Читать книгу Liberty in Mexico - Группа авторов - Страница 9

[print edition page 2]

[print edition page 3]

JOSÉ MARÍA LUIS MORA

José María Luis Mora (1794–1850), the leading liberal thinker during the first federal republic (1824–53), was ordained as a priest and received a degree in theology. Later he studied law and became a lawyer. He was a member of the provincial deputation of Mexico and later was elected as a deputy to the constituent congress of the state of Mexico. He participated in the making of the state constitution and in the drafting of important laws.

Mora edited and published essays in newspapers such as Semanario Político y Literario, El Indicador, and El Observador de la República Mexicana. He played an important role as an adviser during the brief Gómez Farías administration (1833–34) when the government put in place the first reform policies against the privileges of the Catholic Church.

The essays gathered here were published as unsigned newspaper articles between 1821 and 1830. While Mora’s positions were very close to those of Benjamin Constant at the beginning of his career, he later realized that fighting the privileges of the Church and the military required an active government. Two of the essays, “Discourse on Public Opinion and the General Will” (Discurso sobre la opinión pública y voluntad general) and “Discourse on the Nature of Factions” (Discurso sobre los carácteres de las facciones), have been attributed to the Spaniard Alberto Lista because they had appeared earlier in the Spanish daily Lista edited, El Espectador Sevillano. However, we decided to include the essays because they received prominent placement in El Observador, of which Mora was the editor and the arbiter as to what to include and where. Clearly, Mora believed the essays expressed important ideas with which he agreed and of which his readers should be aware. That is, he gave the essays his imprimatur, even to the point of allowing readers to assume that the essays expressed his own views, inasmuch as he did not

[print edition page 4]

attribute them to someone else or otherwise suggest that they were not his or that he disagreed with them. Furthermore, the views that the essays express are integral to Mora’s overall argument on factions and on the proper conception of how public political and social opinion is to be formed and brought to action.

We present nine newspaper articles written between 1821 and 1827.