I don’t like the Peruvian writer naturalized Spanish Mario Vargas Llosa, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. I dabbled in a bit of his effervescent narrative prose, but I quickly stalled. My main grievances against him, however, are not his works of fiction, but his intellectual interventions.
First, I do not forgive Vargas Llosa, former Peruvian presidential candidate of 1990 and primary anti-nationalist, his angry outbursts against the separatists Catalans in 2017. I also blame him for his support for far-right troublemaker Jair Bolsonaro during the Brazilian presidential election last year. His admiration, finally, for those madmen of brutal neoliberalism that were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan horrifies me.
Why read it again, under these conditions? I borrow my answer from the British philosopher of Latvian origin Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), one of Vargas Llosa’s heroes. “It is boring to read the allies, who coincide with our points of view, said Berlin. It is more interesting to read the enemy, the one who tests the strength of our defenses. »
I therefore read, in this light, The call of the tribe (Folio, 2022, 354 pages), the most recent essay by Vargas Llosa, reissued in paperback before the Holidays. By painting the portrait of seven thinkers who have had a profound effect on him, the writer wants to retrace his “own intellectual and political history”.
A Marxist and supporter of the Castro revolution in his youth, Vargas Llosa says he lost, as he grew older, “the taste for political utopias, these apocalypses […] who promise paradise on earth and instead cause iniquities worse than those they want to repair”. In this book, he pays homage to the seven guides who inspired his conversion to liberalism, a doctrine advocating adherence to the free market as the engine of progress and to a democratic culture, “that of tolerance, pluralism, human rights man, individual sovereignty and legality”.
Like the Spaniard José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), who affirmed that “clarity is the politeness of the philosopher”, Vargas Llosa claims to be allergic to the hermetic prose of too many intellectuals. His essay, in this respect, translated from Spanish by Albert Bensoussan and Daniel Lefort, lives up to his claims. The style is clear, elegant and warm. No bluster or verbiage here.
A tutelary figure of liberalism with his concept of the “invisible hand” governing economic exchanges for the benefit of the common good, the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) has the honor of opening the programme. Vargas Llosa, in a magnificent portrait, presents him as an austere moralist, sensitive to artistic beauty and that of virtuous human actions. Proponents of capitalism often cite him in support of their ideology, but Smith, delicate mind, would not have supported, in my opinion, many of them.
The Austrian economist Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) takes up Smith’s central idea that the free market leads to social progress by stimulating emulation, but he takes it a step further by asserting that any state planning of the economy leads to totalitarianism. Even Vargas Llosa, who admires him, must recognize that by supporting the dictatorship of Pinochet, Hayek, who says he wants capitalism and democracy, but always chooses the former, has erred. The writer, moreover, deplores the graceless style of the economist.
While he pays fine homage to the French Raymond Aron (1905-1983) and Jean-François Revel (1924-2006), who knew how to “perceive the moment when theory ceases to express life and begins to betray it”, Vargas Llosa reserves his most complete and most felt portraits for the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) and Isaiah Berlin.
From the first, so austere, it seems, that he would never have kissed his wife on the lips, he retains his critique of historicism—there are no laws of history since humans are free—his philosophical optimism and liberalism concerned with social justice, unlike that of von Hayek.
From the second, he retains the idea of ”contradictory truths”, according to which “believing that there is only one true answer to every human problem” would be a mistake, and the concomitant concepts of negative freedom – one is free in the absence constraints — and positive freedom — we are free when we have the means to participate fully in society.
With lip service, Vargas Llosa sometimes deigns to recognize the value of the social-democratic model — the best combination, to date, of the two freedoms, in my opinion — but we feel that it is costing him, so much does he fear the hints of socialism which persist there. This is what sets us apart.