 After having embraced the doctrine of popular sovereignty and the natural rights language of the French revolution, most liberals followed Benjamin Constant in his critique of the doctrine of popular sovereignty and his defense of a limited government. His writings on constitutionalism were closely followed in the design of Latin American constitutions, both liberal and conservative. Though French liberalism exerted the greatest influence overall, some Latin American liberals were also much influenced by British parliamentarism. Most of them also admired the North American republican experience. Montesquieu and Jeremy Bentham were, along with Constant, among the most cited European authors in the first half of the century (Safford 1987: 68). From Montesquieu, liberals took the idea of separation of powers and his critique of despotism. Though they did not adopt an explicitly utilitarian language, they admired and followed Bentham’s rationalistic approach to legislation (Jaramillo 2001: 120). In the mid-century, the political problem that came into focus and that gave liberals an identity against the conservative opposition was the religious one. The question was how to deal with a powerful Church that, in some regions, posed the most powerful internal challenge to the authority of the newly established republics, given the Catholic uncompromising rejection of liberalism. The Catholic Church had condemned liberalism, secularism, freedom of thought and toleration, among other “evils” in Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors published in 1864. Liberals demanded freedom of religious worship and, in some cases, the separation of church and state. At this point in time, they had for the most part distanced themselves from the natural rights discourse and from contractualism in light of the criticisms by the British utilitarians (especially Bentham) and French liberals (especially Constant). They turned their attention to the German historical school of law (Friedrich Karl von Savigny and his French follower Eugène Lerminier) and, above all, to Auguste Comte’s positivism, which became the most influential philosophical doctrine (Hale 1984) along with Herbert Spencer’s evolutionism. After decades of civil unrest, a doctrine that emphasized the maintenance of order in combination with progress appeared highly attractive. Liberalism had ceased to be an ideology in combat against an enemy, either foreign (Spain) or internal (the conservative political faction), and had become the triumphant ideology of national building (Hale 1984). In the closing decades of the century, positivism displaced liberalism in Brazil, while some Hispanic American liberals carried out a synthesis of liberal ideas and positivism that has often been considered the decline of liberalism.