The Mexican Revolution Today

The revolutionary movement, as a search for—and momentarily finding of—our own selves, transformed Mexico. To be oneself is always to become that other person who is one’s real self, that hidden promise or possibility. In one sense, then, the Revolution has re-created the nation; in another sense, of equal importance, it has extended nationality to races and classes which neither colonialism nor the nineteenth century were able to incorporate into our national life. But despite its extraordinary fecundity, it was incapable of creating a vital order that would at once provide a world view and the basis of a really just and free society. The Revolution has not succeeded in changing our country into a community, I mean a world in which men recognize themselves in each other, and in which the “principle of authority”—that is, force, whatever its origin and justification—concedes its place to a responsible form of liberty. It is true, however, that no known society has ever achieved this state, and it is no accident, of course, that the Revolution has not given us a vision of man comparable to that of colonial Catholicism or the liberalism of the last century. It is our own phenomenon, but many of its limit...