 These multiple approaches have called into question the historical stability of what we mean by “liberalism” and have raised the issue whether anything that political actors and intellectuals called “liberal” can rightfully be considered as such for scholarly purposes. Some have resisted this conclusion and insisted on the need for a prior definition of liberalism in order to properly identify the subject matter of reconstruction (Aguilar 2000 &amp; 2010, Gargarella 2010 &amp; 2013). On approaches of this sort, definitions of “liberalism” are taken from twentieth or twenty-first century authors and applied retrospectively to discern what can rightfully be considered “liberal” and what not in nineteenth century Latin America. From this perspective, whatever does not fit the preferred definitions readily falls out of view, such as liberal social and economic reformism. Unsurprisingly, the failure view has to a great extent been nurtured by this kind of approach (Escalante 1992). In general, historians have been more willing than political theorists and philosophers to take as bona fide “liberal” positions whatever political actors and intellectuals claimed to be so. Some historians have assumed rather wide understandings of liberalism (Collier 2003), and have called to free the discipline from the grip of the failure view (Hale 1989).