The Call of the Tribe
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The intellectual autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
From its origins, the liberal doctrine has represented the most advanced forms of democratic culture, and it is what has most defended us from the inextinguishable “call of the tribe.” This book hopes to make a modest contribution to that indispensable project.
In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that have shaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years. The Nobel laureate, “tireless in his quest to probe the nature of the human animal” (Marie Arana, The Washington Post), maps out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop a new body of ideas after the great ideological traumas of his disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution and his alienation from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author who most inspired Vargas Llosa in his youth.
The works of Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel helped the author enormously during those uneasy years. They showed him another school of thought, one that placed the individual before the tribe, nation, class, or party and defended freedom of expression as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. The Call of the Tribe documents Vargas Llosa’s engagement with their work and charts the evolution of his personal ideology.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa (Harsh Times) lays out in this pensive survey the seven thinkers who shaped his belief in liberal democracy. An early supporter of the Cuban Revolution and socialism, Vargas Llosa saw how powerful "the call of the tribe" was, but ultimately came to view it as "sovereign responsible individuals regress to being part of a mass submissive to the dictates of a leader." Vargas Llosa devotes a chapter to each of the seven authors: Adam Smith, "the father of liberalism," "wrote with elegance and precision" and "was sensitive to good literature"; José Ortega y Gasset "would today be as widely known and read as Sartre" were he French; Friedrich von Hayek's work gave "liberalism a very clear content and very precise boundaries"; Jean-Francois Revel had a keen "ability to see when theory stops expressing life and begins to betray it"; and Isaiah Berlin wrote with "discretion and modesty" as a "wily strategy." The snapshot biographies of each figure are fascinating (Hayek's "first passion" was botany and Smith "was known for being extraordinarily absentminded"), and cumulatively they amount to an illuminating look at the author's own political and intellectual trajectory. Vargas Llosa's fans should check this out.
