Ponciano Arriaga, and Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada shared, despite important differences, one conviction: a liberal republic could not exist while the Church, the army, corporations, and local powers preserved special jurisdictions.
The Constitution of 1857 and the Reform Laws sought to establish a new order: legal equality, secularization, civil marriage, civil registry, disentailment, abolition of fueros, and the supremacy of civil authority. In the United States, religious liberty meant limiting state involvement in religion. In Mexico, the separation of Church and State was also a strategy of state formation. The issue was not only protecting individual conscience; it was reducing the political, economic, and educational power of an institution that competed with the state.
This difference is fundamental. In the United States, liberalism feared that the state would invade society. In Mexico, liberalism feared that corporate powers would prevent the very existence of a national state.
Property, Citizenship, and Inequality
In the United States, liberalism feared state tyranny; in Mexico, it feared that corporate powers would prevent the creation of a national state.
Property also had different meanings.
In the United States, property was understood as a basis of individual liberty and independence.
In Mexico, property became an instrument of modernization and citizenship. Liberals believed that corporate property — whether held by the Church or by communities — blocked markets, legal equality, and the formation of free individuals.
But here a contradiction emerged. Disentailment weakened ecclesiastical power, but it also affected Indigenous communal lands. Formal equality before the law could produce new inequalities when it ignored historical starting conditions. Mexican liberalism sought to free the individual from the corporation, but many communities depended on collective forms of protection for survival.
The great American contradiction was proclaiming equality while slavery, racial exclusion, Indigenous dispossession, and women’s subordination persisted. The great Mexican contradiction was proclaiming legal equality in a society where the abstract individual did not exist under equal conditions for all.
The Revolution and Social Liberalism
The Mexican Revolution transformed liberalism. After the Porfiriato, the issue was no longer only eliminating colonial privileges, but confronting the social costs of liberal modernization: land concentration, authoritarianism, foreign investment, rural inequality, and political exclusion.
The Constitution of 1917 responded with an original formula. It preserved liberal rights but incorporated social rights. Article 27 linked property, land, the nation, and the subsoil. Article 123 constitutionalized labor rights. Public education acquired a national and social function.
This once again distinguished Mexico from the United States. The U.S. Constitution limits government; the Mexican Constitution of 1917 also limits power, but it additionally assigns positive tasks to the state. The state must educate, regulate, redistribute, protect, intervene, and build conditions of social justice.
Thus, Mexican liberalism became social constitutionalism. It did not abandon liberty, but linked it to land, labor, education, economic sovereignty, and justice.
Democracy, Liberalism, and State Capacity
A common confusion is to think that democracy, liberalism, and self-rule are the same thing. They are not.
Self-rule asks: who governs?
Democracy asks: who participates in collective decision-making?
Liberalism asks: what limits protect people from power?
State formation asks: can government actually govern effectively?
Mexico and the United States show that these dimensions can advance unevenly. The United States developed a powerful liberal architecture, but for a long time excluded enslaved people, women, Indigenous peoples, and racial minorities. Mexico proclaimed legal equality and national sovereignty, but faced state weakness, caudillismo, foreign intervention, territorial inequality, corporatism, and presidential authoritarianism.
A country can have independence without liberalism. It can have constitutional liberalism without full democracy. It can have electoral democracy without the rule of law. It can have a strong state without rights. The problem of political modernity is to connect all four dimensions: sovereignty, rights, participation, and institutional capacity.
The democratic task is to connect sovereignty, rights, participation, institutional capacity and a public life oriented toward shared dignity.
Two Liberalisms, Two Historical Sequences
The difference between Mexico and the United States is not that one is liberal and the other is not. The difference is historical sequence.
The United States first had local self-government, then independence, then a federal Constitution, and finally the gradual — conflictive and violent — expansion of rights. Its liberalism was organized around fear of central power.
Mexico had independence, but not a consolidated state. It had constitutions, but also civil wars, invasions, debt, ecclesiastical power, military power, strong regions, and limited fiscal capacity. Its liberalism was organized around the need to build public authority.
That is why Jefferson and Juárez represent different questions. Jefferson asks: how can tyranny be avoided? Juárez asks: how can citizenship be created in a society of privileges? Morelos asks: how can independence become not only political but also social? Arriaga asks: how can one speak of equality in a country of large landowners and poor towns? The constitutional framers of 1917 ask: how can land and labor become constitutional matters?
The Contemporary Lesson
The comparison matters today because both countries remain caught in their founding dilemmas.
The United States distrusts the state even when it faces problems that require public capacity: inequality, health care, infrastructure, violence, climate change, polarization, and economic regulation. Its liberal tradition protects rights, but sometimes makes it difficult to imagine shared public goods.
Mexico, by contrast, often demands a strong state to address inequality, insecurity, corruption, and social abandonment. But its history shows that a strong state without limits can reproduce clientelism, centralization, opacity, and domination. State power can build citizenship, but it can also replace it.
The Mexican question is not whether the country needs state power or liberty. It needs both. Mexico requires strong institutions to protect rights, reduce inequality, and sustain sovereignty; but those institutions must be limited by legality, pluralism, accountability, and respect for human dignity.
The American question is also not simply how to limit the state. Liberty needs institutions. Without public capacity, rights become empty promises.
Conclusion
Liberalism is not a universal recipe. It is a tradition that changes according to the historical problems it confronts.
In the United States, liberalism meant limiting power in order to protect the individual.
In Mexico, liberalism meant building public power in order to create citizenship and dismantle privilege.
Both traditions are incomplete. The American tradition proclaimed universal rights while excluding millions. The Mexican tradition proclaimed legal equality while struggling with social inequality, institutional weakness, and centralization.
The comparative lesson is clear: self-rule is not liberalism; democracy is not automatically the rule of law; and state capacity does not guarantee liberty.
The democratic task is to connect all four elements: a people that governs itself, rights that limit power, institutions that work, and a public life oriented toward shared dignity.
* Doctora en Asuntos Públicos por la Florida International University y profesora de la Universidad Iberoamérica.
References
Jefferson, T. (2020). The Declaration of Independence. National Archives. (Original work published 1776).
Morelos, J. M. (2013). Sentimientos de la Nación. Museo de las Constituciones, UNAM. (Original work delivered 1813).
Locke, J. (1988). Two treatises of government (P. Laslett, ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1689).
Reference readings
Costeloe, M. P. (1967). Church and state at the Mexican Constitutional Convention, 1856–1857. The Americas, 23(4), 427–447.
Hale, C. A. (1968). Mexican liberalism in the age of Mora, 1821–1853. Yale University Press.
Hale, C. A. (1989). The transformation of liberalism in late nineteenth-century Mexico. Princeton University Press.
Medina González, F. (2017). El socialismo constitucional de la Constitución de 1917: Génesis de los artículos 27 y 123. Revista de la Facultad de Derecho de México, 67(267).
Rodríguez O., J. E. (1998). The independence of Spanish America. Cambridge University Press.
Sinkin, R. N. (1973). The Mexican Constitutional Congress, 1856–1857: A statistical analysis. The Hispanic American Historical Review, 53(1), 1–26.
Wood, G. S. (1992). The radicalism of the American Revolution. Alfred A. Knopf.
Wood, G. S. (1998). The creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. University of North Carolina Press.
