 However, in recent decades there has taken place a renewed scholarly interest in nineteenth century Latin American liberalism and local political history more broadly. Novel theoretical approaches have called into question well-established assumptions. Some authors have shifted attention from diagnosing the failures of liberalism in the region to offering more sympathetic and accurate reconstructions (Hale 1968 &amp; 1989, Jáksic and Posada Carbó 2011). This development has opened a number of conceptual debates in an evolving field. Scholars now disagree as to what is to count as “liberalism” in carrying out this reconstruction. While some maintain that such a reconstruction necessarily presupposes a prior theoretical “definition” of liberalism in order to properly identify its subject matter (Aguilar 2000 &amp; 2010, Gargarella 2010 &amp; 2013), others reject all attempts at definition altogether (Palti 2005 &amp; 2007). The question then arises whether any position that political actors called “liberal” is to count as such for scholarly purposes. For instance, Is the fusion of late nineteenth century liberalism with Comtean positivism that took place in some regions to be considered a genuine liberal development? Or should it be considered the demise of liberalism despite the fact that some of those who embraced positivism continued to call themselves “liberals”? What should be the subject matter in this reconstruction: the uses of the term “liberal” (Rivera-Castro 2021), the concept of “liberalism” regardless of the terminology that political actors and movements in fact employed (Fernández Sebastián 2009 &amp; 2012), or the political languages in which they articulated their own views (Palti 2005 &amp; 2007)? These debates have brought to the fore that the reconstruction of nineteenth century Latin American liberalism poses conceptual and methodologiacl questions regarding what we are to understand by “liberal” and “liberalism” both at the early stage around the time of independence and at the time of the liberll triumph in the closing decades of the century. The question even arises whether the attribution of a liberal ideology to political actors at the early stage before the formation of political groups that self-identified as “liberal” is appropriate or only a retrospective reconstruction.