Liberty in Mexico: Writings on Liberalism from the Early Republican Period to the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

Antonio Caso

518 antonio caso Antonio Caso (1883–1946), born in Mexico City, was a philosopher and university professor. As a young man he became dissatisfied with the prevailing philosophical ideas of his time. Indeed, during the first decade of the twentieth century positivism was the official doctrine supported by the minister of education , Justo Sierra. Caso joined like-minded luminaries such as José Vasconcelos , Alfonso Reyes, and Pedro Henríquez Ureña and in 1909 founded a literary club called El Ateneo de la Juventud. The group criticized positivism and developed a philosophy based on intuition and emotion that was influenced by the thinking of Henri Bergson. Caso was president of the National University between 1920 and 1923. In the 1930s he vigorously opposed the project of adopting socialism as the official doctrine of the university and debated the key proponent of this idea, Vicente Lombardo Toledano. Caso defended the role of the university as an institution devoted to the pursuit of truth and knowledge through research and teaching. He argued that teachers should be free to teach what they considered to be true and relevant. Liberty was required to sustain the quest for truth and knowledge. Around that time Caso also wrote on socialism and fascism and on the challenges these doctrines posed to the “human person.” We present a selection from his essay La persona humana y el estado totalitario, from the 1940s. ...