This article seeks to contribute to the reconstruction of Latin American economic thought, much in need of its own tradition in this matter. José M. Rodríguez was a Peruvian economist whose work ran between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. He was a public official and wrote profusely about the Peruvian economy of that time, proposing diagnostics and solutions to its problems. He identified the chronic defects of the national economy and developed ideas that, based on liberalism, evolved into a doctrine baptized as European national-liberalism. Rodríguez proposed the protection of the national industry and the control of foreign investment, differentiating itself from an orthodox and simple economic liberalism.