Ebook: Liberalism as utopia: the rise and fall of legal rule in post-colonial Mexico, 1820-1900

Introduction -- Mestizo towns -- Family and legal order -- Haciendas -- Indigenous towns -- Dictatorship -- Conclusion : law and exception in the making of modern Mexico.;Proporcionado por el editor: "Liberalism as Utopia challenges widespread perceptions about the weakness of Mexico's nineteenth-century state. Schaefer argues that after the War of Independence non- elite Mexicans - peasants, day laborers, artisans, local merchants - pioneered an egalitarian form of legal rule by serving in the town governments and civic militias that became the local faces of the state's coercive authority. These institutions were effective because they embodied patriarchal norms of labor and care for the family that were premised on the legal equality of male, adult citizens".