The Call of the Tribe by Mario Vargas Llosa: A solid political primer but lacking in fresh ideas

The Call of the Tribe: Essays

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa, trans. John King

ISBN-13: 9780571352180

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Guideline Price: £18.99

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was 12 years old when the government of his native Peru was overthrown by a military coup in 1948. The eight-year rule of General Manuel Apolinario Odría imbued him with “a hatred for dictators of any stripe” and he became, for a while, a leftist. Like many of his generation he had high hopes for Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution of 1959, but the authoritarianism of Castro’s regime prompted him to rethink his worldview; over the course of the 1960s and 1970s he drifted away from socialism and embraced the free market, a volte-face that culminated in a foray into frontline politics when, in 1990, he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru on a platform of pro-business policies and privatisation.

In The Call of the Tribe Vargas Llosa pays tribute to seven major thinkers who influenced his political conversion. The book is his homage to the ideology of liberalism, which he describes as “an attitude toward life and society based on tolerance and respect... and a firm defence of freedom as a supreme value”.

Its title refers to the distinction that Vargas Llosa draws between the truly free citizen and the “deindividualised” member of the “mass” or “tribe”, whose sovereignty is subsumed within the collective: “The call of the tribe, the attraction to that form of existence in which individuals enslave themselves to a religion or to a doctrine or to a leader... and shy away from the arduous commitment to freedom and their sovereignty as rational beings, clearly touches chords deep within the human heart.” This impulse, he explains, has sustained the evils of fascism, communism and religious theocracy, and must be resisted.

Most of the figures covered here will be familiar to anyone with a passing interest in political philosophy: there are chapters on Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. Each essay comprises a pen portrait of its subject’s life and works, combining a brisk biographical overview with a succinct summary of their particular contribution to the doctrine of liberalism. Cumulatively, they form a neat potted history of an intellectual tradition, from Smith’s famous line about the “invisible hand” of the market to Hayek’s hardline stance against state intervention in the economy, via Karl Popper’s pronouncements on the incompatibility of socialism with individual liberty.

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The relative outliers, from an Anglophone perspective, are the French duo of Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel, and the Spaniard José Ortega Y Gasset, a Franco-era philosopher whose colourful turn of phrase provides some of the book’s more eye-catching quotes. These include his analysis of Basque and Catalan separatist sentiment as constituting “a conventional and almost always incongruent expression of deep, ineffable and obscure emotions that operate in the subsoil of the collective soul”.

He conspicuously overlooks the achievements of progressive social democracy in western European nations... that have immeasurably improved people’s lives without miring them in despotism

As an introductory primer, The Call of the Tribe is erudite and informative, well worthy of a place on any politics undergraduate reading list. However, as a political thinker in his own right, Vargas Llosa doesn’t bring a great deal to the party. Like many converts, he gives the impression of being haunted by the imagined reproaches of his younger self: he comes off unduly smug about having freed himself “from the illusions and sophisms of socialism” and learned that “common sense is the most valuable of political virtues”.

He appears unwilling or unable to acknowledge the dogmatic strain in his own thought: the human suffering caused by the radical free market policies he champions – particularly in the global South – seems, for him, to sit somewhere outside of history, exempt from the moral reckoning.

Isaiah Berlin posited a delineation between “negative” and “positive” conceptions of freedom: the former relates mainly to the personal rights of the individual vis-a-vis the state; the latter is more expansive, accommodating questions of social justice as well as civil liberties. When Vargas Llosa writes that these constitute “two profoundly divergent and irreconcilable attitudes towards human development”, he conspicuously overlooks the achievements of progressive social democracy in western European nations – employment rights, socialised healthcare, the welfare state – that have immeasurably improved people’s lives without miring them in despotism.

The trouble with a narrowly “negative” conception of liberty is that, at the level of policy, it offers little more than technocratic pragmatism when many of the world’s most pressing problems demand radical, collectivist solutions. Climate change in particular will not be solved by “common sense” alone.

Vargas Llosa is, of course, right when he urges us to be wary of zealots and to prize individual liberty highly, but in his eagerness to flaunt his grasp of liberal orthodoxy he has wandered into the realms of dull fanaticism. Freedom from tyranny need not be the limit of our ambitions: there will always be a place for utopian thinking.