 A central feature of Hispanic American liberalism (the case of Brazil is considered below) is that its multiple variants developed directly in response to the political challenges posed by the need to construct new states after the disintegration of the Spanish empire. Liberal political actors were primarily concerned with addressing institutional issues and also with pressing for specific political ends but not with systematic theorizing. Liberal intellectuals were public figures who usually held official positions and were mainly concerned with the practical tasks of constitutional design and institutional reform. Thus, the various liberal positions principally emerged in political and legal practice, not in theoretical works. Liberal intellectuals expressed and developed their views in the numerous constitutions that they produced, in legal commentary, and in the public debates that took place in pamphlets and newspapers. For this reason, it is crucial to understand the political challenges that they were forced to confront in the design of the new institutional structures. The various liberal positions that they developed can only be fully grasped as responses to the questions and problems that the social and political situations forced upon them. This is not to deny that some liberal Latin American intellectuals did produce theoretical works that are worth examining in their own right, such as those by Juan Bautista Alberdi in Argentina and José Victorino Lastarria in Chile.