In 1990 Mario Vargas Llosa stood as a candidate to become president of Peru. He won the first round as the head of a coalition of liberal parties, but lost to the populist underdog, Alberto Fujimori. Explaining his decision to run, the Nobel laureate later said that Peru’s “fragile democracy” found itself on the point of collapse. With one of the latest incumbents recently jailed (he tried to dissolve Congress), that prognosis is equally germane today.
Even the slimmest familiarity with Latin American politics demonstrates that the author’s homeland is no exception. Political turbulence is the region’s one constant. Its Old World oppressors may have gone, but the appeal of their political doctrines has not. From Soviet-era communism to ultra-laissez-faire economics, and everything in between, Latin America has given it a whirl – often at the expense of its economic wellbeing and the liberty of its citizens.
Vargas Llosa is not a fan of revolution. To ideologues, in general, he gives a wide berth. Having lived through multiple military governments (Peru had four in the 1960s alone), personal experience has taught him that ideological regimes rarely end well. Indeed, the “collective claustrophobia” and general misery he saw during a brief trip to the Soviet Union in 1968 prompted him to question his ardent student Marxism. A very public break with Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba a few years later, and disappointment with Jean-Paul Sartre (Vargas Llosa objected to him describing literature as a “luxury”), eventually led him to “break with socialism and reassess the meaning of democracy”.
The Call of the Tribe is the result of that intellectual journey. Written in a professorial yet accessible style, the book is structured around Vargas Llosa’s seven favourite political theorists. Separately they make for a mixed bag, ranging from the well-known (Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper) to the known but less read (Isaiah Berlin and José Ortega y Gasset) to the less known and – nowadays, at least – little read (Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel). Collectively, however, they are a bastion of liberalism, offering a comprehensive take on what Vargas Llosa, with unbridled enthusiasm, refers to as the “flagship of civilization”.
For a novelist, Vargas Llosa resists the temptation towards biography. We only see glimpses of the men behind the ideas – Berlin’s “tortuous and academic” discovery of sex in his forties, for instance, or Smith’s closeness to his mother. When the personal comes into view, it is to explain rather than to titillate. Three of his protagonists fled totalitarianism: Nazism in the cases of Hayek and Popper; Bolshevism for Berlin. All three emigrated to the UK, a country of which Vargas Llosa, as a firm Thatcherite and one-time resident, seems inordinately fond.
So what does The Call of the Tribe have to say about liberalism? Much. The notion of freedom features large, though it is more freedom “from” (political oppression, restrictions of rights, social prejudice, physical violence), than freedom “to” (thrive, learn, flourish). The imbalance is telling. The point of liberalism is to lay the ground, not to dictate a path. Freedom is an infinite resource and to define it is to restrict it. In his attacks on Marxism – and all manner of “isms” besides – the French philosopher Aron stands accused of dismantling the ideologies of his day, but not replacing them with anything constructive. Vargas Llosa’s view? “In that, as well, he was a genuine liberal.”
Better, then, to focus on the impediments. Again, Vargas Llosa’s heroes have much to say on the matter. One position on which all can agree is the undesirability of dogma. Popper is surprisingly unremitting (dare one say, dogmatic?) on the subject. When political theories take on the guise of “scientific doctrines”, the right to criticize or question disappears. And when debate dies away, gulags pop up. There is “no knowledge that cannot be revised”, Vargas Llosa asserts, echoing Popper. This is not truth as relativism: it’s truth as true until proven otherwise; truth as progressively revealed and refined through sharpness of thought and (above all) openness of mind.
Other hurdles to liberalism are all essentially derivatives of this single principle. Banning elections and imprisoning political leaders are the manifestations of a mindset that says “I’m right” (ergo, “you are wrong”). State economic planning falls foul of such logic. Hayek, the poster child of “small government”, argued fervently in his book The Road to Serfdom that the introduction of a welfare state would lead inexorably to Britain’s economic decline – a position with which Vargas Llosa appears to concur, lamenting the “alas, truncated” free-market policies of Margaret Thatcher.
As a primer on the ideas underpinning modern political liberalismThe Call of the Tribe delivers soundly. The author’s command of the primary texts is impressive, as is his deep engagement with their contents. There is some settling of historical arguments (the reduction of Smith’s contribution to mere economics, for instance, or Ortega’s supposed support for nationalism during the Spanish Civil War), as well as some meandering down philosophical rabbit holes (the sections on linguistics and historicism jump to mind) that might have general readers scratching their heads. As for the present state of liberalism, particularly on his home turf of Latin America, barely a word.
Most frustrating is the lack of practical application. Policy proposals do not feature. Any sense of what he might have done had he won the Peruvian presidency in 1990 can only be inferred. One (rare) criticism is of Popper, for undervaluing the expressive form, but Vargas Llosa is similarly silent on how his politics inform his craft.
Even so, The Call of the Tribe is an impressive intellectual feat. It confirms the author of triumphs such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and Conversation in the Cathedral as not only a superb essayist, but also a serious political thinker. More than just a history of ideas, there is a hint of manifesto to this book. Democracy doesn’t die with guns and bombs, Mario Vargas Llosa wants to remind us; it starts when we say “hasta la vista” to the founding liberal principles of political pluralism and freedom of choice.
Oliver Balch is a British writer and journalist, based in Portugal
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