Liberalism as Utopia challenges widespread perceptions about the weakness of Mexico\'s nineteenth-century state.
These institutions were effective because they embodied patriarchal norms of labor and care for the fam.
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.
Liberalism as Utopia challenges widespread perceptions about the weakness of Mexico\'s nineteenth-century state