Peasant movements in Brazil are not a recent phenomenon but have recurred throughout the history of this essentially agrarian nation. The earliest manifestations of peasant discontent were pre-political movements of both a religious and a secular nature. They were primarily local expressions of immediate felt needs, temporary outbursts against misery and oppression. They were largely atomistic movements, confined in time and space, and characterized by a lack of unity and effective communication. More important, they were most often led by social deviants who were generally incapable of expressing realistic social goals which had appeal beyond the local group.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, ecclesiastical wealth in Mexico consisted basically of real estate and mortgages. The Church avoided investments in mining, industry and commerce. There were regional differences, the Church being richer in some parts of the country than in others: in the two most important cities, Mexico and Puebla, the different ecclesiastical corporations owned about half of the total real estate, whereas in some of the smaller cities, such as Veracruz, Jalapa, Orizaba, Córdoba and San Luis Potosí, the Church was proportionately much poorer. The urban real estate consisted of houses rented on fairly favourable terms to both rich and poor, monastic buildings and churches. In the countryside, the Church was considerably poorer than in the cities: its haciendas were few compared to the number of those privately owned, and their value amounted to about 5 per cent of that of all rural estate. Real estate formed about one-half of Church possessions; the other half consisted of mortgages.

In the short history of anthropology as an academic discipline, polemics tinged with personal recrimination have been a constant feature. One might even be led to suspect that controversy has become a firm technique, in line with conflict theory, so that in the middle ground between opposing interpretations of social behaviour may be found a more acceptable aspect of the truth. ‘Penetrating analyses’, so the aphorism might run, ‘are tempered in the fire of animosity.’ Some protagonists had a positive genius for attracting thinly-veiled contumely and for polarizing opinion, even after they had ceased to be practising anthropologists. Perhaps the best example of this was Radcliffe-Brown, as a perusal of the journals Oceania in 1955 and the American Anthropologist from 1951 to 1956 will readily disclose. This method of advancing knowledge, if we may call it such, did not die with Radcliffe-Brown; it has been used many times since—and the discipline is the richer, one hastens to add.

One of the most striking developments in Mexican historiography during the last twenty-five years is the burgeoning of the genre known as the ‘history of ideas’. The origins of the movement date back to 1925, when German historicist and existentialist philosophy made its entry into Mexico through the ideas of José Ortega y Gasset. More recently the impetus came from the seminar in the History of Ideas initiated at El Colegio de México and at the National University by the Spanish philosopher, José Gaos. So great has been the influence of Gaos that it is fair to say that until very recently die history of ideas or intellectual history in Mexico has been dominated by his students—men such as Luis Villoro, Francisco López Cámara, and Leopoldo Zea. Edmundo O'Gorman, while not a student of Gaos, shares his views and has come to be considered as a natural member of the history of ideas group.