 The idea view that liberal reformers had failed because liberal ideas were “imported” and not adequate for Latin American societies has not ceased to occupy interpreters ever since (a discussion is in Hale 1984). A notable exception to this dominant view is the reconstruction, by an official ideologue, of Mexican liberalism as the official and triumphant ideology of the political regimes emanated from the 1910 revolution (Reyes Heroles 1957). However, there is currently a growing tendency to abandon the “failure” view of liberalism and to focus on the reconstruction of what nineteenth century liberals aimed and accomplished, as a recent collection of essays shows (Jaksic and Posada Carbó 2011b). Scholars have engaged in conceptual debates regarding the adequate framework for a more sympathetic and accurate reconstruction of intellectual political history. The starting point has been the criticism of the “traditional history of ideas” that allegedly presumed political ideas to have a definite content subject to little, if any, historical change (Detailed discussions are in Palti 2005 &amp; 2007, Linares Londoño 2021). On this “traditional” view, which is usually attributed to intellectual historian Leopoldo Zea, liberalism was some sort of political “model” originated in Europe and Anglo North America that was transplanted and adapted to Latin American societies, which were, the view goes, unsuitable (Escalante 1992, Montalvo Ortega 1995). Whatever resulted in this “adaptation”, this traditional view continues, was a “deviation” from the original model. As a commentator puts it in a recent work when presenting this view: “the importance of studying Latin American ideas does not lie in their contribution to western thought but in the ‘mistakes’ that the former contain in relation to the latter, that is, in the refractions or deviations that Latin American national circumstances impressed on the original ideas” (Linares Londoño 2021: 47). The traditional history of ideas, thus understood, would make at least three mistaken assumptions: First, that the meaning of liberalism can be established conceptually, apart from the historically changing conditions in which the notion has been deployed; second, that liberal Latin American political actors sought to “apply” this already complete model of liberalism to their own societies; and third, that to understand Latin American liberalism is primarily to trace its intellectual sources or “influences” in European and Anglo North American liberal authors and political movements.