This work analyzes Paz's political thought, arguing that it is rooted in two separate and often antagonistic traditions, Liberalism and Romanticism. This work also provides a discussion of the political culture and democratization of Mexico.
The focus is placed on the period of emergence of insurgency (roughly, the 1970s and early 1980s), a period too often confounded (and not only in the Salvadoran case) with subsequent periods of the revolutionary cycle.