The Call of the Tribe

by Mario Vargas Llosa, John King (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250321671
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/14/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” He also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor. His many works of fiction and nonfiction include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by FSG. He died in Lima at age 89 in 2025.

John King edited From Oslo to Jerusalem from I. B. Tauris.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

THE CALL OF THE TRIBE

ADAM SMITH (1723–1790)

JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET (1883–1955)

FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK (1899–1992)

SIR KARL POPPER (1902–1994)

RAYMOND ARON (1905–1983)

SIR ISAIAH BERLIN (1909–1997)

JEAN–FRANÇOIS REVEL (1924–2006)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Editorial Reviews

"The Peruvian Nobel laureate lays out how seven thinkers convinced him of the importance of the individual before the communal . . . It’s a mini-master course, regardless of your own political philosophy." —Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times

"The duty of intellectuals is to show the world as it really is—what is to be hoped for, and what is to be feared. Mario Vargas Llosa does his duty very well." —David Pryce-Jones, The Wall Street Journal

"Worthy and useful . . . There is an enormous amount to be learned from this book." —David Mehegan, Arts Fuse

"[A] thoughtful, reflective book . . . Vargas Llosa reveals with enthusiasm and aplomb the political and social beliefs that have found homes in his work." —Kirkus Reviews

"There’s a special pleasure in a book that guides you through how a brilliant mind works, which is exactly the promise of Vargas Llosa’s 'intellectual autobiography.'” —Jessie Gaynor, Lit Hub

"Vargas Llosa . . . lays out in this pensive survey the seven thinkers who shaped his belief in liberal democracy . . . cumulatively they amount to an illuminating look at the author’s own political and intellectual trajectory." —Publishers Weekly

"With The Call of the Tribe, Vargas Llosa bequeaths us his legacy in the world of political ideas . . . With his masterful and extraordinary prose, he succeeds in communicating truly complex ideas without losing any of their original content." —Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, Law & Liberty

From the Publisher

2022-09-17
The celebrated author’s personal take on the evolution of his liberal ideas.

Vargas Llosa describes this thoughtful, reflective book as an autobiographical and intellectual road map to his journey from the “Marxism and Sartrean existentialism of my youth to the liberalism of my mature years.” The author laid his political beliefs on the line when he ran for president of Peru in 1987 and when he prominently spoke of defending liberal democracy in his Nobel speech in 2010. He returns to Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station as inspiration, seeking to do for liberalism what Wilson did for socialism. The map consists of biographies and detailed discussions of thinkers who helped shape Vargas Llosa’s political education. He begins with Adam Smith, the “father of liberalism,” focusing on the “oceanic” The Wealth of Nations, which shows how the free market “brings progress to nations,” fostering the “economic freedom [that] upholds and drives all other freedoms.” Vargas Llosa believes that Spain’s José Ortega y Gasset, the “most intelligent and elegant liberal philosophers of the twentieth century,” has been unjustly overlooked and deserves greater recognition. He admits that Friedrich von Hayek is one of the three modern thinkers to whom he owes the most, and Hayek’s last book, The Fatal Conceit (1988), is “one of the most important works of the twentieth century.” Thanks to The Open Society and Its Enemies, an “absolute masterpiece,” Karl Popper was the “most daring liberal thinker of his age” despite “opaque and meandering prose” and his hatred of TV. Vargas Llosa is also a staunch supporter of the “pragmatic realism and the reformist and liberal ideas” of Raymond Aron. The author concludes with Isaiah Berlin, the “extraordinarily erudite political thinker and social philosopher”; and Jean-François Revel, one of liberal culture’s “most talented and battle-hardened combatants.”

Vargas Llosa reveals with enthusiasm and aplomb the political and social beliefs that have found homes in his work.

Kirkus Reviews