Reinventing Modernity in Latin America: Intellectuals Imagine the Future, 1900-1930 [First Edition] 0230603874, 9780230603875, 9780230610101

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 8
1 Introduction: Against Fate and Ascription......Page 12
2 Mapping Out the Modern: Rodó’s Critique of Pure Reason......Page 34
3 Creating a Workers’ Public Sphere: Juan B. Justo’s Analysis of State and Society......Page 82
4 Translating the Past into the Present: The Synthesizing Modernity of Alfonso Reyes......Page 120
5 A Vital Form of Public Space: Mariátegui’s Revolution in Modernity......Page 154
6 Conclusion: A Distinctively Latin American Modernity......Page 198
Notes......Page 208
Bibliography......Page 258
B......Page 282
C......Page 283
G......Page 284
L......Page 285
M......Page 286
P......Page 287
R......Page 288
U......Page 289
Z......Page 290

Citation preview

STUDIES

OF THE

A MERICAS

edited by

James Dunkerley Institute for the Study of the Americas University of London School of Advanced Study

Titles in this series are multi-disciplinary studies of aspects of the societies of the hemisphere, particularly in the areas of politics, economics, history, anthropology, sociology and the environment. The series covers a comparative perspective across the Americas, including Canada and the Caribbean as well as the USA and Latin America. Titles in this series published by Palgrave Macmillan: Cuba’s Military 1990-2005: Revolutionary Soldiers during Counter-Revolutionary Times By Hal Klepak The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America Edited by Rachel Sieder, Line Schjolden, and Alan Angell Latin America: A New Interpretation By Laurence Whitehead Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina By Arnd Schneider America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism Edited by Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill Vargas and Brazil: New Perspectives Edited by Jens R. Hentschke When Was Latin America Modern? Edited by Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart Debating Cuban Exceptionalism Edited by Bert Hoffmann and Laurence Whitehead Caribbean Land and Development Revisited Edited by Jean Besson and Janet Momsen Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic Edited by Nancy Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca and David Treece

Democratization, Development, and Legality: Chile, 1831-1973 By Julio Faundez The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820-1880 By Iván Jaksi´c The Role of Mexico’s Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture: From Tlatelolco to the “Philanthropic Ogre” By John King Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico Edited by Matthew Butler Reinventing Modernity in Latin America: Intellectuals Imagine the Future, 1900-1930 By Nicola Miller The Republican Party and Immigration Politics: From Proposition 187 to George W. Bush By Andrew Wroe Youth Violence in Latin America: Gangs and Juvenile Justice in Perspective By Gareth A. Jones and Dennis Rodgers

Reinventing Modernity in Latin America Intellectuals Imagine the Future, 1900–1930 Nicola Miller

REINVENTING MODERNITY IN LATIN AMERICA

Copyright © Nicola Miller, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60387–5 ISBN-10: 0–230–60387–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Nicola. Reinventing modernity in Latin America : intellectuals imagine the future, 1900–1930 / Nicola Miller. p. cm.—(Studies of the Americas series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–60387–4 1. Latin America—Civilization—Philosophy. 2. Civilization, Modern—Philosophy. 3. Latin America—Intellectual life—20th century. 4. Modernism (Literature)—Latin America. I. Title. F1414.M554 2007 980.039301—dc22

2007022123

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2008 10

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Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Against Fate and Ascription

vii 1

2. Mapping Out the Modern: Rodó’s Critique of Pure Reason

23

3. Creating a Workers’ Public Sphere: Juan B. Justo’s Analysis of State and Society

71

4. Translating the Past into the Present: The Synthesizing Modernity of Alfonso Reyes

109

5. A Vital Form of Public Space: Mariátegui’s Revolution in Modernity

143

6. Conclusion: A Distinctively Latin American Modernity

187

Notes

197

Bibliography

247

Index

271

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Acknowledgments

My greatest intellectual debt is undoubtedly to my UCL colleague

in modern European history Axel Körner, who has contributed more than can easily be acknowledged in the form of ideas that have evolved in shared teaching and informal discussion over many years. He has carefully read and commented rigorously on several chapters, offered a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bibliography, and acted as a steadfast source of encouragement. His unusual generosity is testament to the rich and lasting rewards of genuine intellectual collaboration. My work has also benefited in both tangible and intangible ways from the contributions of other colleagues at UCL, particularly members of the Cultural History seminar where parts of the book were discussed. It is easy to take a place for granted, especially when you have been there for a long time, so I would like to record here my appreciation of the stimulating and supportive intellectual environment provided both by UCL, especially the History Department, and by the University of London’s Institute for the Study of the Americas. In particular, I would like to thank Christopher Abel, Catherine Hall, and Jason Wilson for their constructive and perceptive comments on earlier drafts of parts of this book. Sophie Taylor helped me to test out whether my ideas made sense to an informed student and in general she acted as a valuable source of enthusiasm for the project. I have also been fortunate to enjoy working with an unusually lively and talented cohort of Ph.D. students over the last few years, all of whom have helped in various ways to shape my own ideas while I was trying to help them with theirs—so I thank Kate Quinn, Matthew Brown, Nicola Foote, Joanna Crow, Michael Goebel, Natalia Bas, and Michela Coletta. UCL gave practical help too, particularly a period of sabbatical leave, which was essential for writing the main part of this book. For the necessary funding for research trips to Latin America and Europe, I am grateful to the UCL Graduate School, the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences Dean’s Fund, and the UCL History Department.

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Another vital source of intellectual stimulation for this book was the series of workshops on Tradition and the Modern organized during 2004–2005 by the AHRC-funded UCL/SOAS Center for African and Asian Literatures. This Center went far beyond the remit of its title not only to include Latin America but also to adopt a remarkably interdisciplinary approach to thinking about the meanings of modernity in societies that have experienced colonialism. Their events were models of how to make interdisciplinarity truly rewarding. Of the many people involved, I particularly thank João Cézar de Castro Rocha, Ross Forman, Stephen Hart, Guido Podesta, and Tim Mathews. While I am recording intellectual debts, it would be hard to omit Laurence Whitehead, who as my doctoral supervisor many years ago first alerted me to the challenges and rewards of comparative enquiry, and whose recent work on Latin American modernity has provided a valuable touchstone for my own thinking. I would also like to register special thanks to Charles A. Hale, now retired from the University of Iowa, both for the inspiration provided by his own extensive work on Latin American intellectual history and for the kind encouragement he has shown me, from a distance, over the last few years. Encouragement plays an indefinable yet crucial part in the writing of any book, even—or perhaps especially—from people whose own main interests lie in very different fields. For the kind of unstinting belief that, whatever it was about it must be worthwhile if I was spending so much time on it, I owe a great deal to Michael Crawford, Annie Currie, Catherine Merridale and Frank Payne, Ian and Hazel Miller, Joan Miller (sadly deceased 2001), Mary Turner, and Caroline Zealey. Special thanks are in order here to Caroline and Richard Williams, who over the years have always offered me a home from home in Bristol. The transition from draft manuscript to published book is often a difficult one, but in this case the process has been eased by the help of James Dunkerley, editor of this series, whose warm response to the first complete version was a great source of confidence. I also thank the anonymous Palgrave reviewer for a generous and helpful report, which spurred me on to the final text. Throughout the production process, staff at Palgrave have been uncommonly easy to work with, for which I would like to express my appreciation, above all to Joanna Mericle, Luba Ostashevsky and Erin Ivy. A very special acknowledgment goes to John North, who read and commented perceptively on the whole book, bringing to bear his unusual capacity to think about intellectual history over a range of

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periods and parts of the world, even those that are far from his own area of expertise. He has also played the invaluable role of helping me to maintain a sense of perspective in the midst of obsessive writing. For all this, many thanks. Lastly, Philip North has taken a very particular interest in this project, which I trust he will find rewarded in what follows.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Against Fate and Ascription1

T

he nations of Latin America were founded upon visions of modernity. Independence leaders imagined republics based on popular sovereignty and liberal freedoms blazing a trail through obscurantism and oppression toward a utopian future in which the full potential of humankind would be realized. Latin America would become distinctively, gloriously, hospitably modern, “disclosing to the Old World the majesty of the New,” proclaimed Bolívar.2 In practice, the notorious gap between ideals and realities in the region has meant that Latin America’s modernity has indeed long been regarded as distinctive, but usually only in a negative sense. Peripheral, uneven, fractured, labyrinthine—these characteristic metaphors of deficiency all imply that the region’s historical experience has been particularly prone to inauthenticity and inconsistency, even more so than might be anticipated by any general theory that the modern condition is generically at odds with itself: incomplete (Habermas), ambivalent (Bauman), or paradoxical (Berman).3 It is not unusual to find Latin America’s history represented as a struggle between modernization and resistance to it. But this is to overlook one of the region’s most compelling features: namely, that the eternal return to an emancipatory project has been just as evident as has the recurrence of exploitation, repression, and frustration.4 Latin America has been distinctive not only for a tendency to resist models of modernity imposed from without, but also for an enduring capacity—against all the odds—to generate affirmative visions of modernity from within. Social conflict was more about how to be modern than whether to be so. Thus there were not just two categories of response to modernization in Latin America, as has often been argued, but three: the technocratic, capitalist model of modernity

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that has been dominant since the mid-nineteenth century has indeed been resisted, usually unsuccessfully, by antimodern essentialisms, but it has also been repeatedly and at times successfully opposed by an alternative conception of modernity inspired by the values upon which independent Latin America was based. The contemporary projects of the New Left are only the latest in a long line of examples. This book explores the intellectual origins of this alternative, truly distinctive Latin American modernity. Four Latin American Challenges What makes it distinctive are the four main challenges it poses to the technocratic model—often taken to be modernity tout court—that became hegemonic in Europe, the United States, and indeed, if often in debased and violent form, in Latin America itself. First, the alternative version offers a rethinking of the role of reason, conceiving it not as instrumental but more in terms of what Habermas has called communicative reason,5 which highlights the processes of reasoning (rather than their outcomes) and aims to be intersubjective (rather than based on subject-object relations). Rationality in Latin America, far from being the disenchantment of the world, has been conceptualized as “the intelligibility of its totality,”6 open to aesthetics (which instrumental rationality turned into an alienated enemy) and to ethics (which technocratic modernity, enthralled by science, delegated to organized religion). Second, the Latin American alternative seeks to deepen the concept of popular sovereignty, arguing that procedural democracy and the law of contract are not in themselves sufficient to guarantee it; also necessary are democratic participatory associational life and the solidarities it can build, which are seen as the only effective way to counteract the inbuilt individualism of modern life. Third, history has been interpreted in Latin America less in terms of moments of rupture—a feature often assumed to be intrinsic to modernity— and more as a process of continuity. In Latin America, the dynamic between the traditional and the modern has entailed not so much a break with the past as the integration of past and present in creative synthesis. Fourth, against the boundaries and exclusions of technocratic Western modernity, Latin American alternatives have championed openness, inclusiveness, and heterogeneity. Thus, Latin America’s distinctive vision of modernity goes beyond the claim that Latin American experiences did not fit European norms (the “discourse of the autochthonous” analyzed by Julio Ramos)7 to embark upon a radical revision of the very categories of modernity in order to

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elaborate a different conception of what it could mean to be modern. In short, this alternative imaginary of modernity was not just claiming to be different, but was paving the way to thinking differently about difference itself. Modernity and Modernization All this starts from the premise that modernity is not an inherently Eurocentric or teleological concept, although it is often claimed to be so because it is both prescriptive and future oriented. One way of freeing it from Eurocentrism is to distinguish it clearly from modernization (the two terms are often used as if they were virtually synonymous, especially in sociological literature). This confusion has had particularly unfortunate consequences in relation to Latin America, where U.S. “modernization theory,” which promoted free-market capitalism as the most efficient route to political stability, became hegemonic in the Cold War context of the 1950s.8 Modernity, seen as equivalent to modernization or, worse still, U.S.-style modernization, therefore, came to be widely regarded in Latin America as coextensive with dependence on imperial powers, a view that precluded consideration, both intellectually and politically, of other possibilities for Latin American modernity.9 The subsuming of modernity into modernization helps to sustain what Mark Thurner has called a “metanarrative of the deficient” in Latin American history,10 whereby Latin America is continually found to be lacking or tardy or otherwise inadequate. It also condemns Latin America to a Hobson’s choice of accepting external versions of modernity or retreating into a defensive antimodernity. Yet, as this book illustrates, there were alternatives, which become more visible if Eurocentrism is confronted. The wellnigh inescapable fact that European modernization came first chronologically does not mean that it should be granted the analytical status of a universal model of modernity. Diverse European sociocultural projects (and they were, it is worth emphasizing, far more varied than is always acknowledged) developed in response to European experiences of modernization. As recent work adopting the “multiple modernities” perspective has highlighted, other experiences of modernization resulted in other conceptions of modernity, different configurations of the range of possibilities offered by objective rationality and subjectivity.11 In order to discern these alternative imaginaries, the historian needs to look beyond approaches that define modernity in terms of that familiar cluster of historical processes that can roughly be dated

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to the late eighteenth century and located in (parts of) Europe, namely capital formation and the emergence of capitalist relations of production; industrialization and urbanization; the privileging of empirical science and its associated technology as the prime source of knowledge; state bureaucratization; secularization; commitment to impersonality of the law; the promotion of individualism; the separation of public and private spheres; and the advent of mass politics. These processes, which are objectively measurable by positivist methods, are referred to in this book as “modernization,” following Habermas’s usage.12 “Modernity” itself will be used to refer to the far more subjective “horizons of expectation” and “spaces of experience” (to borrow Koselleck’s terms)13 that the processes of modernization create. Taking the view that ways of knowing condition possibilities of being, modernity will be thought of primarily as an epistemological concept, denoting a specifically reflexive consciousness of time, space, and self in relation to other. My approach, inspired by Foucault,14 will draw upon the aesthetic responses to modernity that arose from a reaction against European “bourgeois modernity”: the explorations of ephemerality, elusiveness, indeterminacy, and contingency of modernist writers and artists from Baudelaire to the Surrealists. Social theorists built upon their insights to develop ideas about modernity’s transformed consciousness of time (Benjamin and Koselleck); the effects of fragmentation on consciousness (Simmel); and the possibilities for a dialogic understanding of language (Bakhtin). Many of these ideas, which are discussed in more detail where they are specifically relevant, have proved suggestive in my thinking about the allure of the modern in Latin America. In the spirit of such approaches, my starting point is that in its inbuilt relativity, the concept of modernity represents a state that is always achievable, but always already deferred (modernity is always elsewhere in time or space, its very elusiveness the secret of its power). In its inherent subjectivity, it is about ways of perceiving, understanding, and imagining the world. That does not mean that it lacks any analytical content, however. Modernity’s generic promise is that historical transformation can be brought about by rational human agency, conquering space and time (i.e., geography and history) through scientific knowledge to create a society of greater justice, sovereignty, and liberty. The historian’s contribution here is to analyze how each of these terms (rationality, agency, and so forth) is conceived in any specific historical context. Even in the context of European history, it is widely acknowledged that there was a period in which modernity was the cultural aspiration of the minority before modernization made it the experience of

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the majority,15 just as a nation can be imagined long before it acquires political anchorage in statehood. This was certainly the case in Latin America, where the dream of becoming modern had been present for at least half a century—say, from the 1820s—before modernization began to gather serious momentum around 1870. The wars of independence had, after all, mainly been conducted on the basis that anticolonial republicanism was an advance on European monarchism and despotism, and historians have recently found evidence that public debate and public opinion became significant for the first time during the course of those wars.16 In their wake, the new republics embarked upon nation-state building, a modernizing endeavor if ever there was one, for all the compromises that nationalism is habitually obliged to make with the traditions that it, like any other modernism, invents for itself. Thus, although the term modernidad was not used widely in Latin America until the late twentieth century, when it became current in the context of debates about postmodernity,17 moderno often occurred in the works of intellectuals throughout the nineteenth century and became ubiquitous in the printed media (at least in urban areas) from the early twentieth century onward. It was especially prominent in the fields of culture and consumption, sometimes appearing in the titles of the popular magazines that began to circulate, and often in the articles and advertisements inside.18 Moreover, Latin Americans were also compelled to accept “the modern” as a category applicable to them because outsiders had no hesitation in applying it, even if usually to say—as they still sometimes do—that Latin America was not modern. My analysis focuses not on the issue of the presence or absence of modern institutions in Latin America, but rather on the creation of a social imaginary of modernity. This term is Charles Taylor’s, and he designed it in order to go beyond analysis of social theory and social practice as distinct fields, in the hope of exploring the “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.”19 To posit ideas and material forces as “rival causal agencies” in history is to set up a false dichotomy, he argues: “Ideas always come [ . . . ] wrapped up in certain practices, even if these are only discursive practices,” and, in turn, practices, even when coercive, are shaped by “self-conceptions, modes of understanding.”20 Modernity has been variously conceptualized in terms of a historical consciousness; an accumulation of socioeconomic and political experiences; a project for shaping the future; and a selfreflexive discourse. The concept of the social imaginary makes it possible to integrate these different approaches, which have often been

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seen as mutually exclusive, and to try to understand modernity in relation to modernization without reducing it to modernization. To confuse the two terms obscures the extent to which the question of what it meant to be modern itself became part of the political struggles that arose out of modernization in Latin America. Latin America’s distinctive approach to modernity began to take shape during the period from 1900 to 1930, which is the focus of this book. The onset of a new century, together with the imminent Independence centennials and the increasingly intrusive presence of the United States, prompted Latin Americans to take stock of the cumulative effects of modernization processes that had been building up momentum, albeit unevenly, for several decades. During the late nineteenth century, at least in the wealthier Latin American countries, the central state had begun to extend its powers, constitutional government had functioned more reliably than previously (albeit still imperfectly and not without interruptions), capitalist labor relations had started to prevail in key sectors of the economy, and capital cities had been refashioned along modern lines.21 It is often forgotten that during the late nineteenth century the Southern Cone countries, particularly Argentina, underwent one of the fastest processes of modernization in the world. In 1900 Buenos Aires, with a million inhabitants, had a larger population than many European cities, and in 1914 Argentina had a higher percentage of its inhabitants born elsewhere (30 percent) than was ever reached in the United States.22 Opportunities for public assembly, debate, and organization were more extensive in Latin America during these three decades than has always been recognized in the historiography (post-1930 authoritarianism, a reaction to the World Depression, has cast a long shadow). Public spaces began to open up: plazas, boulevards and parks; museums, art galleries, theaters, concert halls, libraries and cinemas; department stores, shops and arcades; cafés, bars, and restaurants. Political parties seeking a mass base began to form,23 labor and peasant organizations began to make economic and political demands, and the “social question” began to be widely discussed, not only in periodicals and at exclusive salons, but also in handbills and on the streets. Intellectuals as Mediators of Modernity Intellectuals enjoyed singular prominence in these debates, at a time when their own unevenly modernized conditions of production acquired an element of the adventurism characteristic of the region’s boom-and-bust economies.24 While such unpredictability undeniably

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made it harder to consolidate a stable cultural sphere, it also allowed for a certain degree of freedom that some intellectuals found exhilarating. By this time the modernization of intellectual life, which was relatively rapid compared with many other areas of activity, had created the opportunity for writers to earn a living through their work (mainly from the newly expanding press), independently of private income or patronage. The generalist letrado of the nineteenth-century Republic of Letters, who moved freely between politics and literature, playing multiple roles as ideologue, legislator, educator, scholar, was giving way to the modern, specialist literato. For the first time in Latin American history, thinkers and writers could establish a role for themselves as independent “intellectuals” (the term began to be used in the region during the 1890s). As well as these new options, however, modernization also brought about the decline of the Republic of Letters, which led to a loss of status and influence for modern professional intellectuals compared with the scholar-statesmen of previous generations.25 Moreover, as the effects of modernization became visible in Latin America’s own cities, there was an increasing sense among intellectuals that universalism did not necessarily imply inclusion and autonomy, as Sarmiento had assumed (“Let us be the United States!”) but could lead to exclusion and greater dependence (Martí: “[Let us beware] our formidable neighbour who does not understand us”).26 In the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, not only was there U.S. military and economic might to contend with, but also the equally ruthless power of cultural imperialism: the Afro-American dance, the cake-walk, swept all before it just as inexorably as did Roosevelt’s Rough Riders or the magnates of Chicago and Manhattan.27 In these circumstances, the new generation of Latin American intellectuals found it hard to share the confidence of their predecessors that barbarism could be civilized through their own agency. In response to this dual crisis of culture and politics, in the context of the international ascendancy of a model of modernity widely perceived to be in thrall to material gain at the expense of liberty and justice, leading Latin American intellectuals began to rethink what it could mean to be modern from a Latin American perspective. Casting themselves as porteurs (carriers) of ideas (Pomian), 28 not only as translators and expositors but also as opinion makers, through their newspaper columns and the journals they founded to disseminate images of modernity, intellectuals came to serve as touchstones of the modern, the mere invocation of one of their names or texts being sufficient to establish a position in a debate. As both

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“witnesses and products” of the social changes they lived through (Chartier)29 —in other words, as mediators of modernity—their work provides a key source for the historian seeking to trace the cognitive possibilities of their times. Although their migrations through modernity, both literal and metaphorical, were undeniably elite journeys, in this respect it is important to bear in mind the argument that elite culture is not created in a vacuum but is itself constituted “in large measure by [ . . . ] a subtle game of appropriations [and] reusages” of nonelite cultural practices.30 Modernization processes had their democratizing side effects in Latin America,31 as elsewhere, and more than enough evidence has now been accumulated from various disciplines to state with confidence that it was not only the region’s intellectuals and technocrats who were interested in the modern and how it might intersect with existing cultural practices in different social sectors.32 Work in Latin American cultural studies from the 1990s onward, explicitly refuting the cultural pessimism of the Frankfurt School, has illustrated the enduring creativity of the varied ways in which the “goods” of modernity (from consumer durables to products of the mass culture industries to political values) were assimilated throughout society from the early twentieth century onward.33 A broad range of reading material circulated among popular organizations, particularly but not exclusively in urban areas, and was read aloud to those unable to read it for themselves. It is difficult, if not impossible, for historians to trace the processes of mutual influence between Latin American intellectuals and popular organizations, but we do know that contacts took place, and it is, therefore, highly probable that the workers and peasants had an effect on the intellectuals just as the intellectuals had an effect on them. The visions and blueprints elaborated by intellectuals drew upon a more diverse range of ideas and practices than can be accounted for by the old model of the elites championing modernization and the masses resisting it—a model that would rarely be explicitly endorsed now but that is still implicit in much of the scholarly literature on Latin America.34 I have, therefore, chosen to illustrate each of the themes identified as inherent to Latin America’s distinctive modernity by focusing on the work of four leading intellectuals who became particularly associated with the debates at issue: (1) the role of reason—the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917); (2) the relationship between the state and society—the Argentine Juan B. Justo (1865–1928); (3) the meaning of history—the Mexican Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959); and (4) the character of revolution—the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui

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(1894–1930). The ideas of each of these intellectuals are explored in a broad context incorporating both the conditions of their production and the history of their reception, processes that I see (drawing on the work of De Certeau, Jauss, and Febvre) as interrelated.35 Any radical separation of production and consumption is untenable, because cultural consumption is in itself an active process of producing meaning and cultural production is shaped by consumption practices both as experienced in the past and anticipated for the future. Identifying how and why certain intellectual figures became iconic can reveal a great deal about ideas of modernity far beyond the individuals themselves, going beyond discourse analysis to take a series of soundings on Latin American responses to the modern. Thus the work of each of these intellectuals will be viewed not as a closed body of ideas, but rather as an open site for the social contestation of particular aspects of modernity. Together, it will be argued, they constitute a coalescing project (moving from caution to confidence) of an alternative modernity that aimed to integrate critique, autonomy, progress, and universalism with spiritual quest, social solidarity, hospitality, and an ethic of authenticity. Four Faces of Modernity: Rodó, Justo, Reyes, and Mariátegui Why these four intellectuals? At first sight they might seem to be an ill-assorted bunch, especially given the variety of the political solutions they proposed (Rodó was a moderate liberal, a lifelong member of the reformist Uruguayan Colorado Party; Reyes a more radical liberal who lent critical support to the Mexican Revolution; Justo a democratic socialist who founded the Argentine Socialist Party; Mariátegui a revolutionary socialist who founded a Peruvian Communist Party). They came from two different generations and there is no evidence that any of them met, although they would all have been aware of each other’s work to some extent.36 Justo, Reyes, and Mariátegui all acknowledged an intellectual debt to Rodó, but they each built very differently on the foundations he had laid for a modern culture. Justo and Mariátegui both identified themselves as socialists, but Mariátegui needed only a brief exchange of letters with the Argentine party to decide that their reformist approach was unacceptable to him.37 In no sense, then, can it be said that they constituted a group. They all embraced modernity, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm ranging from Rodó’s hesitancy to Mariátegui’s enthrallment, but that in itself does not mark them out from the previous generations of writers and thinkers,

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dating back at least to the late eighteenth century, who had addressed the issue of how Latin America could become modern. The rationale for my comparison is as follows. All four of these intellectuals had careers that were made possible by the effects—both good and bad—of modernization on Latin American intellectual life. Thus, although none of them were from elite families, apart from Alfonso Reyes (and his family’s wealth and status were sharply reduced during the Mexican Revolution), they were all able to take advantage of new opportunities to achieve national and regional influence on the basis of their intellectual production alone (whereas illustrious predecessors such as Sarmiento or Martí had accumulated cultural capital at least partly because of their respective political roles as Argentine president and Cuban independence leader). Rodó was acclaimed at the time for being the first major figure to achieve regional influence with the written word alone, that is, as an intellectual.38 More recently, Julio Ramos has argued that Rodó was operating in a wholly different discursive context from the letrados of previous generations, such as Sarmiento, who had spoken from “a relatively undifferentiated field, authorized in the rationalizing will and in state consolidation.”39 In Rodó, by contrast, “a specifically aesthetic authority is at work,” and in this he was different even from Martí.40 Thus, something qualitatively different started with Rodó, which is why I start with him. Given these new conditions of cultural life, it was no coincidence that each one of the four intellectuals founded a major periodical, which I analyze as windows on their worldview and the ways in which they conceptualized modernity. The emerging market for cultural products was fickle, though, which meant that their standard of living was adequate rather than comfortable, and they often felt themselves to be, and in many senses were, isolated from other elite groups. Although they were all politically active, none of my four held executive power, unlike others who could potentially have been included, such as José Vasconcelos, who became Minister of Education after the Mexican Revolution and oversaw the virtual creation of primary education in Mexico. Politically, all four of these intellectuals opposed the dominant corporate institutions of Latin America (Church, military, and large landed estate), but they were also unpersuaded by the laissez-faire liberalism promoted by many of their nineteenth-century predecessors. They were all against both corporate and arbitrary power, but, like other critics of conventional liberalism, they argued that freedom from such constraints was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for happiness. They were all against organized religion, but equally,

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they saw a vital role for some kind of spirituality in the modern world. They were committed to nation building to the extent that they identified the nation-state as the best means of integrating the masses into society, but they were all wary of introverted nationalism, preferring to maintain a balance with a universalist perspective that would keep Latin America open to ideas from elsewhere. They all had the experience of living under governments that were committed to using the state as an agent of modernization (Batlle in Uruguay, who put in place one of the world’s earliest welfare states; the Radicals in Argentina; the Mexican postrevolutionary leaders; Leguía in Peru, of whom it was joked that he would have paved the Andes, such was his enthusiasm for public works). They were all worried about the impact of modernization on Latin America, particularly because of the rise of U.S. interventionism, which provoked fears that modernization could only mean Americanization. They all resisted the instrumentalist implications of the debased form of positivism that had taken hold among many Latin American elites in the late nineteenth century. But it is important to note that they all welcomed positivism for having challenged not only scholasticism but also romanticism, which all four intellectuals discussed in this book explicitly spurned because of what Reyes referred to as its “utopian sentimentality.”41 They all worked from fundamentally positivist assumptions about the relativity of knowledge and the significance of historical analysis. All four intellectuals questioned the universal egalitarian promise of modernity, arguing that historical and local differences would persist, particularly outside those countries already deemed to be modern, because capitalist interests required it to be so. Even so, they feared skepticism and nihilism above all, and sought to revive the optimism that animated the European Enlightenment and—more significantly— the Independence of Latin America. Unlike many of their counterparts in Europe, none of these intellectuals advocated a retreat from modernity; rather, they sought a critical reevaluation of its key assumptions. Their conceptions of an alternative modernity should not be confused with the irrationalist alternatives that have sometimes been identified with Latin America, such as “macondismo,” a term derived from the magical realist representation of the town Macondo in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, or the “baroque modernity” elaborated by Pedro Morandé.42 The intellectuals discussed in this book were all committed to ideals of rationality, sovereignty, and progress, although they did not necessarily define them in the same way as Europeans did. On that basis, they developed a critique of modern life that still allowed for engagement and participation

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in it, hoping that Latin Americans could thereby achieve control over the modernization processes to which the dynamics of international capital would inevitably expose them. They all saw culture as a key element in any alternative social imaginary of modernity. Thus, although none of them was modernist in the conventional European sense of pursuing radical formal experimentation, they all drew on modernism (defined for the purposes of the argument here as aesthetic reflection upon the modern) to the extent of adopting variants of what Reyes called “fragmentary forms”—essays, chronicles, anecdotes, and notes—in order to test out different ways of representing the modern. Modernity and Modernism It is part of my argument that modernism was a crucial context for the development of an alternative social imaginary of modernity in Latin America, just as radicalism in art and in politics came together in many European avant-garde movements. The relationship between modernity and modernism was played out differently in Latin America, however. In Europe, modernism is conventionally dated as beginning with Baudelaire and continuing inexorably on its sublime path to self-destruction with the Surrealists. In Latin America, in contrast, two distinct periods of modernism are usually identified: first, the literary movement, modernismo, which was launched by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío in 1888 and lasted until the First World War; and second, the vanguardista movements of the 1920s. In Europe, modernism was primarily a reaction against a relatively well-consolidated bourgeois society (specifically, the Paris of the Second Empire), which had fabulous achievements to display as well as asinine follies, and which generated a grandeur that cast a rosy glow over its undoubted weakness for triviality. For all the spleen he directed at bourgeois morality, Baudelaire was no less admiring of bourgeois élan than was Marx. In late-nineteenth-century Latin America, however, there was no entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, constantly revolutionizing conditions of production, against which to rebel. Instead, fundamentally conservative landowning oligarchies held sway over a rising commercial bourgeoisie, often dominated by imperial interests.43 These oligarchies had accomplished no wonders; “all fixed, fast-frozen relations” were not “swept away”; “all that was solid” did not “melt into air,” “all that was holy” was certainly not “profaned.”44 Indeed, Latin America had demonstrated a remarkable capacity to absorb modern imports while its ways of life remained

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more or less untouched: “the automobile, the aeroplane, the radio, divorce, the 8-hour day, votes for women—none of this alters the essential fabric of our existence.”45 As Octavio Paz has pointed out, positivism in Latin America was not the ideology of a dynamic bourgeoisie, as in Europe, but rather of an inert landowning oligarchy that succeeded in sustaining its position of privilege until well into the twentieth century.46 Operating in unholy alliance with Social Darwinism, positivism was welcomed by Latin American elites primarily as a means of promoting limited evolutionary change from above in order to contain radical revolution from below: in short, it was a recipe for order rather than progress. Technocratic modernization was personified in Latin America by the caricatural big, bluff, cigar-brandishing U.S. male (Darío’s “buffalo with silver teeth”)47; it was scarcely surprising, then, that modernista poets recoiled not so much from the delicious horror of industrial urban life (as had Baudelaire) but, rather, from the vulgarity and solecism of a growing commercial bourgeoisie that aped Parisian fashions and affected what they fancied to be Parisian manners.48 Modernization in Latin America was also manifest in imported consumer goods, particularly but not exclusively for the elites, a commercialization that modernistas sought to counter with a parallel aesthetic world.49 The continuing debates about how to interpret modernismo echo the tensions and contradictions in and around this first artistic response to Latin America’s uneven modernization. For a long time, modernistas were perceived as nostalgic and antimodern, in content if not in form, but since the “Boom” writers of the 1960s claimed them as a source of inspiration, doubts have been raised about the conventional image of them as Eurocentric elitists who retreated from the unsatisfactory social realities of their countries into an artificial aristocratic world of derivative aestheticism. 50 Their preoccupations with the exquisite and the esoteric, the transient and the transcendental, the classical and the cosmopolitan, were how they “registered their experience of the modern,” argued Gerard Aching.51 If they cultivated a finely wrought stylistic perfection, then perhaps this was not because they sought to escape to a classical Arcadia, but rather because they set out to counter all the negative images of their part of the Americas, painting (on ivory) an idyllic world of harmonious nature, transcendent art, and virtuous politics to substantiate the claim that “Latin America is the future of the world!.”52 Their use of language—incorporating not only the notorious gallicismos, but also American Spanish and indigenous vocabulary—and their formal challenge to Spanish poetic tradition have been reinterpreted as

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the first manifestation of a distinctively American voice in Spanish literature,53 and the first instance of influence reversing direction to go from Spain’s former colonies back to the metropolis. It has increasingly been recognized that there were different tendencies in modernismo (which Paz characterized as Latin America’s true Romanticism)—just as there were in European Romanticism.54 In late-nineteenth-century Latin America, the early aesthetic reaction to positivism evolved into an ethical and in some cases a political response (study of the modernista prose works, in addition to the more famous poetry, went a long way toward substantiating this position).55 As Paz persuasively argued, modernismo drew upon a cosmopolitanism symbolized by Paris in order to discover other literatures and to reevaluate the indigenous past; it constituted a critique both of tradition (in sense of Hispanicism) and of a particular model of modernity, namely progress U.S.-style plus the debased positivism of Latin American elites.56 Furthermore, one way in which the modernistas were indisputably modern was in their concern for literary professionalism: they succeeded in establishing literature as an exceptional space, into which intellectuals could project a modernity that compensated for the inequalities of development in other social institutions. If it had not been for the modernistas’ self-proclaimed marginality, together with their defense of the autonomy of culture in the context of increasing market opportunities, it would have been harder for their successors to claim a role as independent social critics.57 Yet the visions of modernity of the intellectuals discussed in this book were crucially shaped by their own reactions against modernismo. From Rodó onward, there was a sense that in attacking the values of technocratic modernization and in raising the profile of art, culture, and spirit over materialism, the modernistas had made the first move toward elaborating an alternative—but that they had done so at the expense of excluding ethics. It was partly in response to the perceived detachment of the modernistas from political and economic realities that their successors concentrated on addressing the question of what a distinctively Latin American modernity could be. Beyond Ambivalence toward an Alternative Not all Latin American intellectuals, therefore, fulfilled the roles that have conventionally been ascribed to them of either uncritical champions of modernity or implacable critics of it. Recent work has revised the stereotypical interpretation of Latin American intellectuals being

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either for or against modernity, and my point of departure was Jorge Larraín’s book challenging the still widespread view that modernity and identity were irreconcilable in the region.58 He argued persuasively that the two ideas have actually been interdependent since at least the wars of independence, when resistance to continued rule from Spain was channeled through the imported ideologies of liberalism and republicanism. The resulting states-that-would-benations were founded on the emancipatory promise of Enlightenment thought: rational principles of government would erode obscurantism, injustice, and disorder. From a different angle, and focusing on narrative fiction, Carlos Alonso has argued that from the mid-nineteenth century onward Latin American texts reveal a profound ambivalence toward modernity, simultaneously affirming and subverting it, in a manifestation of every Latin American intellectual’s fear that the region could easily become “the negative object of modern Western knowledge,” thereby denying it subjectivity and agency.59 Catherine Davies has imaginatively applied Alonso’s ideas to novels by nineteenth-century women writers, whom she interprets as trying “to inscribe [themselves and other subalterns] into liberal discourse as subjects rather than objects of modernity.” As she perceptively suggested, their strategies were not limited to establishing the specificity of their own experiences of modernity, but went further to reinterpret the values of modernity, representing women as the agents of progress. Her crucial insight that while ambivalence may well have been the starting point of Latin American intellectuals’ response to modernization, it was by no means the end point, is what I build on in this book, which was written in the spirit of mapping out territory. The image in my mind’s eye is of an archipelago: each of these intellectuals emerges as an island out of a sea of ambivalence about modernization to propose a distinctively modern version of the region’s future.60 Only in the loosest sense do these islands constitute a unity, but they are related to each other and cannot be fully appreciated if looked at in isolation. Three Latin American Responses to Modernization Thus the premise of this book is that there have been not two types of response to modernization in Latin America, as is widely assumed, but three: (1) technocratic modernity—the promotion of an ideology of progress defined primarily in economic terms, driven by instrumental reason and technology, and implemented by a knowledge elite; (2) essentialism—the rejection of progress and the promotion of

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identities conceived as innate and unchanging; and (3) an alternative modernity—committed to reason and progress but seeking to realize the emancipatory political and cultural promise of modernity as well as its economic potential. Each of these has a different conception of the relationship between the traditional and the modern, with different referents for those terms. Technocratic Modernity This model was first fully elaborated by the Argentine Generation of 1837, particularly Juan Bautista Alberdi, who enshrined an opposition between technology and culture. Along with Sarmiento, Bartolomé Mitre, and others, he argued that modernization, in the form of industrialization and agricultural colonization by European immigrants, would eliminate the negative characteristics caused by the legacy of Spanish colonialism and racial mixing. This generation of scholar-statesmen was part of a region-wide reaction against the radical Liberal projects of the 1820s, which, it was argued, had failed so spectacularly because they were abstract blueprints that took no account of conditions in Latin America. In this context, Romanticism— with its emphasis on local particularities—was widely welcomed as a way of superseding an over-theoretical approach to nation building.61 Thus, although the Generation of 1837 subsequently became notorious for its advocacy of foreign models, especially the United States, France, and Britain, it is worth emphasizing that this founding model of a technocratic modernity for Latin America was represented by its exponents as the means by which Latin America would ultimately overtake Europe, assume full control of its own affairs, and fulfill its rightful role as the avatar of modernity. The role of the Americas in the civilization of the world, argued Alberdi, was to put European theories into practice in a way that Europe itself had failed to do (specifically, he meant French theories, as he made explicit).62 In science, the arts, and industry, Europe was worthy of emulation, he and others argued, but in politics it had little to offer. The men of this generation deemed law to be more important than technology in consolidating a modern state, and argued that laws had to be designed to fit local circumstances. They defined progress primarily in economic terms, but they also pursued a strong secondary theme of morality in the ideal of the virtuous citizen. This model of modernity, as formulated by the Generation of 1837, had a political component in republicanism, but its major shortcoming, as identified by the generations of the early twentieth century, was that it lacked any coherent vision

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of culture beyond despair about the colonial legacy and the mixed races of Latin America. As a result, although the Generation of 1837 did not actually advocate the mere imitation of external models, it was easy for their critics to represent them as having done so. This version of technocratic modernity shed its political ideals over time and came to focus increasingly on economic progress. By the 1930s, states were in a position to assume a directive role in development and to impose a technological blueprint on Latin American societies. The populist regimes of the mid-twentieth century were basically implementing this technocratic model, even though they mitigated its fundamental ruthlessness by making some limited concessions to social welfare, in response to the debates generated by attempts to elaborate a more radical alternative in the first three decades of twentieth century (see the section “A Distinctively Latin American Alternative”). The advent of military authoritarianism in the 1960s signaled the end of such concessions and a determination to enforce technologically driven modernization by means of state terror. In the wake of the failure of these regimes, the same model has been pursued by neoliberals, albeit using soft power, pursuing targeted initiatives to alleviate the effects on the poor, and paying more attention than previously to developing a political counterpart in democratic accountability. In all manifestations of this technocratic approach “tradition,” which was defined initially as the Spanish colonial legacy and subsequently also as the indigenous heritage, has been represented as an obstacle to modernity. The populists, who sought to neutralize the power of tradition by exploiting it for modernizing projects (e.g., through the nationalization of local forms of music and dance), had fundamentally the same agenda. Despite its lack of enduring economic success, technocratic modernity has been the dominant model of modernity in Latin America, shared by liberals, positivists, many on the orthodox Left, CEPAListas, bureaucratic authoritarians, and neoliberals. The recurrent descent into economic crisis helps to explain why Latin America has been far less successful than Europe or the United States at realizing the political hopes of modernity by marrying capitalist development with pluralist democracy; the Latin American compromise was populism. Essentialism Essentialist reactions against modernity, all of which imagine tradition to be a refuge from change, took shape in the late nineteenth century, largely in reaction against the perceived pro-foreign bias of the technocratic model. Examples include racial pessimists, some

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indigenistas and many hispanistas, cultural nationalists, among them the national character essayists, right-wing Catholic nationalists and, most recently, Felipe Quispe’s revanchist movement seeking the recreation of an “Aymara nation.” The most persistent, and probably most significant, of these is Catholic traditionalism, which has continued to enjoy a degree of social legitimacy, because, Manuel Garretón argues, “it advances a progressive socioeconomic perspective concerning the disenfranchised and at times is the only one to denounce the materialism and inequalities, and even the immorality, of the capitalist [ . . . ] economy”; nevertheless, he adds, it is “deeply reactionary [ . . . ] antirationalist [ . . . ] antifreedom.”63 A Distinctively Latin American Alternative Finally, there is the alternative modernity that is the subject of this book. This early-twentieth-century response to modernization was skeptical of the emphasis on economic progress of the Generation of 1837, particularly given that events of the late nineteenth century had made it clear that it would be far harder than Alberdi et al. had expected for Latin Americans to control the modernization process, because of imperialism. The newly self-identified intellectuals of the twentieth century were, however, far more optimistic than their forebears about the region’s culture.64 In consequence, they helped to bring about a shift in debates from the moral to the ethical, in the sense of Habermas’s distinction between the moral as what governs how the individual seeks validation from society “about the rightness of binding norms” and the ethical as what concerns the construction of identities, both individual and collective.65 Their premise was that radical authenticity could not be realized in isolation but was in practice dependent upon recognition by others. This led them to question the distinction between the traditional and the modern, arguing that things labeled traditional coexisted alongside things labeled modern and that the two interacted in a constant process of reformulation. Their ideas were not as sharply or as rigorously formulated in this early-twentieth-century version of an alternative modernity as they came to be in the 1990s within Latin American cultural studies,66 but the same questions and insights are there. How Was Latin America Modern? In the short and medium term, these intellectuals’ visions of how Latin America could become more humanely modern were eclipsed,

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first by the reactionary politics of the 1930s and then by the state-led populist, developmentalist models of the 1940s and 1950s. Over these three decades, governments of varied ideological hue expanded the state to promote top-down projects based on industrialization, infrastructure building, and the incorporation and/or repression of those social forces (a rapidly expanding industrial working class and an increasingly organized peasantry) that might have entertained any doubts about the desirability of making themselves modern in the image of the elites. In general, the masses were compelled to sacrifice the political rights promised by modernization in order to secure a meager, albeit rising, share in its material gains. From the 1960s onward, with the rise of military authoritarian regimes and Latin America’s decline into debt crisis, the poor saw their share of national incomes decline again, although after redemocratization in the 1980s there was some increase in opportunities to exercise political rights. In other words, many of the fears expressed in the work of earlytwentieth-century intellectuals were realized: authoritarianism did prevail—at least partly because of the effects of the Depression. That does not mean, however, that its ascendancy went unchallenged, or that there was a continuum from the frequent resort to authoritarian methods that happened both before 1880 and after 1930. Moreover, even though the project of an alternative modernity failed in the 1930s, it was kept alive over the next couple of decades—in reformist and revolutionary political parties, in universities, in literary/artistic circles and, almost certainly, although this is harder to document, in schools and labor unions—and it reemerged in force during the 1960s. It is not difficult to find the themes of secular spirituality, participatory solidarity, integration of the past with the present, and hospitality in the discourses and practices of many twentieth-century Latin American opposition movements that were clearly committed to modernizing projects, from the revolutions in Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua to the social movements that formed in the 1980s and 1990s, notably the Zapatistas and Evo Morales’s Movement toward Socialism (MAS). These themes feature in the speeches of Lula, Michelle Bachelet, and even Hugo Chávez. They can be found in the pedagogy of Paulo Freire, in Liberation Theology, in the arts and particularly in literature, where they are evident far beyond the famous literary “boom” novels of the 1960s. Indeed, the English term “magical realism” is an exoticizing travesty of the far more suggestive “real maravilloso americano,” which refers to a textual strategy dating back to the 1920s for inducing readers to explore the marvel that is Latin

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American reality. More recently, Zapatista calls for a society with a place for everybody; arguments about how universalism could function as a way of building solidarity among different cultures rather than as a means of imposing a Western norm; the debates at the World Social Forum, which first met in Brazil,67 about how to combine economic development with respect for the natural world and all peoples— all testify to the enduring significance of these themes. Thus although my four intellectuals (with the exception of Mariátegui) had relatively little direct political influence at the time, especially when compared to earlier generations of letrados,68 and are not much read nowadays outside universities, the ideas they articulated have remained central to continuing Latin American debates about alternatives to technocratic modernity. Their legacy of a potential alternative provided a crucial resource for the elaboration of political challenges to the capitalist rationalization imposed by authoritarian regimes from the 1960s to the 1980s. Their ideas matter, not least because they are a reminder that alternatives usually do exist in history, thereby acting as a check on the determinism that still tends to be a subtext of much of the academic literature on Latin America (once authoritarian, always authoritarian . . .).69 My position, then, is that it is futile to debate whether Latin American modernity is a sui generis experience or an inferior imitation of Western models. Latin American societies were historically founded (as much after independence as before) upon orientation toward exchange, both material and symbolic, with the outside world. To note that most Latin American projects of modernity have had an external referent does not necessarily imply that they were all derivative. In any case, the creation of the Latin American “other” was as complex and variegated as its creation of self: these intellectuals sought inspiration not only from Britain, France, and the United States, but also from Russia, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, China, Australia, and New Zealand. Experiences within Latin American were also crucial: Buenos Aires became a touchstone of modernity for the rest of Latin America; after the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, Mexico City became another major point of reference. All advocates of modernity in Latin America have made reference to external examples—as often as not, in order to illustrate what not to do; the important question is what their selection of examples reveals about their thinking about modernity. Imitation certainly took place, as did resistance, as did creative appropriation, but none of those frameworks is sufficient in itself to explain the reception of ideas, which is a creative process in itself. All four of the intellectuals I discuss have been accused of

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Eurocentrism, both by their contemporaries and their successors, but my view is that to categorize any Latin American intellectual as either an importer of modernity or a defender of tradition (whichever way the value-loading falls out) is to reinforce the postcolonial dilemma faced by all of them. Why should anyone be obliged to choose between “a universalist, destructive modernity and the conservation of an absolute cultural difference” (as Alain Touraine has argued),70 or, as one Argentine periodical of the 1920s put it, between an independent culture and “Swedish toothpaste, French towels and English soap”?71 What most of these intellectuals were grappling with was the question of how to reconcile the introduction of modernizing practices with the development of autonomous identities. That is at the root of the dilemma faced by all modern societies; the issues are just posed in starker terms in Latin America. Theories of modernity have tended to draw mainly on European and U.S. evidence, mentioning Latin America only in passing as a metaphor for apocalyptic failure. Although I have drawn extensively on the established theoretical literature on modernity, both to borrow from its analytical insights and to test its arguments by seeing how they play out in the context of Latin America, this book was written in the belief that Latin America’s specific experience is worthy of study not only in its own right but also as a rich source for developing a broader comparative understanding of the elusive concept of modernity. As Octavio Paz and Néstor García Canclini have pointed out, Latin America has experienced “an exuberant modernism” alongside a “deficient modernization,” both of which have been extensively analyzed by historians and scholars from cultural studies. As this book illustrates, the region has also produced a powerful critique of both.72

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Chapter 2

Mapping Out the Modern: Rodó’s Critique of Pure Reason

Rationality [in Latin America] is not the disenchantment of the world, but the intelligibility of its totality. Aníbal Quijano1

T

he Cartesian logic of understanding the world by breaking it down into ever smaller units of analysis has never had great appeal in Latin America, where there has been a recurrent bias toward a holistic approach. The idea that to be truly free, to be “fully human,” individuals must be “open to the four winds of the spirit,” not bound by any single mode of apprehending reality, can be found in many earlytwentieth-century Latin American texts.2 Generous, expansive, symphonic natures have long compelled Latin American admiration, the multitudes they were thought to contain eclipsing any contradictions. It is perhaps no coincidence that in Latin America there has not been the radical rejection of reason that occurred in Europe: Latin Americans saw Goethe and Tolstoy as inspirational, but not Wagner or Nietzsche; famously, they preferred Sartre to Camus. Maybe because rationality had never been raised so high, correspondingly there was no need to bring it so low. Instead, the haunting themes of twentieth-century Latin American discourse have been the integration of theory and practice; the reconciliation of reason and spirit; the claim that reason does not necessarily exclude passion or imagination or intuition; and the view that reason is one source among others rather the fount of all knowledge. It is not just instrumental reason that was deemed to be inadequate, but any conception of reason as cut off from experience of life. In his famous essay of 1925 proclaiming that Latin American peoples would become The Cosmic Race

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through the synthesizing energies of mestizaje, José Vasconcelos outlined an approach to methodology that was widely shared in Latin America at the time: Only a leap of the spirit, nourished with facts, can give us a vision that will lift us above the micro-ideology of the specialist. Then we can fathom events as a whole in order to discover a direction, a rhythm and a purpose in them. Precisely there, where the analyst discovers nothing, the synthesizer and the creator are enlightened. Let us, then, attempt explanations, not with the imagination of a novelist, but with an intuition supported by the facts of history and science.3

The Latin American critique of pure reason has played itself out in many fields in Latin America: in literature (the “marvellous real”) and criticism (the “critical closeness” of Carlos Monsiváis); in philosophy, particularly in the idea that critique can be a basis for liberation and solidarity;4 in Liberation Theology, which sought to accommodate social science and theology; in educational theory, for example, Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of consciousness-raising; and in Che Guevara’s concept of the new man. In all these areas, reason was conceived as more encompassing and less absolute than instrumental reason. This rethinking of the role of reason is central to the alternative modernity sketched out in this book. It occurs in the work of all four intellectuals discussed, but the process began with the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917), whose contribution to the collective endeavor of mapping out the territory of the modern in Latin America is hard to overstate. In 1909 Rodó was hailed as “the thinker of our new times,” by no less an authority than the internationally renowned poet Rubén Darío, speaking from the lofty heights of his own exalted position as the first modernista.5 Darío’s endorsement may surprise many readers today, who—if they have heard of Rodó at all—are likely to think of him as a conservative throw-back to the nineteenth century rather than as a modern interpreter of the twentieth century. He certainly was not charismatic, like Darío or Martí, and Uruguay was not one of the major intellectual centers of the region, but even so he became, by common consent, “the most representative writer” in Latin America during the early twentieth century.6 The essay that made him famous, Ariel (1900), was referred to as the bible and conscience of Latin America for at least three decades, and it is still read today as a foundational text in the history of Latin American culture. He was the first Latin American writer to achieve public acclaim on intellectual grounds alone: large crowds accompanied his funeral procession

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through the streets of Montevideo, and intellectuals and statesmen of varying political views crossed the continent to pay homage to him as the founder of a “modern literature of ideas.” 7 During the 1940s, however, when populist politics and cultural nationalism were in the ascendant throughout the region, Rodó’s reputation as a modern thinker was comprehensively revised. He was then attacked as a dilettante who had been out of touch with Latin American realities, dedicated to a cult of the past, hostile to scientific progress, and compromised by an aristocratic ideal of the intellectual.8 Some recent work has redrawn this conventional portrait, but the assumption that Rodó was reactionary and antimodern remains widely held today,9 in stark contrast with his contemporaries’ view of him as “profoundly reformist and eminently modern.”10 In accounting for the discrepancy between these two views of Rodó’s response to modernity, there is more at stake than rescuing him from the condescension of posterity. The inconsistency is highly revealing in itself, and provides the starting point for my argument in this chapter, which is that Rodó was a transitional figure, whose life and work are best approached as a site of the ambivalence about modernity that was widely felt in Latin America during the early twentieth century. What Rodó meant to his contemporaries can be illustrated by their reception of his work, especially Ariel,11 which came to symbolize all the hopes for change invested in a new century.12 As the first clear articulation of a challenge to the positivism that had dominated intellectual and political life in Uruguay and most of Latin America during the late nineteenth century, Ariel represented a cultural watershed, “far more [so] than Martí [ . . . ] or even Darío.”13 In its appropriation of the symbolism of The Tempest (Ariel, the spirit; Caliban, the savage son of a witch; and Prospero, the sorcerer) to advocate an idealist renaissance led by Latin America, the essay offered a means of countering both the ascendancy of materialist values and—it is often forgotten—also the “decadent exoticism” of Darío’s modernismo.14 The stereotypes of the United States in Ariel have been much criticized, but it is worth recalling that in the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, with U.S. interventionism on the rise, they seemed only too plausible. Aggressive businessmen were the only Americans that most Latin Americans encountered, U.S. ambassadors to the region tended to be third-rate, and idealistic intellectuals were very rare visitors indeed.15 Ariel resonated so powerfully, however, not only because it provided a compelling allegorical framework for anti-imperialism, but

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also—even more importantly—because it expressed a serene confidence in Latin America’s capacity to generate an alternative set of values. In celebrating the Latinity of the region, and identifying it as the repository of classical humanist ideals that had supposedly been corrupted in Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world, Ariel became emblematic of an affirmative “New-Worldism.” Young intellectuals from Argentina to Mexico proclaimed themselves Arielistas, proudly championing the alleged superiority of Latin America’s “spiritual” culture over the vulgar—Calibanesque—commercialism and pragmatism they had come to associate with the United States. Rodó’s inspiring image of Latin America’s potential offered a powerful counterweight to the endemic racial pessimism caused by adherence to Social Darwinism—Latin America was not “sick” but just “young,” he maintained—16 to the extent that there were Arielistas even in some indigenous circles.17 The Arielista strategy for selective modernization18 played an acknowledged part in Vasconcelos’s theory of the cosmic race; in Argentine Socialist Manuel Ugarte’s development of a political (rather than cultural) anti-imperialism; in the University Reform Movement of 1918 and in the subsequent political radicalization of the student community that led to the foundation of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APR A) and the Cuban Communist Party. And it is probably true that “many thundering Latin American political leaders of recent decades have unknowingly derived nourishment from Rodó’s slim volume of 1900, which, one suspects, few have ever heard of and [even] fewer have read.”19 The extent of Ariel’s impact, however, can only be fully explained by thinking in terms of form as well as content. The very fact that the essay was published as a book, rather than as a contribution to a newspaper or periodical, was in itself a sign that a modern cultural sphere was emerging.20 In enacting the idea, proposed by Martí, that literature (including the essay as well as poetry and fiction) could function as an alternative source of disinterested knowledge, Rodó’s text inspired many Latin American intellectuals who were disillusioned with the debased versions of positivism that had taken hold in ruling circles and given science a bad name. In promoting the possibility of knowledge that was both autonomous and authentic, Ariel offered Latin American intellectuals a gift they found invaluable: hope. Alfonso Reyes, from the next generation, described how Rodó’s “optimism drawn from life” had lit up “the bleak and barren intellectual climate” at the beginning of the twentieth century when European skepticism held sway and “reason had yet to recover from its wounds.”21 Even young intellectuals who were far more politically radical than

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Rodó, such as José Carlos Mariátegui and Julio Antonio Mella (founders of communist parties in Peru and Cuba, respectively), acknowledged themselves to have been inspired by his confidence in Latin America’s future and his faith in the transformative power of culture. Ariel’s tone strikes many readers today, attuned as they are to the dilemmas of postcolonial writers struggling to stake a claim to authority, as “defensive,”22 but for most of Rodó’s contemporaries his language struck a sublime note. It was no coincidence that so many of the reviews dwelt upon “the inimitable artistry” of his language, which had “enriched our Castilian tongue with a new voice,” creating “sounds never previously heard” and “new rhythms” in Spanish prose, 23 just as Darío had been acclaimed for doing in verse. Many of Rodó’s contemporaries felt that “his word was our word,” and this discovery of a distinctive voice was explicitly linked by them to the capacity of Latin American countries to act effectively in the world as a force for good.24 As is illustrated in this chapter, Rodó’s remarkably broad appeal lay not in his ideas about democracy or even about the United States but in his use of language and form to explore the potential for a distinctively modern Latin American culture. Critics of Rodó have focused on the elitist implications of his Latin model of American identity, which ignored not only the region’s indigenous cultures but also its Catholic and baroque inheritances. Some of these criticisms were voiced at the time, although, ironically enough, more often by conservatives or liberals than by those on the Left, who tended to welcome his idealism even if they did not accept his decision to channel it through classical values.25 Later critics have emphasized that Prospero’s speech, which occupied almost the entire essay, with only a very brief foreword and afterword in authorial voice, expressed fears that democracy would result in mediocrity, that the cultural integrity of the individual would be compromised by the multitude, and that popular suffrage would inevitably lead to demagoguery until public education became more widespread. It is problematic, of course, to assume that the voice of Prospero simply was the voice of Rodó, thereby ignoring the fictional status of the work, but that is what most readers have done and, indeed, what Rodó himself encouraged people to do,26 so that such an assumption became built into the history of Ariel’s reception. The speech also rehearsed the arguments that immigration would undermine the fragile consciousness of collective identity emerging in Latin America, and that to encourage the settlement of “phalanxes of ferocious Prudhommes” would exacerbate existing tendencies toward anarchy and vulgarity in the region.27 Moreover, Prospero, and by implication Ariel, the new spirit of Latin America,

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spoke only in Spanish: there was no reference in Ariel to the contribution, actual or potential, of indigenous languages and cultures to the development of an American identity that, for Rodó, remained exclusively “Latin.” There are various passages from later works that his defenders have cited, with some justification, as proof of his social concern for the indigenous peoples. However, as Gordon Brotherston has persuasively argued, none of them refutes the fundamental point that Rodó’s texts placed the indigenous outside the region’s “culture,” a term that he habitually used to refer to the cultural products of the national elites.28 Furthermore, his views on women—whom he depicted in unvaryingly moralizing terms as repositories of purity and serenity—are wholly irredeemable from any feminist standpoint.29 Michael Aronna’s reading of Ariel is full of insights about the exclusive masculinity of Rodó’s vision of cultural regeneration, in which the ancient Greek ephebe (the youthful citizen-warrior) is represented as the ideal agent of transformation.30 In short, there is plenty of evidence, especially in Ariel, that Rodó shared the caution conventional to liberals of his era—bounded by race, gender, and class—about how far it was safe in practice to extend theoretically universal rights. However, it does not follow from Rodó’s reluctance to embrace a politically radical version of modernity that he rejected all things modern in favor of a sterile retreat into the past. In his early critique of Darío, he explicitly identified himself with new currents of thought: “I too am a modernista; I belong wholeheartedly to the great reaction that gives character and meaning to the evolution of thought at the close of this century.”31 By “the great reaction” he referred to a prevailing sense that “literary naturalism and philosophical positivism” were in themselves inadequate, and had to be transformed into “higher conceptions” of modernity.32 Throughout his life Rodó maintained a commitment to the Enlightenment ideals of human progress through the accumulation of scientific knowledge and the accountability of authority, as stated in Ariel: “Democracy and science are . . . the two irreplaceable supports upon which our civilization rests.”33 While acknowledging that his temperament tended toward the nostalgic, he reiterated, even in his later years, a commitment to remaining open to the possibilities of modern life. Intellectually, if perhaps not always instinctively, Rodó saw the modern world as offering more scope for making connections and broadening horizons than had been possible in the past: “Constant and easy communication, interchange of ideas, religious tolerance, cosmopolitan curiosity, the telegraph wire, the steamship, have turned the world, which for our grandparents was divided into national souls, . . . into a vast moral

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organism which involves us in a network of continuously changing requests.”34 Although Marxism held no appeal for Rodó (who saw it as too materialist and too committed to egalitarianism), his evocation of modernity is intriguingly close to a passage in the unequivocally pro-modern Communist Manifesto, which described “intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations [ . . . ] in place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency”— although it is impossible to say whether or not the echo was conscious.35 Either way, Rodó was certainly no radical, either politically or culturally. But to dismiss him as wholly reactionary is to miss much evidence of great interest to the historian of modernity. His concern about how “peoples that were still forming and shaping their national entity” (pueblos que aún forman y modelan su entidad nacional) could draw inspiration from external models whilst preserving their distinctiveness (su genio personal),36 was widely shared among his Latin American contemporaries, as was his sense of disgust at the injustice of the capitalist order: In our times, even those of us who are not socialists or anarchists or anything of the kind . . . more or less consciously carry around in our souls a fund of protest, of discontent, of inability to adapt to so much brutal injustice, so much hypocritical lying, so much exaltation of hateful vulgarity as is woven into the warp of the social order transmitted to the century just beginning.37

In expressing anxiety about the form that modernity would take in economically dependent Latin America, where capitalism tended to be at its most brutal, Rodó articulated a problem that has continued to be at the center of Latin American debates about the modern condition. The contemporary impact—and the enduring interest—of his views on modernity lie precisely in their ambivalence, which emerges in far sharper relief if we look beyond his uncritical presentation of stereotypes of both Latin America and the United States in parts of Ariel. What follows draws on a wide range of his work, including essays, newspaper articles, reviews, and speeches, together with his most ambitious text, an assemblage of philosophical reflections entitled Motivos de Proteo (1909), which gradually came to be regarded as an important book in Rodó’s lifetime, even though it was never as successful as Ariel and its reputation has not endured.38 This body of work as a whole will be analyzed as the site of a series of cultural tensions that were in play during the early twentieth century in Latin America, tensions symptomatic of a modernization process that was generating economic growth without bringing either progressive

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politics or general prosperity. What can be traced through Rodó’s texts, I suggest, is a mapping out of the ground upon which a Latin American version of modernity could potentially be conceived, and a testing out of discursive strategies by which it could plausibly be expressed. First, let us explore the conditions of production in which he operated. Rodó’s Experiences of the Modern Rodó’s life story was in itself illustrative of the uneven impact of modernization in early-twentieth-century Uruguay. For all his cosmopolitan interests, he spent virtually his entire life in Montevideo, rarely going outside the city. Conservative in dress and manner, diffident in public, he lived quietly, apparently tempted by wine, but not by women or song. He was unable to take personal advantage of new opportunities for travel (largely because of financial constraints) until he left for Europe in 1916, on a long-anticipated trip that was cut short by his death the following year. Previously, he had been only to Buenos Aires, where he met Darío in late 1897, and to Santiago de Chile, where he attended the independence centenary celebrations in 1910. Unlike many Latin American intellectuals of this period, he never saw either Paris or New York. Nevertheless, by virtue of staying in Montevideo Rodó was witness to one of the fastest modernization processes in the world. The city expanded remarkably rapidly during this period, some measure of which is given by census data: while in 1884, there were 91,247 “Uruguayans” and 72,781 “immigrants” recorded, totaling 164,028 people;39 by 1900 the national population had increased more than fivefold to 936,000, the majority of whom were immigrants who settled in the capital. In 1915, with well over half its population living in urban areas (57.4 percent), Uruguay was almost as urbanized as the United States (58.5 percent) and Germany (64 percent), and more so than France (53 percent) or Russia (23 percent).40 Major port facilities were built to ship out the products of the meat-processing industry stimulated by the development of commercial ranching and symbolized by the brand name of Fray Bentos. An active labor movement quickly developed from its beginnings among printing workers in 1865, and the political elite was increasingly obliged to contend with pressures for reform from below. Over the course of Rodó’s lifetime, Montevideo’s environment was transformed by the construction of what were deemed to be the requisites of modern urban life: broad tree-lined streets and plazas, tramways, shops—including bookshops, leisure spaces (parks and gardens,

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sports centers, beach resorts), and entertainment venues. A landmark in the process of modernization was the opening, in 1909, of Uruguay’s first advertising agency. This quintessentially modern enterprise, in addition to emblazoning the trams with bright posters lauding the desirability of all manner of modern consumer goods, established itself as the annalist of the nation’s modernity by publishing the Almanaque Guía El Siglo, a vast compendium of commercial and cultural information, including the first street-plan of Montevideo.41 It was the trams—advancing “proudly across the city” as avatars of civilization—that did the most to change the atmosphere of the city from a quiet place where people could stroll in stately leisure to a more boisterous but also a more dynamic and exciting environment.42 By 1925, when Uruguay celebrated the centenary of its independence, Montevideo was confidently being described in official discourse as “an essentially modern and comfortable city,”43 with little visible evidence of its colonial past, much of which had literally been knocked down and cleared away. A key political consequence of urbanization was that by 1880 the landowners had lost control of the institutions of government, although they retained influence over economic policy, a situation that caused a high level of instability. For most of Rodó’s childhood, when he was aged five to fifteen, Uruguay was ruled by the military (1876–1886). He vividly recalled “the times when a battalion marching through the public streets [ . . . ] caused the hearts of the citizens to beat faster with anxiety.”44 Newly professionalized by their experience of supporting Argentina and Brazil in the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay (1865–1870), the Uruguayan military saw themselves as a modernizing force and began a process of state building, establishing property rights and secure conditions for British investments along with a degree of protection for new industries—in short, a utilitarian modernization program.45 Rodó’s lifetime spanned a period of transition from armed politics to electoral politics. Although Uruguay became famous for having consolidated one of the earliest democratic welfare states in the world under President José Batlle y Ordóñez (1903–1907 and 1911–1915),46 it is worth recalling that the immediately preceding period was turbulent and violent, with two presidential assassinations (1886 and 1897) and two civil wars (1897 and 1904). There was virtually perpetual warfare out in the rural areas, at least until the spread of wire fencing in the 1870s and 1880s enabled landowners to secure their property rights without resorting to force of arms. It is also the case that although Uruguay’s political parties had deeper roots in the population than was customary in most Latin

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American countries at that time, their capacity to function in a modern way as representatives of their supporters was severely compromised by their strong orientation toward the developing state structure.47 Uruguay’s two main parties, the Colorados and the Blancos, which had effectively carved up the country between them through a series of pacts begun in 1872, served mainly as vehicles for containing popular unrest, especially in the countryside. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Colorados, who had a long history of successfully accommodating themselves to changing political configurations, had defined themselves as the party of the immigrants (by which they meant the party of liberal Italians, not conservative Spaniards, most of whom became Blanco supporters). The Blancos, in contrast, proclaimed themselves to be the nationalist party, by which they meant the bearers of Uruguay’s patrician tradition. The Colorados tended to agitate for socioeconomic modernization; the Blancos tended to be against it. But both parties were personalist, populist, and factionalized, and they remained so despite all Batlle’s improving rhetoric about the importance of representative political parties and universal suffrage to the functioning of a modern state. Crucially, however, they both functioned as comparatively effective vehicles for integrating immigrants into Uruguayan political culture (the contrast has been drawn with Argentina, where a divide between creoles and immigrants persisted for far longer).48 Integration may also have been facilitated by the fact that immigration to Uruguay started earlier than to the other major South American destinations of Argentina and Brazil. Rodó’s own parentage was a product of these cumulative historical circumstances: his Catalan father came to Uruguay as a child in one of the early waves of immigration and married the daughter of a long-established, wealthy creole family. The late nineteenth century was a period of secularization in Uruguay, as in most other Latin American countries: civil marriage was made obligatory in 1885 and the Church formally separated from the state by the Constitution implemented in 1919. Uruguay had officially been a Catholic country since 1830, but the Church was less powerful than in many other Latin American republics, the main struggle for influence taking place in education. A major reform designed to turn schools into “factories of citizens” was enacted by leading educationalist José Pedro Varela in 1877,49 establishing free, compulsory, and lay education, which enabled Rodó to attend the country’s first secular school. At the University, the positivist rector Alfredo Vásquez Acevedo (1880–1882 and 1885–1899) reformed the entire syllabus in a drive to root out scholasticism. In the 1908

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national census, 25 percent of Uruguayans declared themselves to be liberal (compared to 5 percent in 1889), while the number of selfdeclared Catholics had fallen from 83 to 63 percent.50 Christian thought by no means disappeared from the scene, however. The Catholic Club was a major public presence, largely through its periodical El Bien Público (The Public Good). Another nucleus of Christian thinkers was the Civic Union. In their very nomenclature both of these groups staked their claim to a place for Catholic thinking in the modern world. Krausism, a neo-Kantian attempt to reconcile recognition of a divinity with commitment to liberal, progressive ideas,51 was also influential, largely through its leading Uruguayan proponent Prudencio Vásquez y Vega. In the Ateneo (Athenaeum), a cultural center established during the 1870s to provide an alternative intellectual forum to the university, rationalist spiritualism was dominant, especially in its journal La Razón (Reason), which was founded with the specific purpose of combating Catholicism.52 In this period of increasing state intervention in society, a close connection developed between philosophical and political debates; the idealism that was beginning to emerge in reaction against positivism was not merely contemplative, but aspired to be a philosophy of action. Positivists and idealists alike were preoccupied by the crucial issue of how to banish corruption and despotism from public life. Meanwhile, the state carried on inventing the nation, establishing independence hero Artigas as the founding father and Romantic poet Juan Zorrilla de San Martín as the popular bard. Thus, although Uruguay became a unique example in Latin America of a “modern” welfare state during the early twentieth century, historians have convincingly argued that mass democracy was institutionalized at the cost of preserving fundamentally authoritarian methods of conflict resolution. This tendency became all too manifest when President Batlle tried to force through a constitutional amendment to establish a plural executive (known as the colegiado), which was in effect designed to ensure indefinite Colorado control. Rodó, who had been involved in the Colorado Party since his youth, served three terms as a Colorado deputy (1902–1905, 1908–1911, and 1911–1914) and supported many of Batlle’s early policies, was nevertheless vehemently opposed to the colegiado.53 Batlle’s justification for the maneuver was that he was trying to protect his social reforms, reduce the likelihood of dictatorship, put a stop to corruption, and neutralize conflict among political elites. His opponents, led by Rodó, countered that government by clique had to be avoided at all costs, processes had to be modernized as well as policies, the

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legislature was the place for pluralism, not the executive, and proportional representation should be introduced to open up the polity to new interests. The unspoken issue at the heart of their dispute was the relationship between the state and civil society: Batlle was committed to a powerful role for the state as a necessary counterweight to vested interests, whereas Rodó was more concerned to defend liberal freedoms of expression, association, and public accountability. Their clash is telling about the complexities of these early stages of modernization in Latin America and the difficulties entailed in classifying anybody as a modernizer or a traditionalist, a reformer or a reactionary. In the event, a compromise solution was found for the Constitution of 1919, which combined a directly elected president with a National Council of administration elected by proportional representation. In the longer run, Rodó’s ideas won out over Batlle’s: the Constitution of 1934 abolished the Council, but extended the practice of proportional representation. Although Rodó frequently lamented the time taken up by politics, he nevertheless committed himself to it, maintaining that to do otherwise was effectively to turn his back on national life.54 Such conditions were not particularly conducive to creativity, as he often patiently tried to explain in letters to more privileged intellectuals in Spain, who politely hinted at puzzlement as to why he did not publish more.55 Nevertheless, the possibility of earning a living through intellectual production did exist for Rodó’s generation, as it had not done for their predecessors. Intellectuals lost a certain degree of social status at this time, and the organizers of literary events found they had to compete for funding with more popular cultural activities, including—to the dismay of some—football. A few writers rather missed the ripple of polite applause from a small, select audience, seated formally in a lofty salon, that had been the expectation of earlier generations,56 but the majority welcomed the chance to display their talents in a wider public arena. An expansion of the press, both in Montevideo and across the water in Buenos Aires, made journalism a steady source of income.57 Such opportunities were crucial to Rodó, whose family was not sufficiently monied to afford him leisure to pursue scholarship, at least not after the death of his businessman father in 1885. It was the success of his first essay, “El que vendrá” (The Coming One), in 1896, that enabled him to leave his job as a bank clerk, and to earn his living thereafter by a combination of journalism and teaching literature at the University, fitted in around his work in Congress (which in itself was relatively well paid).58 A national publishing industry was also beginning to develop—Rodó himself had three books published

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during his lifetime—although these companies only had limited capacities to distribute their products commercially, as is all too clear from Rodó’s correspondence. Until the better-resourced Spanish company, Editorial Sempere of Valencia, produced an edition of Ariel, in 1908, he was mostly sending the book out himself, although such informal routes evidently worked fairly well.59 Thus, public spaces were opening up, both literally and metaphorically, in fin-de-siècle Montevideo sufficient to give writers an arena in which to operate and a base from which to sustain a claim to commentate on the affairs of the nation. The introduction of electric lighting was symbolic of the extent to which urban cultural life was changing, as vividly recalled by one participant: As soon as night fell, at that twilight hour when, among a mass of crisscrossing wires, on every street corner the arc lamps would light up in the shops—bookshops, wholesale merchants, chemists, patisseries— groups of friends began to gather. [ . . . ] like Madrid, Montevideo was a city of circles and discussion groups. The people loved to talk [ . . . ].60

Intellectual debate moved out of the positivist-dominated University of Montevideo, and into the newly established cafés, bookshops, and editorial offices of ephemeral revistas. Cafés were particularly important centers, for it was in conversations there that people decoded the newspapers, which were prone to self-censorship even when official censorship was not in place. It was said that if the newspaper was public life in print, then the café was public life in everyday conversation.61 There were four or five key establishments, from the famous Café Polo Bamba, frequented by fashionable young literati committed to the cult of épater le bourgeois, to the more intellectually serious Librería Barreiro y Ramos, where law, philosophy, and politics were formally discussed, to the Café Yrigoyen, where self-styled young revolutionaries of the spirit, most of whom became socialists, engaged in passionate political argument. Rodó himself, wary of both fashion and fervor, sat quietly by a window at the Confitería of the Jockey Club, surrounded by a few close friends.62 Overall, at least in the center of Montevideo, the atmosphere was eclectic, incoherent, intoxicating.63 Nor was it confined to the upper sectors of society: there was a sufficient level of cultural awareness amongst workers for the death of Zola to be deemed worthy of commemoration in the immigrant-dominated labor movement.64 Rodó’s own generation, known as the Generation of 1900, took the initiative in trying to establish new spaces for intellectual concerns,

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as distinct from either overtly political or purely literary ones. A leading example was the Revista Nacional de Literatura y Ciencias Sociales (National Review of Literature and Social Sciences) (1895–1897), which aimed to reflect “the cerebral life of the new generations.”65 In pursuit of this objective, the journal—like others throughout Latin America at the time—published translated extracts from the works of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and D’Annunzio, among others, but—more significantly and unusually—it devoted most of its space to covering the works of Latin American writers. Indeed, Rodó’s own review articles were early evidence of his view that modernity had to be created in dialectical relationship to local tradition: he deliberately eschewed “novelties from Paris” in favor of Latin American works.66 The journal also made a practice of including contributions from members of the previous generation as well as from young writers, thereby seeking to play the integrating role that came to be so characteristic of Rodó’s approach to intellectual life. Many of the new generation, including Rodó, were autodidacts, in contrast to the previous generation of doctores.67 This fact indicated that although reform of the Uruguayan public education sector had been initiated—earlier than in most other Latin American countries—it had not yet been fully implemented. The University—which he attended before scholasticism had been decisively defeated—clearly failed to inspire him, and he abandoned his undergraduate studies after only a short time. He, therefore, had little formal training in philosophy, or indeed in any academic discipline, and acquired his knowledge of literature, philosophy, and history through libraries, café society, and an international correspondence, which he pursued assiduously. Through these none too easy means, he became well acquainted with Latin American cultural developments and relatively well versed in recent European currents of thought, especially (like many of his Latin American contemporaries) debates in France. Far more reading matter was directly available to Rodó’s generation than to his predecessors, largely because of the rise of Spanish and French publishing houses seeking new markets in Latin America. A serendipitous assortment of European works found their way to Montevideo’s bookshops, where Romantic and positivist works were still to be found alongside the more glamorous products of fin-de-siècle European thought. The extensive knowledge that scholars have accumulated about what Rodó actually read gives a good indication of the range of material available to Latin American intellectuals in the late nineteenth century.68 He started out with the Spanish classics, especially Cervantes,

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which he found in his father’s library, where he also read the work of the Argentine Generation of 1837, the first elaborators of a technocratic model of modernity for Latin America. Among other Latin American writers, he was well acquainted with the works of Darío, Montalvo, and Bolívar, upon all of whom he wrote extended essays, and he also had plans to write about Martí. From his correspondence, it is evident that he exchanged material with a wide range of his Latin American and Spanish contemporaries, including the Generation of 1898. It is safe to assume that he regularly read most Uruguayan and Argentine periodicals, which would have introduced him to socialist and anarchist thought. Contemporary French philosophers were crucial sounding boards: Renan, Taine, Guyau (who was highly influential in Uruguay at the time), Fouillée, and, above all, Bergson, whose élan vital acquired virtually cult status in Latin America during the early twentieth century. Hugo—poet and tribune—was a key role model for Rodó, although it seems to have been Goethe whom he saw as his ideal intellectual. Of the premodern canon, he frequently cited Plato, Dante, Montaigne, and Shakespeare. Historians were more important to him than has always been recognized, especially Michelet, Carlyle, and Macaulay. Among the modern philosophers Rodó often mentioned Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; among the poets, Byron, Schiller, and Baudelaire; among the novelists, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Of the positivist thinkers, Spencer was far better known in Uruguay than Comte; and Rodó gleaned his understanding of scientific evolution from Lamarck rather than Darwin. Few women writers caught his attention: apart from a couple of Latin Americans, he mentioned in passing only George Eliot, George Sand, and Madame de Stae¨ l. His encounters with European and U.S. modernisms seem to have been highly erratic: he discussed Ibsen but not Strindberg or Shaw; Zola but not Proust or Joyce; Emerson but not Whitman; Verlaine but not Rimbaud; D’Annunzio but not Marinetti; Wagner but not Schoenberg. He probably did not come across any of Weber’s writing, of which relatively little was published, let alone translated, during Rodó’s lifetime. Notably, however, he made no reference at all to the works of Marx, Engels, or Freud, some of which would have been available to him, at least in the form of extracts. Rodó finally embarked for Europe, after several postponements of a much-anticipated trip, in July 1916, recording his experiences in articles sent to the leading Argentine journal Caras y caretas.69 On the voyage to Lisbon, he received a fleeting impression of Brazil, when the ship docked briefly in Rio de Janeiro, Bahía, and Recife. He recorded the natural splendor of Rio’s magnificent bay surrounded by

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mountains and forests as an image of the historic promise of the Americas, evoking “the architectonic idea of a world opening up, of a continent condensing its infinitude and its character into one aspect that the eyes can take in all at once.”70 On arrival in Europe, he passed rapidly through Lisbon, Madrid, and Barcelona toward his main destination, Italy, where he spent over seven months touring. Rodó went to Europe, he declared, less to be dazzled by trophies of modernity than to observe the effects of a long history; he was, after all, he noted wryly, from “the newest part of America” and had plenty of opportunities back home to experience modernization.71 He was quite capable of gently satirizing his own attitudes in this respect: for example, he recounted a revealing moment in Pisa, in 1916, when he emerged into the Renaissance splendor of one of the grand piazzas only to see a whole host of people, including women, determinedly ploughing across it on bicycles; “I don’t really mind,” he mused, adding wistfully that he could not help wishing there had been horses and carriages instead.72 But his approach to historic European cities went beyond nostalgia. He was interested not so much in the relics of the past—the monuments, the splendid buildings or the ruins (although he went to see them, like any other visitor)—but rather in how the spirit of the past was integrated into the present. Barcelona— his father’s native city—was characterized, in his view, by a heady blend of energy, calculation, and imagination, which demonstrated the falsity of the Romantic idea that commercial success was incompatible with creative expression. Moreover, this artistic bent was by no means limited to an elite minority: noting Barcelona’s famous workers’ choral societies, Rodó claimed that the city lived “by the spontaneous vocation of the popular genius.” 73 He did not even baulk too much at Gaudí’s “ultramodern” fairy-tale cathedral, Sagrada Familia, which would have been less than half-built when he saw it (notoriously, it remains an unfinished project to this day).74 In Italy, his interests were not confined to the standard ancient sites. Indeed, he was fascinated by the political organization of modern Italy, above all the combination of diversity in unity, and saw it as a model for a substantive federalism that Latin American countries might well emulate. He praised the variety, vivacity, and harmony of Italian towns and cities that all, in his eyes, had their own distinctive character and spirit.75 The fact that Italy was at war was hardly noticeable in these places, apart from the lack of street lighting at night, he observed, attributing this to the people’s capacity to sustain hope. Civil war in Montevideo had created a far more depressing atmosphere, he claimed.76 The main thing that impressed him about

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Rome was that it offered “a perennial lesson in active, affirmative tolerance, in serenity and amplitude.”77 In Sicily he expressed surprise at how far the society was removed from his clichéd expectations of histrionics and vendettas, and was especially struck by the number of well-stocked bookshops.78 In both Naples and Palermo he mingled contentedly with the bustling crowds, showing none of the horror of the masses that many intellectuals of that era affected and, indeed, apparently felt. He had originally planned to spend more time in Spain before returning home, and also to visit Paris, where a celebration in his honor had been organized, but by the time he reached Milan in November 1916, he was already visibly ill, and he died five months later in Palermo, at a legendary modernist site, the Hôtel des Palmes, where Wagner wrote the last act of Parsifal. Rodó’s Approach to Modernity: Marking Out the Territory From the vantage point of Montevideo, Rodó observed European fin-de-siècle reactions against positivism and materialism with deep disquiet. In his first successful essay, “El que vendrá” (1896), noting that his Uruguayan contemporaries were also in a state of profound uncertainty, he sought to distinguish their experience of doubt from that of (by implication, European) skeptics, experimentalists, or Romantics: In us, doubt is neither indulgence nor voluptuousness of thought, like that of the sceptic who finds curious delectation in doubt [ . . . ]; nor is it an austere, cold and certain attitude, as in the experimentalists; it is not even an impulse of desperation and pride, as in the great rebels of Romanticism. In us, Doubt [sic] is an eager hopefulness; a feeling of nostalgia mixed with regrets, with longings, with fears; a vague sense of unease that for the most part comes from that yearning to believe which is almost in itself belief . . .79

What preoccupied him about contemporary European expressions of doubt was their abdication of social responsibility. In his view, proponents of each of these “-isms” were self-indulgent in their various ways: skeptics took refuge in the perverse pleasure of remorseless logic, experimentalists and positivists in the comforting certainty of abstraction, Romantics in the license arising from despair. All ultimately embraced their loss of faith in reason, and were too busy relishing the perceived compensations to think about what might have been lost. Many of Rodó’s acquaintances in Montevideo—especially the flamboyant Café

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Polo Bamba crowd—made a fetish out of decadence, and he feared the social and cultural consequences of such ideas becoming widespread there. Thus, the main issue over which Rodó differed from his European sources was the role of reason, which he wanted to retain as a guide, rather than abandoning it altogether in favor of other sources of knowledge such as experience, intuition, imagination, or will. Even though he maintained that reason in itself was insufficient to act as a unifying social principle, nonetheless it was “the rational life,” dedicated to the fulfillment of human nature in all its aspects, that he set up as the antithesis of “the utilitarian conception” of life, in which activity was seen in instrumental terms.80 Rodó continually emphasized the liberating role attributed to reason by the Enlightenment thinkers and by the leaders of Latin American independence. Throughout his work, as is explored later, he tried to reconceptualize reason to incorporate both subjectivity and history. First of all, in a series of early essays, which he planned to bring together under the title “The New Life,” he made a major contribution to clearing the ground for a Latin American version of modernity by sketching out a critique of each of the main European currents of thought and suggesting in what ways they were or were not relevant to Latin America. The worst model, by far, from Rodó’s standpoint, was nihilism. During the 1890s, many European intellectuals, finding neo-Kantian attempts to revive a humanist reason inadequate in the face of rapidly spreading utilitarian values, drew upon Nietzsche’s writings to promote Lebensphilosophie, which posited “life” as an infinite series of creative possibilities unconstrained by reason. Both in Europe and Latin America, Nietzsche’s work was read—both favorably and critically—as an invitation to moral license. In Montevideo, as elsewhere, there were young people (mostly men) who justified their pursuit of uninhibited sensual and aesthetic pleasure with highly selective quotations from Nietzsche about the need to challenge all existing values. Rodó regarded all radical skeptics, even those who assumed a less frivolous guise than the decadents, in the same light as fanatics, that is, as manifestations of extreme arrogance and sterility. He denounced Nietzsche’s claim that society existed only for the elect as “monstrous” and as the source of “an abominable, reactionary spirit.” While to an extent he shared Nietzsche’s worries about that “false egalitarianism which aspires to bring everybody down to the same vulgar level,” even so he vigorously condemned the concept of the superman for being endowed with “satanic contempt for the disinherited

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and the weak.”81 Whereas fanatics were dangerous because of their “lack of understanding, inflexibility and brutality,” skeptics were compromised by their “incompetence for action, the cold sterility of their doubt, the limitation and poverty of what they ask of reality, and their enervating and corrosive influence.”82 Just because values could no longer be regarded as absolute, Rodó’s argument continued, it did not necessarily follow that meaninglessness was the only option. European intellectuals might be in a position to allow themselves the luxury of despair, but, the Uruguayan implied, Latin Americans were in dire need of hope. Nihilism, however heroically sustained, was not an option Latin America could afford to entertain. Almost as bad, in Rodó’s opinion, and far more of a direct threat to the region’s culture, was utilitarianism, which he represented in caricatural form as a life-devouring monster, and condemned unequivocally as a recipe for mediocrity. In this, Rodó echoed a well-established position in Latin American debates, dating back at least to the radical Chilean thinker Francisco Bilbao (1823–1865) and powerfully revived by Martí. The prevalence of anti-utilitarian opinion in late-nineteenth-century Latin America is confirmed by the manifestation, notably in Colombia, of a conservative version of it, based on theories of the organic state that Rodó—who was a liberal at heart— did not accept.83 His own hostility toward utilitarianism seems to have been based mainly on a reaction against the form it assumed in Latin America. He made only brief reference to works by Bentham and Stuart Mill (his reading knowledge of English was not good), and it is probable that his knowledge of utilitarian philosophy was derived mainly from his reading of its conservative French critics, such as Renan and Guyau, and of Latin American positivists, who, in his view, propounded “a very low-level utilitarian empiricism.”84 The “pallid utilitarianism” of Latin America lacked, he argued, the commitment to disinterestedness that had leant it a touch of greatness in the Anglo-Saxon world.85 Thus, Rodó’s struggle was against utilitarianism in its crudest form, based on a straightforward opposition between quantity and quality. His passing reference to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) as the “Bible of utility” is indicative of the extent to which he reduced utilitarianism to a synonym for the pursuit of economic self-interest.86 Thus, he offered not so much a philosophical critique of utilitarianism as an indictment of what he identified as its social consequences, namely the materialism and equality-in-mediocrity that he imagined to be already dominant in U.S. society and that he feared would also come to prevail in Latin America.87 Rather as the Frankfurt School did later in Europe with

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instrumental reason, Rodó made a monolith out of utilitarianism in order to shatter it. One element he particularly hammered away at was Bentham’s ahistorical view of humankind (always pursuing the same goal of pleasure, always motivated by its attainment). Instead, Rodó promoted the argument, as Martí had done, that historical circumstance was crucial to understanding human behavior, which was a necessary premise for formulating a distinctively Latin American modernity. Romanticism, which had been widely influential in Latin America since its introduction by the Argentine Generation of 1837, was another major reference point here, and Rodó, as in so many other respects, represents a turning point in Latin American attitudes. Romanticism’s critique of European claims to superiority appealed to the first post-Independence generation, many of whom attributed the region’s problems of nation building to the attempts of the 1820s to implement abstract imported models of liberalism in disregard of local realities. The Romantics’ interest in religion, local custom, and dialect—which in Europe was often received as reactionary—was seen as progressive in Latin America because it challenged the imposition of rules and laws formulated for other situations (one of the most famous examples is the debate between Bello and Sarmiento about whether an American Spanish was best developed through adherence to common rules or by openness to local variation).88 Herder’s wry aside that “only a real misanthrope could regard European culture as the universal condition of our species,” had serious implications in Latin America. Rodó shared the widespread approval among nineteenthcentury Latin American intellectuals of early Romanticism’s rejection of “the abstract uniformity of pseudo-classicism” in favor of expressing the distinctiveness of particular societies, landscapes, and customs (apparently, he knew the work of Herder well),89 but he was against full-blown Romantic nationalism, with its tellurian overtones and its sentimental approach to history. The obsession of European Romantics with the medieval world was particularly inappropriate when imitated in Latin America, he argued, where it had no popular resonance.90 He welcomed the Romantics’ emphasis on the link between reason and liberty,91 but rejected their privileging of emotion over reason and of the individual at the expense of society. He mocked late Romantic star-gazing and wilful ignorance of social realities.92 And he had no time at all for their privileging of nature over culture, dismissing as absurd Rousseau’s “faith in the goodness of the spontaneous and the primitive” and representing him as both undisciplined and dogmatic.93 What Rodó sought to retain from Romanticism, above all, was its idealism, but he also insisted that the idealism of his generation in

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Uruguay was wholly different from that of both “the spiritualists and romantics of 1830” and “the revolutionaries and utopians of 1848,” because positivism had intervened.94 Rodó shared in the widespread reaction of Latin American intellectuals against positivism during the early twentieth century. Like most of his generation, he strongly resisted its conversion of scientific method into a dogma, its suppression of subjectivity, its will to sacrifice “on the altars of an inalterable Objectivity, all the intimate things, all those eternal interior voices that have accounted for at least half, and the most beautiful half at that, of human art.” 95 There were others who formulated a similar critique far more rigorously than Rodó;96 the real interest here of his engagement with positivism is that, unlike many of his ultra-idealist contemporaries, he identified several beneficial aspects to it, especially in relation to Latin America. In particular, he welcomed its onslaught against the lingering influence of scholastic approaches to learning and its introduction of a greater critical spirit and engagement with reality into Latin American analyses of society.97 In general, he thought that it had liberated metaphysics from “exhausted and sterile idealisms” and freed the creative imagination from “the orgy of the romantics, [with their] phantasms and chimeras.” 98 He found Comte’s faith in human solidarity highly sympathetic, and drew upon it to formulate his own vision of Latin American unity.99 He echoed the positivists’ urge to find a unifying principle to integrate the diversity of all things, although he disagreed with them that science was the answer. His thought continued to be shaped by aspects of positivism throughout his life, as was actually the case with many Latin American intellectuals of his era. Perhaps the most significant element that Rodó drew from both Romanticism and positivism was the idea that knowledge is relative. In one of his earliest works, he expressed a sense of the relativity of both time and space in distinctly Spencerian vocabulary: “Just as there is in space a particular genius of Nature for each vast zone, so there is in time, for each new form assumed by the spirit, a Poetry, a [sense of] Beauty.”100 The relativist escape route from deterministic views of Latin America provided him with the framework for a challenge to European epistemology, based on a practice of selective appropriation from a variety of cultural movements rather than outright repudiation of any of them. From classicism, he drew a sense of moderation, a love of perfection, and an appreciation of the value of order; from Romanticism, he preserved the idea of the relativity of cultural models and the claim to rational freedom; from naturalism, he gathered a “generous audacity and a rough and ready sincerity,

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respect for reality [and] an intense feeling for life.”101 Significantly, Rodó saw these different perspectives as concentric circles of accumulating wisdom, each expanding the space of the previous circle, rather than as mutually exclusive worldviews.102 Indeed, he suggested, it was precisely Latin America’s characteristic capacity to assimilate “all the resonances of Desire, Enthusiasm and Sorrow” that gave it a distinctive potential to articulate the hitherto suppressed hopes of modernity.103 On this premise, Rodó wrote his own founding statement of Latin American modernity: Ariel. It is well known that Ariel was a reply to Renan’s play Caliban, suite de La Tempête (1878), with Rodó reversing Renan’s ending, in which the base, demagogic Caliban triumphed, in order to entrust the future, at least in Latin America, to the ethereal Ariel. It is less often noted, however, that Ariel was also written in the context of two other key statements on the modern condition: Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (first complete edition 1892) and Martí’s “Nuestra América” (1891). The connections are explicit in the case of Nietzsche’s text, implicit in the case of Martí’s. The epilogue to Ariel begins as follows: “Thus spoke Prospero” (Así habló Próspero). The structure of Ariel echoes that of Thus Spake Zarathustra: a framing device of a prologue and an epilogue in authorial voice, with an account of words spoken by the protagonist in between, divided into numbered parts (four in Nietzsche, six in Rodó). For all the uncharacteristic vehemence of Rodó’s condemnation of the übermensch, he did share several significant ideas with Nietzsche: an opposition to systems and system builders; a commitment to action in the world over disengaged contemplation; and an unconditional affirmation of existence in its mixture of joy and suffering. But Rodó regarded Nietzsche’s work as the outcome of an exalted, ecstatic state of mind, of which he was highly suspicious, and he recoiled from what he saw as Nietzsche’s extreme voluntarism,104 hence the shaping of his own manifesto for modernity as a direct response and explicit alternative to Nietzsche’s tract. In relation to Martí, Rodó stated that he greatly admired the Cuban independence leader and wanted to include an essay on him in his projected book Hombres de América. He never did so, however, and only a few remarks remain to give any indication of his assessment: notably, he emphasized Martí’s commitment to “intelligence, culture and idealism” as well as to “liberty, prosperity and peace.”105 Despite the lack of firm evidence, it seems plausible to see Ariel as an indirect refutation of “Nuestra América,” not least because although Rodó’s text did not engage explicitly with Martí’s, it did set out a

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clear alternative. Martí and Rodó represent an early parting of the ways in twentieth-century debates about Latin American identity: the former emphasizing Latin America’s indigenous culture, the latter its European inheritance. To Martí’s “our Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours,” referring to the need for all Latin Americans to learn about their great indigenous civilizations, Rodó responded that “Greece” was an eternal symbol of the “soul of youth” and that Latin America had just as much right as Europe, if not more, to draw upon its force of example. Effectively he was saying: ancient Greece is ours. In general, both Martí and Rodó developed arguments more complex than any rigid opposition between indigenista and europeísta can accommodate, not least because they both practiced selective adaptation, not uncritical assimilation, of external ideas. Their visions of Latin American modernity were, however, fundamentally different, and the main difference lay in Rodó’s refusal to endorse Martí’s celebration of natural man. Whereas Martí’s prose confidently evoked a living landscape of trees, tigers, and virile, male human bodies, Rodó’s writing moved more cautiously across a tabula rasa awaiting the imprint of culture, which was embodied in an androgynous adolescent. Julio Ramos has argued persuasively that for all Martí’s political differences with Sarmiento, for all his inversion of Sarmiento’s notorious association of civilization with the city and barbarism with the countryside, Martí still conveyed a confidence in the writer’s authority and agency that was dependent upon the letrados’ access to state power. Rodó, writing less than a decade later, but from the modern intellectual’s position at a distance from power, shared Martí’s view that literature could function as a defense against both the internal colonialism of the Latin American elites and the expansionist modernity of the United States, but he baulked at the antirationalist implications of Martí’s thorough-going critique of the “ordering project” of the Republic of Letters.106 Martí’s vision of a redemptive “organic America” was not for him. Instead, he sought to connect Martí’s vision of the potential autonomy of literature with the letrados’ faith in reason, adopting writing not as a tool of contestation but as a strategy for reconciliation. Thus, Ariel is a text that sets itself apart from three prevalent critiques of the utilitarianism and individualism that Rodó himself also rejected: an influential version of European conservatism (represented by Renan); a dominant strain of radical skepticism (the outcome of reductionist readings of Nietzsche, both in Europe and Latin America); and a nascent Latin American discourse of the autochthonous (powerfully articulated by Martí). Compare the measured tone

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of Rodó’s text with Renan’s ironical, skeptical drama, or with the oscillating exultation and despair of Thus Spake Zarathustra, or the passionate, lyrical exhortation of Martí’s manifesto. Analogously, in representing Prospero as a catalyst of cultural change, Rodó offered a very different model of the intellectual from Renan’s detached observer, Nietzsche’s prophet, or Martí’s revolutionary. Rodó’s vision of the intellectual moving out from an autonomous cultural space into the public arena of the masses was evoked at the end of Ariel when the students leave the classroom where they have been listening to Prospero’s speech and go out into the streets. However uncomfortable they found the “rough contact” of the crowd, the move has nonetheless been made and cannot easily be reversed.107 Before the reader’s eyes, the Latin American intellectual metamorphosed from being a legislator into becoming an interpreter,108 the brief no longer being to prescribe change but instead to engage critically with it. If Rodó remained unpersuaded by the schools of European latenineteenth-century thought he encountered, he found no greater solace in their local manifestations, distancing himself from what he saw as the unmitigated universalism of the letrados and the sentimental essentialism of Latin American Romantics. Neither was he enthusiastic about Latin America’s own specific response to modernization, the literary modernismo associated with Darío. Although the early modernistas had shared Rodó’s dissatisfaction with “calculating reason” and bourgeois material values, their solution was to replace them with either transcendentalism or pure aestheticism,109 both of which he dismissed as escapist, elitist, and superficial. Artistically, modernismo had been productive, he argued, in that it had stirred up the cultural atmosphere, expanded the possibilities of expression, and established the importance of artistic freedom.110 But it was too much in thrall to the idea of novelty for its own sake, too narcissistically enamored of its own linguistic daring, and far too seduced by the pleasures of the senses.111 It had stimulated a craving for sensation for its own sake, an obsession with artificiality and a disregard for truth.112 Even Darío, whom Rodó rather grudgingly regarded as a great poet, lacked authenticity, he insisted—not only americanista authenticity but also personal authenticity (a criticism that Darío to an extent accepted).113 The reader would not find in Darío’s poetry “the generous and truthful abandonment of a soul that completely surrenders itself to you”: it was too much the product of will and calculation.114 Rodó shared the widespread Baudelairean view of modern art as necessarily contemporary, arguing that each generation had to find its own route to sincerity of expression,115 but as a movement, modernismo had barely

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scratched the surface of “the new sources of spiritual emotion,”116 he argued. Moreover, it “suffered from a poverty of ideas and a lack of interest in social reality, in the problems of action and in the profound, serious concerns of the individual conscience.”117 In its reverence for aristocracy, it was authoritarian in tendency.118 It was idealist, but in the worst sense—reveling in an “anarchic idealism” that he saw as both frivolous and dangerously amoral.119 In Rodó’s view, modernismo was both spiritually and sociologically bankrupt, but there was no going back to Romanticism, realism, or traditionalism: it was high time, he announced in 1900, “to do something else.”120 Rethinking the Role of Reason What he did first was to discard any model of reason that was not grounded in life. Logic was intellectually beautiful,121 he conceded, but ultimately unsatisfying because it said nothing about how to live. He set aside both Cartesian “reasoning reason” (the idea that reason itself was the ultimate criterion of truth, by which even sense experiences were subject to verification) and Kant’s ideal of a transcendental moral agent, the “noumenal self,” existing outside of time and causality. Reason was the best guiding force available, the best defense against excess of force, faith, passion, or instinct, Rodó always insisted, but the “austere” reason of late-eighteenth-century Europe was not right for Latin America.122 Instead, Latin Americans needed to elaborate a model of reason hospitable to what the Enlightenment version had left out: aesthetics, ethics, spirituality, and subjectivity. Rodó’s critique of pure reason started with an attack on the analytic method. A fear that the modern world was losing any sense of the integrity of human life was widely expressed in both Europe and Latin America at the time, but it was more acute, he implied, in Latin America, where both civil society and cultural identity were more precarious. He saw the increasing specialization of labor, even among practitioners of knowledge, as an inevitable part of the modernizing process, and indeed as essential to human progress. Nonetheless, he urged, artists, scientists, and politicians should all aim to sustain “an awareness of the fundamental unity of our nature.” “The fulfillment of a common destiny as rational beings,” he continued, “takes precedence over any modifications of human nature made by profession or culture. ‘There is a universal profession,’ as Guyau so admirably said, ‘which is to be a human being.’ ”123 Rodó endorsed the widespread view in Latin America that utilitarianism compromised the integrity of the human spirit with its insistence upon focusing only on “the sole

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aspect of reality with which [people] are in immediate contact,” thereby precluding the possibility of integrating any activity into a general vision.124 It was just such an approach to education that led to intolerance and exclusivity: “a disastrous indifference towards the general condition of humankind.”125 His stated ideals were “a harmonious culture and [ . . . ] an integrated life,”126 which could only be realized, he proposed, by reconceptualizing reason as a process of synthesis rather than an act of analysis. In other words, he refused to accept the reductivism inherent in a modern bureaucratic conception of rationality, which demands a single currency of reasons, thereby tending to exclude anything—such as feeling, spirit, or beauty—that cannot be accommodated within an instrumental approach to life.127 Rodó’s first and most famous synthesizing move was to restore reason’s link with the aesthetic, which had been challenged by the Romantics (on the grounds that there should be no constraints on beauty) and, from a different perspective, by the positivists (who wanted to keep reasoning processes pure). For him, a well-developed sense of beauty was part of a truly rational existence.128 But his conception of beauty was very different from that of his contemporaries. He showed little patience with art-for-art’s-sake aesthetes, who saw beauty purely in formal terms and used it as a refuge from the vulgarity of worldly affairs—preferring “marble and bronze” to “the palpitation and clamour of life.”129 He also deprecated the tendency of self-defined Nietzscheans to aestheticize life and to enthrone taste as a sublime source of knowledge beyond truth and falsehood. He was scathing about the amoral consequences of the modernista tendency to make a fetish out of rarity: if the rare was synonymous with the good, as Darío claimed, then, responded Rodó, “Satan is worthy of being included in litanies of praise so long as he is incarnate in forms of [ . . . ] Parisian beauty.”130 And although he could not help acclaiming Baudelaire’s visionary capacity to extract beauty from the mire, something Darío would have been quite incapable of doing, he alleged,131 he insisted even so that the cult of ephemerality was no substitute for ethics. For Rodó, who identified with many of Plato’s ideas, the importance of beauty lay in its relationship to morality and truth: As humanity advances, moral law will more clearly be seen as an aesthetic of conduct. People will flee from evil and error as if from discord; they will seek good as they seek the pleasure of harmony. When Kant’s stoic severity inspired the austere words, symbolic of the spirit of his ethics: “I slept, and dreamt that life was beauty; I awoke, and found that it was duty,” he failed to take into account that if duty really

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is the supreme reality, then he would find in duty the object of his dream, because awareness of duty would give him a clear vision of what is good and the corresponding pleasure of what is beautiful.132

Here Rodó touched on a key difficulty that philosophers have detected in Kant’s ethics, namely that he put into different categories actions of moral principle and actions of pleasure, as if people never derived pleasure from acting morally.133 Rodó not only condemned the idea of a retreat into beauty as amoral, but he also denied any link between asceticism and virtue: “Those who insist that good and truth always appear in harsh and severe guise have always seemed to me to be traitors to good and truth. Virtue is also a kind of art, a divine art.”134 If beauty were excluded from people’s existence, as advocated by Christian asceticism, then the human spirit of freedom would become corrupted, he argued, and seek outlet in the superficial beauty of appearances, disregarding morality, as in Renaissance Italy.135 He drew upon Schiller’s ideal of the public character of art—its potential for communicating and building solidarity—which in Europe had been abandoned by Baudelaire and was not revived until Marcuse.136 In sum, Rodó’s aesthetics entailed a movement toward life, not a withdrawal from it. Thus, when he criticized Kant for being the personification of “morality abstracted from all substance and warmth of feeling,”137 his point was not that Kant lacked “feeling” in any of the Romantic, individualistic senses of sensuality, sensation, sentiment, emotion, instinct, passion, or ecstasy, but, rather, that Kant had excluded the higher aspirations of the human spirit. Rodó’s concept of feeling was elevated and aestheticized, as critics have often noted, but it was also, more importantly for the argument here, dependent on social, rather than merely personal, action and engagement. The “empire of reason,” he wrote, “is generous enthusiasm, high and disinterested motive for action, spirituality in culture, vivacity and graceful wit of the intelligence.”138 What he referred to as spirituality was not a state to be achieved by isolated contemplation of the ideal, but rather through an engagement with the world which, in Herbert Spencer’s words, united “philanthropic energy with philosophic calm.”139 Thus Rodó’s wish to bring aesthetics back under the umbrella of reason brought him to a rethinking of the relationship between reason and spirit. In early-twentieth-century Latin America rationalism was not usually thought of as incompatible with spiritual or even religious experience, although it almost invariably entailed opposition to the Catholic

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Church. Secularization did not so much imply the elimination of religion from public life, but rather a commitment to reducing the wealth and power of the Church, together with a respect for basic liberal freedoms, including the right to practice any religion (as stipulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen). Rodó’s own secular formal education was counterbalanced, to an extent, by the religiosity conveyed to him informally by his Catholic mother.140 As an adult, he expressed personal bemusement at Christian tendencies toward morbidity and ecstatic excess, at least partly because they involved an abandonment of reason,141 but he professed respect for the religious faith of others.142 He represented Christianity primarily as a symbol of the enduring human capacity for charitable love,143 and invoked Tolstoy as the embodiment of the humanitarian religion that he welcomed, so long as it did not insist on dogma that interfered with the dissemination of rationalism.144 A commitment to reason did not in itself entail hostility to religious faith, argued Rodó, suggesting—in an uncharacteristic metaphor—that embracing reason was comparable to embarking upon a new love affair, which does not necessarily mean that all previous attachments are forgotten: Equally, when reason obliges you to relinquish a faith that filled your soul with love, you do not have to recoil from that faith, or even to stop loving it. You can remain faithful and grateful to it: faithfulness and gratitude are appropriate devotions to the memory; [ . . . ] and you may find pleasure in observing coincidences, affinities and sympathies between the moral sentiments that your previous faith gave you and the new teaching of stern reason.145

Historically, human beings had always been intrigued by the mystery of life’s origins, he noted, and “from that point of view, religions are undoubtedly legitimate.”146 In the Americas, the Catholic Church had played a creative—indeed crucial—role in stimulating intellectual life, which “would have been totally impossible without the influence of the only spiritual force that rose up against brute force.”147 He argued that religion should be kept out of politics, but had no wish to exclude religious debate from any other sphere of public life.148 Latin America was advanced in its lack of fanaticism, he claimed, maintaining a high level of freedom and tolerance not only because of official policy but also because of a widely accepted social convention that religion was a matter for the individual conscience.149 He was not at all drawn to the esoteric forms of spirituality that appealed to so many late Victorians. For many of his Latin American readers, his

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rational conception of a secular spirituality, living in peaceful coexistence with the institutional religion that was condemned to disappearance by the laws of history, seemed to provide the answer to the modern world’s unfulfilled longing for spirit. What Rodó primarily opposed was dogmatism, which, he argued, could equally well be anti-clerical as clerical. He condemned the sweeping anticlericalism of the Batllista government, which renamed religious holidays with secular vocabulary and insisted on “dios” (God) being spelt without a capital letter. In a series of letters written in protest at an official edict to remove crucifixes from Uruguayan state hospitals, Rodó made an eloquent plea for toleration of Christian practice. The removal of crucifixes had not been motivated by liberalism, he suggested, but instead by “the inexorable logic of Jacobinism’, which ‘leads fatally to the most absurd extremes and the most provoking injustices when it is applied to the sphere of real live human feelings and action.”150 What he objected to in Jacobinism was “the dogmatic absolutism of its conception of truth,” which he traced back via Condillac, Helvetius, and Rousseau to “the ‘reasoning reason’ of Descartes.”151 Jacobinism was “pseudo-liberalism,” he maintained, because it lacked any spirit of generosity. It was an example of precisely how reason should not operate, in Rodó’s view, that is, inflexibly and relentlessly pursuing its own logic without regard for human sympathies. The ideal of toleration—both religious and in a wider sense—was a recurrent motif in Rodó’s work. He described it as “the highest expression of charitable love linked to thought.”152 He wrote approvingly of a series of nineteenth-century figures who manifested high ideals of tolerance: Goethe “raising tolerance and expansiveness to the heights of his Olympian vision”; Spencer, “his sovereign spirit soaring to the elevated sphere from which religion and science appeared as two phases, different but not irreconcilable”; Comte “consistently demonstrating his great historical respect for the Christian tradition, and taking it as a model for his ideal religious organization”; Renan, Taine, Carlyle, and other thinkers who took the spiritual aspect of human experience into account.153 Indeed, he maintained: The cumulative meaning of the intellectual endeavour of the nineteenth century is tolerance, but not just tolerance with respect to the material world, namely that tolerance which protects the immunity of persons and relates to rights and liberties that can be enshrined in constitutions and laws, but also, and most importantly, spiritual tolerance, which concerns the relationship of ideas to each other, to communication and mutual influence: an affirmative and active tolerance,

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which is the great school of open-mindedness of thought, delicacy of feeling, and perfectibility of character.154

He stated that his liberalism was “at its heart, tolerance”155 —the kind of tolerance that leads to solidarity rather than the kind that results in indifference—and described himself as “free of all religious connections, defending a great human tradition and an elevated conception of liberty.”156 In sum, he sought to retain rationalism’s critique of institutional religious practice without taking the leap into a materialist view that ignored the spiritual experience of the individual subject. In any case, Rodó concluded, most tellingly, shedding the yoke of Catholic dogma was only the first step on the road to true freedom of thought, which was much more difficult and complex to achieve than is assumed by the superficial commonplace that equates it with independence in relation to traditional faith. It is far more than a formula or a device: it is a result of inner education. In order to think freely it is not enough to have freed oneself from the dogmatic authority of a faith. There are many other preoccupations, many other prejudices, many other irrational authorities, many other persistent conventionalities, many other idolatries, apart from religious faith, and anyone who aspires to true freedom of conscience has to overcome them all.157

In Motivos de Proteo (1909), Rodó made his most sustained and elaborate attempt to illustrate what he meant by “a truly rational existence.”158 The book was both a plea for the reinstatement of reason as the guiding force in human affairs and an exploration of the nature of subjectivity. Its central metaphor was both classical and Shakespearian (one of the two gentlemen of Verona is called Proteus): again, Rodó was signaling that Latin America was fully entitled to claim the patrimony of European culture. Proteus’s “infinite plasticity”—not abstract but not concrete either—was invoked to convey the all-embracing, questing intelligence that he saw as the ideal agent for effecting positive change.159 This choice of imagery is in itself telling about the evolution of his thought: sculptural metaphors recur throughout Rodó’s work, but earlier in his career the images were latently violent, conveying the sense that human beings had to be hammered into shape.160 In Motivos de Proteo form was still represented as necessary to stem the tide against the void, but it was henceforth to be as flexible as possible. Constant change was an unavoidable aspect of life, Rodó maintained: all of us are, successively, “not one, but many.”161 Identity was mutable, and there was no point

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in trying to rebel against that fundamental reality. Moreover, selfhood was constantly evolving in relation to the social world: “Any society to which you are connected robs you of a portion of your being and replaces it with a glimmer of the gigantic personality that is collectively born from it.”162 Acknowledging the limits of reason, Rodó noted that full control was impossible because so many aspects of the personality were beyond the reach of the conscious mind. He presented a model of consciousness that anticipated Freud, referring to the depths of the “soul” to evoke not only “animal instinct” but also intuition and inspiration, conscience, a sense of vocation, childhood memories, inherited temperament, unexplained moods of sadness or happiness, which he vividly evoked as “all the perhapses, all the almosts, all the only justs of the soul.”163 But he did not represent that unknowability as threatening; indeed, he emphasized the advantages of abandoning the quest for stable foundations, not the least of them being the freedom to change and the possibility of originality.164 If individuals—and societies— could actively embrace this process of transformation, it would “serve as a framework for emphasising rational and free energy.”165 To “live rationally” was “to try each day to have a clear notion of your inner state and of the transformations operating on the things surrounding you, and to govern your thought and actions in accordance with this knowledge.”166 Reason’s role in the process of self-transformation was to recognize and to orientate these unconscious forces, ensuring that they were in accordance with actual possibilities for creative action in the world, sustaining the delicate balance between doubt and faith. In the shaping of the personality, love was sovereign, especially for the poet or artist,167 but even love had to have its potential excesses moderated by reason. Any kind of ecstatic love, or worship, of art or knowledge would be a kind of superstition that resulted in suspension of the will and, therefore, inaction.168 Likewise, the self-conscious, self-perfecting individual should avoid the excesses of self-preoccupation by engaging in social contact and cooperative work.169 Like many Latin American philosophers at the time,170 Rodó drew explicitly on Henri Bergson’s philosophical/psychological concept of creative evolution (in which evolution was seen in terms of contingent factors rather than necessity),171 applying it to ethics to posit an “ideal norm of action for life.”172 One reviewer acclaimed Motivos de Proteo as “one of the most robust hymns ever sung in praise of human will,”173 but, if anything, Rodó’s second reply to Nietzsche was a call for the taming of the individual will. If will could be subjected to the intelligence, argued Rodó, then emotions, perceptions, and even instincts

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could be brought within the remit of a constant process of selftransformation, potentially open to everybody, that would enable purposeful action in the world.174 But he was manifestly disoriented by Nietzschean visions of the will rampant. What he proposed in Motivos de Proteo was a humanist corrective to the übermensch: will as a sense of vocation, guided by the intelligence and nurtured by inspiration. Against the will to power, Rodó set the integrity of personality; against the idea of eternal recurrence, he posited a dynamic of self-transformation. Criticizing Criticism Itself One key way in which he applied his own proposed strategy for transformation was in rethinking the nature and purpose of one of the cornerstones of rational discourse: criticism. Rodó, who was himself known as “the critic” because of his many book reviews and critical essays on Latin American writers,175 questioned the conventional post-Romantic idea that criticism was opposed to creativity. In an early article, he argued that the critic himself had to understand the creative process, and be open to a wide variety of experiences to inform his literary judgments. Like a traveler, the critic’s mind would be enhanced by experience of “the inexhaustible variety of things”; the good critic would open “the horizons of his thought” to “the four winds of the spirit.”176 Great critics, such as Schiller, Goethe, and Diderot, were renowned for their tolerance and open-mindedness. Criticism was far more than the well-argued expression of an opinion, he argued, and it did not necessarily have to be severe in order to be penetrating. Criticism should be “a spacious literary form, an impression, a reflection of art, a note of sympathy, the personal echo of a feeling that vibrates with the spirit of the age.”177 A good critic would be both an astute psychologist and an informed and imaginative historian.178 Rather than relentlessly pursuing a destructive logic, criticism should be creative, generous, flexible, and empathetic in approach. A modern critic was, by definition, “a man of perpetual metamorphoses of the mind and heart: a man of many souls, capable of being in tune with the most diverse characters and the most opposed conceptions of beauty and life.”179 Criticism should entail the bringing together of “objective contemplation” and “the impassioned subjectivism of aspiration and struggle.”180 Thus he sought to redefine critique as a synthetic rather than an analytical process,181 suggesting that reflexivity could both draw on analogical thinking (in itself both “scientific [and] rational,” argued Benjamin,182 although

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it was often employed by advocates of intuitionism) and yet still incorporate aesthetic understanding. Instead of the modernistas’ antithesis between modern literature and modernization (Darío: “The artist has been supplanted by the engineer”),183 Rodó proposed a reciprocal relationship, mediated by a new type of criticism. Such a redefinition of criticism was to become a significant feature of Latin America’s distinctive modernity. Rodó’s new critical method depended upon adopting an approach to the use of language that Bakhtin associated with the novel: “plasticity itself [ . . . ] ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review.”184 One reason why so many of Rodó’s contemporaries focused on his style of writing was that his highly worked prose (some would say overworked) drew attention to the artificiality, or the constructedness, of language, and the need for it to reflect critically upon itself. Rodó was by no means the first author in Latin America to do this: the early nineteenth-century educator and tutor to Bolívar, Simón Rodríguez, had acted out the slipperiness of meaning in his texts by resorting to every typographical trick in the book,185 and leading nineteenth-century women writers, such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Clorinda Matto de Turner, had played a variety of games with language.186 The difference with Rodó was that he came after a long line of Romantically influenced letrados (including Martí), who were more committed to the possibility of unmediated signification.187 Like many of his generation, Rodó rejected the rhetoric that was associated with the Republic of Letters, but neither was he drawn to the colloquial style adopted by writers such as the Argentine gauchesque poet, Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938). Prospero addressed his students with the formal “vosotros” that would never have been used in common parlance in Montevideo at the time.188 Rodó heard the language of the streets only as “a confused clamour,”189 but he, nevertheless, sought to go beyond both Romantic and modernista linguistic strategies. As was argued at the time by a Colombian critic, Rodó tried to reconcile Castilian syntax with the eclectic and neologistic vocabulary of the modernista writers.190 His language was “refined,” but at the same time it was “communicative,” which proved to be a disconcerting combination.191 Thus, the idea that Rodó shared Martí’s “distanced and totalising gaze,” as Julio Ramos has argued,192 ignores the extent to which Rodó’s texts drew attention to some of the problems involved in trying to “see from afar,” as Martí had suggested Latin American writers should do. One strategy used by Rodó to bring things closer was to

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adopt what the anthropologist Johannes Fabian has called “root metaphors of knowledge” that were based on hearing rather than seeing.193 Starting in Ariel and continuing throughout his texts, Rodó emphasized communication over observation, speaking and listening over seeing, performance over statement. Ariel in particular drew explicitly on Latin America’s “sacred” oratorical tradition; it was written not to be read, but to be listened to.194 The text was ambivalent about questions of authority, as it was in so many other respects. Undeniably, the vision of an educated elite bringing enlightenment to the “obscure and indifferent” masses in itself entailed a degree of latent force.195 What was avowedly a rhetoric of persuasion was fatally compromised by the violence inherent in its metaphors of branding, sealing, and inscribing, as Roberto González Echavarría has illustrated.196 Yet the text can also be interpreted as raising a series of questions about utterance and the problems of speaking to, speaking about and—above all—speaking for another. Prospero’s voice may be magisterial but, in being represented as spoken, it posed a challenge to the prestige of the written word in Latin America, thereby potentially opening up space for the articulation of oral cultures. It is Prospero’s voice that penetrates the souls of his audience, not his vision or his gaze. In trying to restore the aura of speech on the printed page, Ariel corresponded to what Searle called a speech act.197 It was both a call for transformation and an act of transformation in its own right: symbolizing the creation of culture as a space for the reconciliation of debates about Latin America’s future. Ariel was an enactment of the process of making culture more autonomous, but in the sense that it was a ritual act, it was designed “not [ . . . ] to ensure compliance, but to establish obligation”—the obligation on intellectuals not only to communicate but also to explore what communication entailed.198 Just as there was a shift in the voice of authority from the father figure in Martí’s “Our America” to teacher in Rodó’s Ariel,199 so correspondingly was there a significant change of genre: from manifesto to allegorical essay. Allegory does not conceal its artifice: it is explicit about “the distance between what we mean and the texts we produce.”200 Moreover, by framing the text with a short prologue and epilogue to Prospero’s speech, in authorial voice, Rodó both claimed the authority of an interpreter (in itself, less absolute than the authority of a legislator) and at the same time opened up the possibility of questioning even this relative authority by drawing attention to the way that all meaning is mediated. And the author, like the reader, is also a listener. There are elements here of a challenge to the claim that modernity is inevitably linked with writing.

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Fragmentary Forms A key feature of Rodó’s new epistemological approach was his experimentation with what Alfonso Reyes later characterized as fragmentary forms.201 Reyes introduced the idea of the fragment to suggest a theory of writing as a continuous process of movement toward an indefinite horizon, a theory he thought Rodó had enacted in Motivos de Proteo, 202 which is presented in short, numbered sections, reminiscent of biblical verse. Rodó himself declared that he would never impose an “architecture” on this work, which he described as “a book in perpetual ‘becoming.’ ”203 Reyes used the term fragment not so much to suggest fragmentation in the sense of disintegration, as was usually the case among European modernists, but rather to convey the idea of a dynamic fragmentariness that was as yet disconnected and incomplete but could potentially be united in alliance if not unified into one. Thus between the standard antithesis of disempowering fragmentation or totalizing wholeness a new possibility arose: fragmentariness as the impulse for making connections. It was in this sense that Reyes saw Rodó’s “eclectic” work as the foundation of new possibilities in literature.204 The form for which Rodó was best known was the essay. Indeed, Ariel is widely agreed to be the foundational text of the Latin American modern identity essay. This genre, with its possibilities for exploring philosophical or political questions in a literary style, suited Rodó’s integrating purposes admirably and he explicitly employed it to move beyond the “pamphleteering” approach of earlier generations, who had used literature primarily for didactic or propaganda purposes, he argued.205 The form had not been widely used in the Americas before Rodó, although writers he admired, such as Emerson, Montalvo, Alberdi, and Martí, had all explored it to some extent. Drawing on Adorno’s discussion of the characteristics of the essay, 206 it can be suggested that, as approached by Rodó, the essay was in its very form a dramatization of the possibilities for Latin American culture. Its child-like freedom to experiment struck him as particularly appropriate to the relatively young culture of the New World. In allowing for interpretation rather than legislation, and for coordination rather than subordination of diverse elements, the essay opened up possibilities for questioning conventional hierarchies of knowledge. In inviting both reason and imagination to play a part, it challenged the collusion between Romanticism and positivism in “fencing up art as a preserve for the irrational.”207 In defying Descartes’s cardinal rules about being analytical, moving from the simple to the complex,

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and aiming to be exhaustive in scope, the essay offered an alternative to the logic of scientific discourse without permitting the license of irrationality. It thus enabled Rodó to avoid the over-systematic type of argumentation that he regarded as symptomatic of the dehumanization of the intelligence, and to create his effects through the accumulation and synthesis of a variety of ideas. Such a strategy of selective accumulation was a notable feature of the works of the Argentine Generation of 1837, which Rodó knew from early reading in his father’s library. It has been a salient, if neglected, aspect of Latin American intellectual history in general. By the early twentieth century, Rodó had adapted this synthesizing approach to challenge the idea that Latin America was bound to divide up knowledge into the same categories as Europe or the United States. A fragmentary form for which Rodó became renowned was the parable. It was a form of narrative that he, like many Latin Americans, had often heard during childhood. He claimed that everything could be said in parables, 208 where it was possible to bring together “fiction, morality, poetry, philosophical experience and good sense” in the closest possible approximation to his ideal approach to life.209 If we think about the nature of parables, it becomes clearer why they appealed to Rodó, who saw himself as a “cure of souls” (cura de almas) and was writing during the uncertainties of early-twentieth-century Latin America. In the Bible, parables were often used by priests who were operating in situations of great uncertainty (e.g., Ezekiel in the Exilic community), and were, therefore, unable to fulfill their mission of dispensing absolution and consolation.210 Parables are tales of crisis and transformation; they are moments of taking stock, operating both diachronically, by reflecting “on the past, which has been told, and the future, which is yet to be told,” and synchronically, by temporarily pausing the main flow of the narrative “to explore the depth and ground of what is past and impending. [ . . . ] to make some sense of the tale at large.”211 They are based on the premise that the past should not be denied but neither should it be allowed to constrain the present or the future: in short, it must be useable. In part II of Ariel, for example, Rodó made Prospero break off his account of the threats posed by utilitarianism to recount the tale—“[conjured up] from a dusty corner of my memory”—of the oriental monarch. Renowned for his hospitality, this king’s palace was “the house of the people,” with no guards at the entrance, young and old alike flocking through the open porticos, all drawn toward his generous spirit, with even the waves of the neighboring sea rising up “as if they wanted to envelop it in an embrace.”212 The old monarch, however, retreated to a mysterious

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room at the very heart of his home, a still, silent, dimly lit but fragrant space, in order to meditate. Finally, “when death came to remind him that he was no more than another guest in his own palace,” the inner sanctuary was closed for good to honor the place where the generousspirited ruler had communed with his own soul.213 The king in his palace was explicitly represented as a model for how Latin Americans should live in the modern world: “open [ . . . ] to all the currents of the world” but preserving the mystery of an inner space “where only serene reason belongs.”214 Parables were an even more striking feature of Motivos de Proteo, where Rodó extended the boundaries of conventional form far further than in Ariel, combining traditional genres of biblical verse, parables, fables, and homilies to create a new type of work that defies conventional categorization. One example that is highly revealing about the way Rodó was playing with narrative patterns was “The Farewell of Gorgias” (chapter cxxvii). Gorgias (c.485–380 BC) was a sophist famous for his skill in rhetoric. Very little of his work remains, and it is likely that Rodó encountered him through his critic Plato.215 Rodó represented Gorgias in a favorable light, however. The parable is of Gorgias sitting with his disciples, after he has been denounced and is about to die, having chosen to emulate Socrates’s method of drinking hemlock. As his followers were competing to reassure him that they would be faithful to his teaching, Gorgias told what he called “an anecdote” about his mother. She was so enraptured by his childhood innocence and beauty, and so longed to preserve him in that state forever, that finally she planned to resort to a magic formula to do so. The night beforehand, however, she had a dream, in which, applying heart of dove and flower of wild iris to the boy’s heart and head as instructed, she did indeed succeed in keeping him as a child. One day, however, she could not find either the dove’s heart or the wild iris, and the following morning she awoke to find her bonny lad turned into a bitter old man, full of hatred and despair, cursing her for having robbed him of his adult life. The dream was so vivid and horrific that she vowed to let her son grow up as normal. Rodó’s Gorgias spelt out the moral of his tale, which was that no philosophy, however persuasive, should be taken as an absolute dogma that was permanently valid. He had taught his followers a love of the truth, he declared, but each of them had to seek out their own truth for themselves. The parable ended with a last toast, just before Gorgias swallowed his fatal dose, to “whoever triumphs honourably over me” as the next teacher of his disciples. Both the medium and the message of this tale are intriguing. The narrative

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consists of a dream told within an anecdote told within a parable, a discursive maneuver that enabled Rodó both to inscribe the idea that meaning is created out of multiple contexts and to raise questions about the allocation of authority. The ultimate example of Rodó’s fragmentary forms is his use of references. Both in Ariel and Motivos de Proteo, he assembled a montage of quotations, mostly, although not exclusively, from nineteenthcentury European sources. The explicit intertextuality of Rodó’s work has often been noted: it used to be explained by claiming that Rodó was derivative; more recently, it has been seen in postcolonial terms as a strategy for the writer from a non-hegemonic culture to authorize himself by demonstrating extensive knowledge of the Western canon. Latin American intellectuals have indeed long been “devourers” of books.216 But it is worth thinking about exactly how Rodó represented European writers in his work. One of his favorite devices was to attach particular themes that concerned him to major thinkers whom he mentioned repeatedly, so that their names recurred in his texts not so much as grand authoritative figures but as mere motifs: “Goethe” became a watchword for self-conquest; “Renan” a shorthand for idealism; “Carlyle” a symbol of heroism in history.217 Rodó made them all emblematic, the effect of which was to reduce them all to stereotypes: “Kant” (just one mention) stood for “stoic severity”; “Rousseau” for a state of nature; “Flaubert” for loathing of mediocrity; “Ibsen” for the threat of the masses.218 It is as if the reader were looking at these figures the wrong way through the lenses of the opera glasses: they have all diminished to Lilliputian size. Thus Rodó’s already eclectic version of the European canon was reduced to a series of fragments, a set of objects to be collected and taken down almost at random from the shelves for occasional scrutiny. He sometimes quoted directly from his sources, but at other times he only referred to them, and even then often only allusively. He translated, glossed, and paraphrased, never explaining who his sources were, even when he mentioned quite obscure writers. The discursive strategy of calling upon the authority of so many of them not only had a leveling effect, canceling out rather than confirming the authority of each one, but also served to reinforce the authority of Prospero (himself symbolic of the Latin American intellectual) as the authorizer, the connoisseur, the authenticator. If learning is seen in Walter Benjamin’s terms as a form of collecting, 219 then Rodó accumulated snippets of Western culture, which he then displayed to his readers as the legitimate spoils of an inverse conquest.

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Existing in History In Ariel, Rodó represented the past in Latin America as a time of combat, the present as a time of leveling and construction, and the future as a time for the development of the soul.220 It is not only his characterization of each period that is significant, but also the fact that he linked them together in that way. Latin America had of course always had a sense of its past, but what Rodó’s work did was to crystallize the emerging consciousness that it existed in history and that its identity was constituted by its history. Such an awareness of historicity has been identified by Reinhart Koselleck as the defining feature of modernity (first apparent in Europe, in his account, between 1750 and 1850).221 His emphasis on the significance of a specific view of history in constituting a modern outlook is highly suggestive in relation to Rodó. For Koselleck, some of the main features of a modern historical consciousness were a critical awareness of the historicity of time itself; a sensitivity toward the gap between language and historical meaning; and a sense of the present as a time of transition and of the future as open, all of which can be identified in Rodó’s writing on history. A rational life, for Rodó, was one grounded in history. In this outlook, he contrasted markedly with mid-nineteenth-century liberals, especially in Argentina, who could not flee quickly enough from the past in their rush to embrace the future. Rodó, hovering like Benjamin’s Angel of History, sought instead to mediate between the past and future. He rejected both the positivists’ cataloguing approach to history and the Romantic idea that the historian’s task was to bring the past back to life. He took a view that became widespread in the early twentieth century, and was particularly associated with Benedetto Croce, namely that any generation could only look at the past through the lens of the present.222 What is more, Rodó’s attitude toward the past bore the imprint of the instrumentalism that he condemned elsewhere. He did not, as has been argued, advocate a cult of the past;223 indeed, quite the opposite: he was ruthless in his disregard for aspects of the past that he saw as “useless.” Latin America could not afford many more experiences of rupture, he argued. The only way for it to have a future at all was by a transformative appropriation of useful elements of the past—a selective synthesis.224 Whereas in Europe modernism was usually posited in terms of violent, liberating repudiation of the past, in the far south of South America Rodó sought to sustain a fragile project of becoming modern by grounding it in historical continuity. He saw the wars of independence, which he referred to as “the

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revolution of 1810,”225 as a founding moment of modernity, and the Latin American republics themselves as the outcome of a quintessentially modern sense of the future as “open, promising, limitless.”226 Openness is the most striking feature of Rodó’s Latin American landscape as evoked in Ariel. It has often been pointed out that even though the essay contains very few references to Latin America, the reader is left in no doubt that the setting is Latin American. 227 This fact reinforces the significance of what Rodó did mention. What he presented was not a utopian vision, but it was a vision of modernity, which—in itself—helps to explain the sketchiness of the picture. The first reference was oblique: the Ecuadorian writer José Joaquín de Olmedo was mentioned as “the poet” who wrote lines about the “apathetic soldier who fights under the colours of death.”228 Here, Rodó was discussing how pain could serve as a stimulus to action; so although he associated Latin America by implication with a state of inaction, he also raised the possibility that it could be roused to “a vigorous eagerness for the struggle to conquer or recapture the good that [pain] denies us.”229 Later in the text, Rodó referred to Alberdi’s famous slogan “to govern is to populate,” but did not mention him by name; this was a vision of modernity that he rejected. The only Latin Americans mentioned by name in the whole essay were the Argentine liberals Manuel Moreno (1778–1811), Bernardino Rivadavia (1780–1845), and Domingo Sarmiento (1811–1888), who were invoked approvingly as founders of a city that could potentially rival the great cities of the ancient classical world.230 There was no evocation of a state of nature in Ariel; Rodó’s landscape was there to be shaped by a human hand. Ottmar Ette’s discussion of architectural metaphors in Ariel drew my attention to the prominence of the theme of space and human mastery over it throughout the text.231 There were repeated references to extension, expansion, openness, horizons, perspectives, journeying, orientation, surveying, mapping, and locating. A parallel was drawn between youth as the “generous terrain” upon which “the seed of an opportune word” would soon bear “the fruit of an immortal vegetation” and the European discovery of lands, such as the Americas and China, hitherto unknown to them.232 The reader was taken on a guided tour of the landscapes of human culture, as Rodó envisaged them. Moving back and forth through history, he evoked the olive groves of ancient Greece, where the radiance of freedom of thought replaced the shrouded gloom of an Egyptian temple; the fields of Galilee, an ethereally scented land of abundance and beauty; the psychological

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terrain of the nineteenth-century European novel; the public fora of ancient Athens; the sacred space of a Gothic cathedral in which the choir-stall engravings, with scenes from saints’ lives on one side and ornamental circles of flowers on the other, symbolized the union of virtue and beauty. Rodó’s ideal city, evoked in part VI of Ariel, was not a worldly one of boulevards and arcades, like Benjamin’s Paris, nor a city of dream-like spaces, as envisaged by the surrealists, nor one of labyrinths, as posited by Borges: it was, instead, a built landscape of the spirit, and when evoking “this America we dream of” Rodó returned to the image of the Gothic cathedral, with a rose window in its nave, “which glows with light above the austerity of the sombre walls.”233 Space opened up as the essay moved on, and at the end, when Prospero’s audience went out into a beautiful summer evening, the group of students walked in silence “por mucho espacio” (literally, for a long space, although space of time is implied).234 The tactic behind Rodó’s panoramic approach to history was to convert time into space, so that history could become less of a burden. As a Latin American, unable by historical circumstance to stand firm on the ground of Kantian universal reason, Rodó felt he had little choice but to venture out into the immensity of the unknown. He called upon all Latin Americans to look out toward the world in a bold act of reconquest: “enter, then, into life, which opens up its profound horizons (hondos horizontes) to you, with the noble ambition of making your presence felt from the moment you confront it with the haughty gaze of the conqueror.”235 He expressed apprehension, however, about losing sight of any horizon. The issue, for him, was to identify “legitimate limit[s].”236 One key source of such limits lay in history. Rodó argued that one of the most dangerous consequences of the idea of progress was “the conception of the past and the present as two enemies perpetually at war with each other, instead of considering them as father and son or as two workers on successive shifts, both pursuing the same task.”237 He saw tradition as a manifestation of solidarity between generations. As such, tradition could not be an unchanging absolute; like anything else, it could be modified by reason, and it would play a different role in different historical and cultural contexts. Tradition did not necessarily mean slavish obedience to superstition; nor did it have to be conservative or defensive. Indeed, such a concept of tradition was, he argued, opposed to his own idea of tradition as living continuity, sustaining itself precisely because of its adaptability, 238 which fitted in with his overall view of life as continuous transformation. Traditions should be critically analyzed in the light of assimilation of the new, he maintained, but if

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they were ignored altogether then the danger arose that new and foreign ideas would be absorbed uncritically without regard for local circumstance. In Europe, he argued, tradition carried weight. The prestige of the past had acted as a powerful corrective toward the obsession with “progress” at any cost, that desire to obliterate the past for the sake of the future which had resulted in the violent excesses of Jacobinism. In Latin America, by contrast, no such balancing forces existed. Tradition in Latin America, which he seemed to define as the colonial tradition (although it is not clear exactly what he meant by that), had only “a weak and precarious element of conservation.”239 Independence had brought not only political rupture from Spain but also cultural rejection, which Rodó saw as a major error. The first generation of liberals, “in their impatient, generous longing to integrate the spirit of these societies into the progressive movement of the world,” had deluded themselves that all they had to do to emancipate themselves from nature and history was to “ignore and repudiate them,” which was equivalent to assuming that an enemy could be avoided by turning one’s back upon him.240 The embrace of French, British, and U.S. models, in defiance of collective traditions developed under colonial rule, had caused all the main problems of nation-state building in Latin America, he argued. Such a “radical excision” between colonial tradition and the principles of liberal progressive development had not been inevitable, he argued, but could have been avoided by recognizing that not everything in the past was “an indomitable force of reaction or of inertia” and “trying to adapt, as far as possible, . . . innovation to custom.” He maintained that if Latin America were to become modern in its own distinctive way, it would have to acknowledge its past: “Longing for the future, sympathy for the new, expansive and generous hospitality, are natural conditions of our development; but, if we are to maintain any collective personality we need to recognise ourselves in our past and keep it constantly in our sights.”241 Memory played a determining role in any process of regeneration, he suggested.242 If Latin America failed to incorporate some elements of its past into a vision of the future, then its modernity could only ever be a shallow imitation of foreign models. From this specifically Latin American perspective on the relationship between tradition and modernity, Rodó’s well-known invocation of the classical world, which is usually adduced as evidence of his longing to retreat from the modern world, as it was for most European Hellenists, appears in a different light. Even those among Rodó’s contemporaries who thought it an absurdity to propose ancient Greece as

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a source of values for Latin America still regarded his proposal as a model for modernity. If Latin America were to have modernity, it had to have classicism too, and Rodó baulked at Martí’s proposal that the indigenous civilizations should fulfill that role. So he engaged in the eminently modern practice of inventing a tradition, and the specific tradition that he invented—Latinity—was ultimately less important than his search for a useable past that could act as the measure of modernity’s own contemporaneity. Rodó was trying to combat both the mid-nineteenth-century versions of River Plate liberalism that tended to locate all positive values outside of Latin America and the inward-looking Romantic nationalism with tellurian and reactionary overtones—what he called “the sullenness of ‘national’ patriotism”243 —that developed into the cultural nationalism of the early twentieth century. Ariel stood for humanism in general, not for any specific national manifestation of it, not even Spanish or French, and Rodó’s claim that it was Latin America’s historical destiny to reinvigorate humanism was proposed as a way of reconciling cosmopolitanism, the colonial past, and the potential distinctiveness of local culture. Rodó’s Spain, as Leopoldo Zea has argued, was not the conservatives’ crucible of Catholic order and virtue, but the symbol of a capacity for integration and assimilation of different races and cultures that he saw (as Bolívar had done) as a defining feature of the Roman Empire.244 He called upon classical values because of their capacity to reconcile various potential divides that he saw as dangerous: “the sense of the ideal and of the real, reason and instinct, the forces of both body and spirit.”245 He drew on classical terminology to express that approach to the world which he saw as particularly necessary in violent, disorderly Latin America, namely serene disinterested contemplation, which he referred to as ocio. Rodó’s use of this term, drawn from the Latin term “otium,” or leisure, to signal an elevated state is particularly intriguing in the light of recent research about the many manuals of good conduct, catechisms, and even constitutions in nineteenth-century Latin America that were dedicated to convincing potential citizens that ocio, in the sense of idleness, was the mother of all vices.246 These high-circulation manuals prescribed everything from a person’s duties to God to appropriate conduct in the local tea-room. Thus Rodó’s reappropriation of term ocio signaled his rejection of the utilitarian work ethic and the bourgeois etiquette associated with positivist modernization. Himself an autodidact, he produced texts that to an extent resisted the disciplinary practices of nineteenth-century citizenship, questioning the idea that citizens had to be molded from above by the state and opening up

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the possibility of individual agency through self-transformation. Rodó represented contemplation not as some trance-like experience in which reason was suspended but as “a truly rational existence,” involving a conscious elimination of prejudice, superstition, and a priori assumptions.247 He always insisted, however, that contemplation had to be complemented by, and geared to, action. Moreover, he criticized the elitism of the classical era, maintaining that one of the advantages of the modern age was that inner freedom of thought had become open to all: “The classical spirit, which based its conception of the dignity of life exclusively on that elevated aristocratic idea of otium, finds its correction and its complement in the modern belief in the dignity of labour.”248 For him, the beauty of pagan art could not disguise the injustices of ancient Greek society. It was in the creative synthesis of classical and Christian values that Rodó saw a means by which Spanish America could evolve a collective consciousness that was both rooted in its own history and linked to universal ideals, so that the region could become confident of its distinctiveness without resorting to chauvinism. Rodó’s strategy was one way of contending with the paradoxical longings of all those who have historically been cast as “other,” namely to reconcile a claim to equality with an assertion of difference. A passage from one of Rodó’s late essays, written while he was in Italy, illustrates the thinking behind his approach: There is another feeling that the influence of Europe awakens in the American heart, and that is profound faith in our destinies, creole pride, the invigorating energy of our social conscience [ . . . ]. [I]f comparison with the work of centuries in many respects confirms the natural inferiority of our infancy, it also gives due weight to the effort that enabled cities like Buenos Aires, Santiago and Montevideo to be raised from the bountiful earth, amidst the convulsions and the fevers of our political formation. [I]n this European land wherever you look history speaks with words of stone, evoking infinite memories and examples, and the words of history are the best apologia for our inexperience and our errors; the most self-evident testimony to the “human” basis of our meanderings; the most restorative explanation for the youthful turbulence that empty philosophies attribute to environmental or racial incapacity.249

Conclusion Rodó identified himself in classic Enlightenment terms as a “[freelancer] for a cause that has few supporters in our country [ . . . ] or in the world at large: the cause of thinking for yourself, without hatred,

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without prejudice [ . . . and without ] sectarian passion.”250 He stood for belief in “the efficacy of human effort” and faith in the future.251 But he did not—could not, given his historical circumstances—see reason in Kantian terms as ahistorical, dispassionate, and universal. His ideals were disinterestedness rather than detachment, commitment rather than duty, rootedness in history rather than disembeddedness. After Rodó, Latin Americans had an alternative to the assumption that reason was inevitably at odds with feeling, faith, or tradition, as Europeans often thought it to be. His proposed strategies for avoiding the extremes of either instrumentalism or individualism were freedom of thought, integrity, and tolerance. He resisted the ruthlessness implicit in the idea of indefinite progress (the impulse to force people to be free that has been attacked by many critics of the Enlightenment). The theme of hospitality echoes through his work: openness of heart, openness of mind. Although appreciation of beauty was given a prominent role in Ariel, Rodó placed far less emphasis on it in later works, and his move from aesthetics to an emancipatory ethics was one that was followed by many Latin American intellectuals in the early twentieth century. As Carlos Fuentes has argued, 252 the ultimate implication of what Rodó was saying was cultural and political diversity, despite the constraints on inclusiveness that were inscribed in his texts. Rodó was talking about the conditions necessary for creating an arena for the expression of public opinion. He contended that reason should be the guiding force in public debate, not partisan interest, prejudice, or unaccountable authority, but in order to play that role effectively reason could not be either narrowly instrumental or inexorably critical. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not see education as a panacea for all Latin America’s ills or even as an effective means of instilling notions of good citizenship. It was not that he saw education as unimportant—indeed, he did a lot of work to promote it in Uruguay—but, he maintained, the best way to form good citizens was to practice good government and to pass fair laws.253 In his political work, he also concerned himself with the legal-constitutional framework necessary to foster rational-critical discourse, arguing that institutional arrangements alone were insufficient to guarantee the effective functioning of civil society.254 This is an argument that has increasingly been made more recently by observers of the attempts to reconstruct civil society in Eastern Europe and Latin America after the fall of dictatorial regimes.255 In practice, autonomy for any particular organization in civil society can only ultimately be secured if both those running it and those in the state apparatus at whom its

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activities are oriented agree to respect such autonomy. There are no guarantees, the only possible mechanism is public scrutiny, and constant vigilance is necessary. Rodó anticipated many of the problems that populism would bring to Latin America by postponing the development of a viable civil society. In contrast to the Argentine Generation of 1837, the powerful articulators of a model of technocratic modernity for Latin America, Rodó found hope in the culture of Latin America. While he did not go very far in challenging the binary oppositions underlying this model (creativity and criticism was one exception), he did reformulate Sarmiento’s all-too-influential opposition between civilization and barbarism into something more like cultured (culto) versus uncultured. The crucial difference is that civilization is a process done unto you by others, whereas becoming cultured is an endeavor you can undertake for yourself. Indeed, it was mainly as a source of faith in the potential of Latin American culture that his contemporaries valued him. In his writings and in the course of his interminable peregrinations around the city of Montevideo, dropping into cafés and bookshops, starting up conversations on literature, politics, or social issues with whoever hailed him,256 Rodó—the benevolent uncle of Latin America’s alternative modernity—promoted optimism. It was an optimism that was all the more compelling for his full acknowledgment that conditions in the region were difficult and unpropitious. Most of his acquaintances recalled his personal sadness, but also his serenity and the courtesy with which he welcomed visitors to the darkened rooms of his gloomy old house, where he sat tremulously summoning visions of a brighter future out of the dim shadows.257 His “fragmentary forms” can be read as the result of a strategy to map out a space—a “blue space, as in the streets of his Montevideo, reflected restlessly and attractively in the infinite harmonies of the sea”—where an integrating, synthesizing reason could at least begin to create the conditions for authenticity, both personal and social.258 The fundamentally new perspective that Rodó introduced into Latin America was that knowledge is relative, which paved the way for giving the region a sense not only that it constituted a distinct culture but also that it existed in history and could, therefore, shape its own future. Therein lay the significance of his work, which far transcends the limitations inherent in his disembodied and de-eroticized ideal of a modern Latin American subject. By articulating a critique of pure reason, Rodó established the main themes of the region’s cultural debates over the next six decades: Latin America’s place in history, how to achieve progress without determinism, the role of the intellectual

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in politics, the tension between particularism and universalism, the place of idealism in a materially deprived continent, the relationship between autonomy and authenticity, the potential of democracy, and Latin America’s relationship to the United States. If the solutions he offered did not have lasting impact, the questions he raised certainly did.259 That Latin Americans could not afford a complete rupture with European tradition, that indeed to take such a course would result in an inauthentic modernity, 260 was an argument that became central to their elaboration of alternative approaches to modernity. Rodó’s attempt to counterbalance relativity by recreating a sense of wholeness also became a recurrent feature of twentieth-century Latin American culture. Too much emphasis has been placed on the fact that he chose to do so by inventing a tradition of Latinity rather than by embracing difference within Latin American societies. This was only to come later, but it could not have done so without Rodó’s cautious yet committed explorations of how it might be possible for Latin Americans to live autonomously in the modern world.

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Chapter 3

Creating a Workers’ Public Sphere: Juan B. Justo’s Analysis of State and Society

The technocratic model of modernity is “doomed to failure, because [ . . . ] it excludes most people.” Manuel Garretón1

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atin America has a long history of trying to make its founding ideal of popular sovereignty a reality.2 In societies that became notorious, especially in the mid-twentieth century, for investing all hopes of modernization in the state, the term civil society only acquired celebrity status during the 1980s,3 but the debates that lie behind it have been periodically revived throughout Latin America’s independent history. The enduring question has been how to reconcile constitutional democracy, economic efficiency, and social inclusion. The options available for doing so have often seemed to be limited to liberalism (now neoliberalism) or populism (now, too, in neo-mode), both of which have distinct drawbacks. Latin American liberalism has historically sustained a restricted set of democratic procedures and a degree of (erratic) economic success, but has done little to address social exclusion. Populism has a more positive record on inclusion, from which it draws a degree of legitimacy, but it tends to be even more limited than liberalism in commitment to democratic rights (it draws its life-blood from national elections, but has often shown scant regard for local democracy or for niceties such as the separation of powers) and has not proved particularly impressive on economic efficiency either. The idea that one possible way of developing an alternative to liberalism or populism would be to promote commitment to participatory associational life was often aired in

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late-twentieth-century debates about democratic consolidation, but it is not new. Such an alternative was widely discussed during the early twentieth century, by which time a remarkable extension of public space for debate, assembly, and organization had begun to take place in many Latin American countries. Carlos Forment has gathered a formidable array of evidence for Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Cuba, from which he concludes: “In Latin America, democratic selfhood emerged in civic, economic, and political associations and developed out of the interpersonal dynamics among members.”4 Labour unions, mutual aid societies, cooperatives, student organizations, cultural centers, and libraries opened up a variety of sites for debate, usually poorly funded and often short-lived, but nonetheless cumulatively creating opportunities to satisfy the modern need for a sense of belonging. The ideal of mutual education through democratic participation was enacted above all in the Popular Universities, which aimed to radicalize the Arielista commitment to self-transformation by creating “a completely new and revolutionary educated mentality” among workers, and to an extent succeeded in doing so, especially in Cuba and Peru.5 Even though most of these organizations were either repressed or co-opted by the state after 1930, these early attempts to create spaces for civil society offer a valuable historical perspective on the variety of possible relations between state and society. Indeed, it is striking when reading commentary on the new social movements that became active at the end of the twentieth century to see how similar many of their ideas—especially on the centrality of culture to any project of social transformation—were to those proposed at the beginning.6 This chapter explores the earlytwentieth-century debates through the work of Argentine Socialist Juan B. Justo (1865–1928). Unlike Rodó, who tends to be labeled a traditionalist, Justo acquired a lasting reputation for being eminently modern. Indeed, the most prevalent view of him is that he sought to impose European models of modernity in disregard of Argentine realities. Famous for translating the first volume of Das Kapital (fourth German edition, 1890) into Spanish (1898), he was one of the first Latin American intellectuals to draw upon Marxism (although he always denied he was a Marxist). One of a new generation of university-trained professionals, Dr. Justo took advantage of the range of opportunities brought about by modernization to combine the practice of medicine (which gave him a secure income) with journalism, theoretical writing, and politics, representing the city of Buenos Aires first as a congressional deputy (1912–1924) and later as a senator (1924–1928).

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Whereas Rodó was primarily concerned with cultural change, Justo started out from the political, exploring the possibilities for implementing what he saw as a quintessentially modern form of politics— democratic socialism—in a neocolonial, immigrant, primarily agricultural economy.7 His ideas are usually analyzed in relation to the political fortunes of the Argentine Socialist Party (PSA), which he played a key role in founding in 1896 and led, with a firm hand, until his death over three decades later.8 The PSA, which was committed to the Second International’s strategy of extending workers’ power through the ballot box, was Argentina’s first modern political party (with a program, statutes, an organizational structure, and a stable leadership). Although it consistently won at least 30 percent of the vote in Buenos Aires from 1912 to 1926, achieved its highest total of deputies (43) ever in 1932, and did well again in 1942,9 its history has conventionally been represented as one of failure, mainly because it was eclipsed first by the Unión Cívica Radical (the UCR, or Radical Party) and later by Peronism. This chapter does not revisit the history of the PSA, which has been thoroughly documented elsewhere.10 The party is certainly an important context for understanding Justo’s ideas, but it is by no means the only context, as is illustrated below. As one contemporary put it, Justo transcended the politics of the Left to become “the theorist of modern Argentina.”11 It is relevant to note here, however, that shifts in his reputation have closely followed general developments in the historiography of Argentine labor. As was the case with Rodó, the era of national-populism brought a sharply critical reassessment of Justo’s approach. As corporatist nationalism (in various guises) gained ascendancy across the political spectrum in Argentina during the 1930s, Justo’s class-based analysis of the country’s history was denounced by revisionists who wanted to locate all national consciousness in the masses and so thought it necessary to limit class mentality to the vendepatria (traitorous) oligarchy.12 The socialists in general were attacked for being complicit with the liberal-conservative governing elite, and Justo in particular was dismissed as a europeísta (Europeanizer) who had added nothing new to the national self-understanding.13 More recently, and from a very different standpoint, the failure of the PSA to attract mass support was interpreted as having paved the way for the rise of Perón, and Justo himself criticized for having undermined his own strategy of electoral participation by a fundamental distrust of the masses.14 As I hope to illustrate, interpretations along these lines, while not wholly lacking in foundation, offer only a partial account of Justo’s engagement with modernization.

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This chapter draws instead, therefore, on the revisionist approach of two leading Argentine left-wingers who, in the context of Argentina’s redemocratization after 1983, returned to Justo’s work to argue that, despite the failures and limitations of the PSA in practice, his writings, nevertheless, contained important ideas about how to counter the authoritarian tendencies of instrumental rationality through a commitment to pluralism.15 One of Justo’s main themes, which is the focus of the following discussion, was the potential for forging a new relationship between the state and society in a newly developing country. In this concern, he was by no means alone in fin-de-siècle Argentina.16 After the political crisis of 1890, when the oligarchy experienced the first serious challenge to their rule, reformers from across the liberal spectrum reassessed their commitment to laissez-faire politics (which in any case had not been operating in practice since nation building began in earnest during the 1880s) in order to accommodate the widely perceived need for political and social reform.17 They cautiously began to advocate strategic state intervention, based on the social sciences that were beginning to establish themselves in Argentina’s universities, and targeted at specific policy concerns, such as health, hygiene, or crime. They remained reluctant to move too far away from a liberal model, fearing the consequences of an excess of paternalism: “Would the state have to give its citizens pocket money, as if they were schoolchildren?” demanded Ernesto Quesada, the first professor of sociology at the University of Buenos Aires.18 But there was a general consensus that increased state intervention in society was necessary, even beneficial, and most leading intellectuals and politicians in early-twentieth-century Argentina were involved in creating state institutions designed to improve public welfare. Thus there was nothing unusual in Justo’s own rejection of various forms of individualism (the liberal entrepreneur, the utilitarian self-made man, and the Nietzschean superman), or in his insistence that the individual was inescapably social.19 What was distinctive about him was that, unlike most of his reformist contemporaries, who focused almost exclusively on the role of the state, seemingly conceiving society as an inert body to be molded by official agency, he also argued for the need to create working-class organizations that would be both autonomous from the state and a necessary complement to it. A key element in his counter-hegemonic project was to promote a public space that was open to those excluded from the positivist nation-building projects of the Argentine Generations of 1837 and 1880. What Justo envisaged, to adopt

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Habermas’s phrase, was a workers’ public sphere, albeit one that was constituted flexibly enough to take into account the social spectrum of early-twentieth-century Argentina, which was “broader than that evoked by the classical terms ‘workers’ or ‘laborers’ ” and also encompassed “[white-collar] employees, teachers, small merchants, professionals and others without a fixed occupation,” both nativeborn and immigrant.20 Three fundamental strategies that Justo pursued to create a workers’ public sphere emerged as key themes in contemporary responses to his work, most of which emphasized his impact beyond the politics of socialism. 21 First, he was acknowledged, even by opponents, as an institution-builder, someone who had succeeded—unlike many intellectuals—in putting his ideals into practice by founding a wide range of organizations—public libraries, cooperative societies, and cultural centers—to further the political and cultural expression of the working class. Beyond the PSA, he was instrumental in founding journals and newspapers, most famously La Vanguardia in 1894. His publications did not operate in a vacuum by any means: Argentina had a lively labor press from the mid-nineteenth century onward, 22 but in La Vanguardia the Argentine working class finally had a regular and accessible source of information, which was designed to inform and stimulate debate rather than acting as a vehicle for partisanship. Moreover, unlike the majority of Argentine intellectuals, who tended to concentrate their efforts on Buenos Aires, Justo helped to establish institutions for working people not only in the capital but also throughout the interior, as was reflected in the commemorations held on the anniversary of his death in many provincial towns. 23 Tens of thousands of people gathered to file past his coffin. 24 Second, he was acclaimed for having brought new methods to public life, just as he had introduced new surgical techniques into Argentina during his early medical career.25 The French socialist intellectual Jean Jaurès famously remarked during a visit to Buenos Aires in 1911 that the Argentine Senate functioned like “a private get-together of very well-brought-up people who do not wish to contradict one another.”26 With Justo’s entry into Congress the following year, as was widely noticed and not a little lamented, discussion became distinctly less decorous, as he exploited debating procedures to “[dissect] the entrails of the oligarchy with the disciplined rigour of a surgeon.”27 “I do not speak here as a gentleman, but as the people’s deputy,” he retorted, in response to an outsmarted opponent who had resorted to calling him to account for his manners.28 Justo,

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who repeatedly stated his conviction that an improvement in the conduct of politicians was crucial to the regeneration of public life, 29 was widely credited with changing both the tone and the content of Argentine political discourse. It was not that social justice had never been mentioned before in the Argentine Congress (indeed, “the social question” had been on everyone’s lips for two decades), but, rather, that it began to be discussed in a different way: the era of “grandiloquent, vacuous speeches” drew to a close and informed debate gradually replaced “the old conventional fencing.”30 Justo acquired a formidable reputation for always being prepared to support his views with precise evidence: for example, in a speech calling for the taxation of land he included a lengthy list of all the properties in Buenos Aires province, specifying their exact size and their ownership.31 Statistics were intermingled with references to intellectual sources, particular favorites being Shaw, Anatole France, and Unamuno.32 Justo “acclimatised the system to telling the unvarnished, plain truth, mitigated only by the sound purpose of being intended for the public good,” initially provoking quite a furor by doing so.33 The eminent philosopher, Alejandro Korn, claimed that Justo was the first to bring a fresh approach to Argentine politics since his namesake Juan Bautista Alberdi.34 Above all, in establishing the idea of social justice Justo had posed the first serious challenge to the technocratic model of modernity dominant since the mid-nineteenth century. Third, and above all, he was seen as a synthesizing figure—“the genius of synthesis,”35 indeed—who applied positivist methods to idealist goals, integrated theory and practice, and combined scientific expertise with a humanitarian approach. In similar spirit, he was acclaimed for his creative adaptation of foreign ideas, especially socialist doctrine. His selective appropriation of certain elements of Marxism is a good illustration of how his synthesizing approach worked. Justo tended to accord lived experience an equivalent epistemological status to theoretical understanding, famously declaring that he had originally become a socialist not by reading Marx, but through witnessing the suffering of the poor while working as a doctor in a Buenos Aires hospital.36 Marxism appealed to him because of its emphasis on man as a social being and its attention to the role of economic factors in shaping history. Beyond those points of agreement, Justo was highly critical of Marx: he replaced Marx’s revolutionary program with a model of evolutionary change;37 questioned the idea that class struggle was the engine of history (which he saw as an oversimplification); and claimed that the concept of historical materialism was meaningless, suggesting that it would be

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better replaced by an “economic conception of history.”38 He identified a contradiction in Marx’s argument that the working class, which was subjected to ever greater immiseration and oppression by capitalism, would also act as the engine of capitalism’s overthrow: classes triumphed not through weakness but strength, maintained Justo. In pursuing these lines of thought, he was in many respects close to the German Socialist Eduard Bernstein, whom he read extensively and may have met in London.39 Unlike Bernstein, however, who always located himself squarely within the Marxist tradition, Justo’s main concern was to rescue socialism from being monopolized by Marxism. Socialism was a great humanist movement, he argued, to which many thinkers had contributed, and which was diminished if its development was attributed to just one or two key figures. Many of Marx’s economic ideas were merely extensions and refinements of Ricardo and Smith, claimed Justo, who had read the English economists in the original before he had read Marx.40 In his view, socialism would not have evolved without Comte, who had completed “the picture of the sciences by incorporating sociology” and who attempted “[to synthesize] all of them into a system of philosophy,” or Spencer, who, drawing on Darwin’s theory of evolution, had continued Comte’s work, and “[applied] the historical method to the social sciences.”41 Justo’s intellectual formation was strongly shaped by the positivism that reached the peak of its influence among Argentine intellectuals in the late nineteenth century.42 Like many others on the Argentine Left he acknowledged the achievements of the positivist nation-builders (Argentina was, after all, one of the richest countries in the world during the early twentieth century).43 Spencer’s model of societies evolving from military to industrial was a crucial factor in his decision to become a socialist, Justo later claimed, and—like Rodó—he drew upon Spencer’s relativism, particularly in relation to the capacity of the state: “He illuminated my thinking by making me see [ . . . ] how imperfect is the functioning of the State, how very little the law can do, thereby curing me of any political fetishism and any superstition about the power of men who make laws and decrees.”44 Nevertheless, he criticized positivists for their lack of due attention to lived experience: “They hardly had any close contacts except with books, and they entertained themselves by formulating abstract laws, the useful content of which is as slight as their foundations are weak.”45 In consequence, they had neglected the issue of social justice and had no solution to the “social question”; it would not do much good, he observed drily, to preach “freedom of contract” and “distribution of wealth” to a working class increasingly

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conscious of the degree to which it was being exploited.46 In this context, Marx’s great contribution, in Justo’s view, was to have given the socialist movement, which had hitherto been dominated by utopian theories, a basis that was not only scientific but also historical.47 The elaboration of a scientific theory of history had not only enabled history to transform itself from being “a chronicle, a romance or a philosophy” into “a complete set of coordinated ideas capable of practical application,” but it had also brought about a great change in science, demystifying it and making it “at the same time more modest and more powerful, more human and more fertile.”48 Even so, for all his genius, Marx’s ideas should not be taken as absolute truths over half a century later: [Any] pure and simple return to the Communist Manifesto written in 1847 by Marx and Engels would be equivalent to admitting that humanity has lived the last sixty years in vain. We need to and we ought to know more than Marx about historical and social matters. Marx was never a Marxist.49

Justo’s theoretical mainstay was not so much Marxism as science, which he welcomed as an unequivocally liberating force: “Science has freed us from the dazzling and impenetrable dialectic with which philosophy blinded us” and “take[n] us away from Kant’s speculative, obscure and equivocal critique.”50 Even more so than Alberdi, who insisted that metaphysics “would never take root in Latin America” because the region needed an applied philosophy to aid in the creation of a new republican order,51 Justo distrusted metaphysics and indeed any approach to reality that he deemed to be overabstract.52 He caviled at what he saw as Marx’s and Engels’s “resort to the artifices of metaphysics to explain the social revolution they foresaw,”53 and attributed some of the less intelligible parts of Das Kapital to Marx’s inability to move beyond “Hegel’s obscure, improbable and negative ideas.”54 He was scathing about the dialectic, suggesting that it was “no less exact or superfluous” to talk about the affirmation of the affirmation than the negation of the negation.55 Justo rejected the neo-Kantian turn taken among German Social Democrats, preferring to base his version of socialism on what evidence he could gather about the everyday lives of working people.56 For him, the debate between philosophical idealists and materialists was irrelevant, because “science is not the daughter of either Idealism or Materialism, but [ . . . ] of life and Technology.”57 In other words, even Justo, who was manifestly far less interested in

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subjectivity than Rodó, Reyes, or Mariátegui, was reluctant to relinquish it altogether. Scientific laws, he argued, had no “absolute or perpetual validity,” but were continually subject to modification through experience, specifically the experience of everyone “in the world, in practical life, in the complex labour of history.”58 For Justo, technology in itself was the ultimate “synthesis of ‘nature’ and ‘man,’ the conjunction of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit.’ ”59 Technology thus defined broadly as the outcome of any such interaction between people and the environment, not just as the applied results of the specialist enclaves of formal science, constituted “the fundamental historical activity.”60 Thus, although Justo often expressed an uncritical faith in the potential of technology to bring about progress, his concept of technology was far more inclusive and more rooted in popular experience than conventional usage implies. In any case, it is worth remembering here that he grew up in an era—and in a country—of supreme optimism. His second wife, Alicia Moreau, recalled the strength of her generation’s belief in human perfectibility.61 The dramatically beneficial results of his own introduction of more advanced sterilization methods into Argentine hospitals would almost certainly have confirmed such faith. Justo also observed that formal technological advances had improved both working conditions and the purchasing power of workers: “Thanks to the progress of industrial technology, the prices of goods have in general fallen considerably over the last fifty years.”62 Moreover, it was not only in economics, but also in ethics, that modernization could bring progress: “Modern methods of transport and communication provide the basis for a civilisation [that is both] universal and far higher. [ . . . ] [I]t is as if the Earth had got smaller, condensing all life and riches into a smaller globe, where people can combine their efforts to more effect.”63 But Justo was not wholly sanguine: technology could become a force of exploitation, he argued, if workers did not unite to develop their own political consciousness: It is indispensable for the working class to become a movement, if it wants to avoid being flattened by the technical progress of industry and commerce, which, if it is not accompanied by an equivalent advance in the intelligence and political activity of the people, will tend only to increase the wealth and power of capitalists at the expense of the wellbeing and freedom of workers.64

In other words, Justo argued that all the goals of the Enlightenment had to be implemented together (solidarity and education as well as

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economic progress) if science were not to erode liberty. Science and democracy, he declared, echoing Rodó, “are the two great revolutionary factors of the present age.”65 Scientific theory was relative, he argued; all theories, even socialism, should be approached with skepticism and judged primarily on their capacity to stimulate research and inquiry.66 Scientific methodology was in itself the most revolutionary approach to life, he claimed, for it required constant questioning of everything. Socialists had nothing to fear from a “critical spirit” that subjected all institutions to scrutiny, because such a spirit would generate “new ideas, theories of social reconstruction, ideals of peace and justice that would displace the old, anodyne, sterile religious ideals.”67 “The world belongs,” he proclaimed, in a classic Enlightenment metaphor, “to those who can see the most,” which implied that both conservatives who “hoped to stop social evolution with barbarous measures” and “false revolutionaries whose only method of action is to deny or destroy everything that exists” were doomed to “fail on the terrain of the facts.”68 By making science the guide to socialism, Justo signaled that he saw socialism not as an object to be attained but as a process in continual evolution.69 Democratic socialism was in itself a synthesizing force, he maintained, one that would enable Argentina to carve out a route to modernity that avoided isolation either from its own past or from the experiences of other societies. Justo’s Experiences of Modern Life By virtue of living in Buenos Aires, Justo witnessed at firsthand the most spectacular process of modernization in Latin America.70 In 1865, the year of his birth, Buenos Aires (with a population of well under 200,000) was still affectionately known as “la gran aldea” (the great hamlet), but by 1930, only two years after his death, it had become a major city of over 2.5 million people. Contacts with the outside world and technological innovations escalated rapidly during his childhood: the first export of wheat took place in 1873 and the first agricultural machinery was imported in 1877, when the first refrigerator ship also arrived.71 Between 1880 and 1914, Argentina increased its land under cultivation and its railway mileage by factors of 55 and 40 respectively; its foreign trade increased twelvefold and its population quadrupled.72 By the early twentieth century, it was ranked as the eighth most developed country in the world.73 Justo summarized his own view of the pace and extent of national change in

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the first editorial of La Vanguardia in 1894: This country is being transformed. The open, undivided plain has given way to enclosed fields, which will soon take up all the usable area. [ . . . ] The railway has finished off the crop wagons. The great ports have eliminated most of the local coastal traffic. The Central Fruit Market is replacing the old stalls. Even our rudimentary industry is undergoing the same kind of change. In Buenos Aires shoe and hat factories, great ironworks and joineries are putting most of the small workshops in these branches of trade out of business; in Tucumán the small sugar mills are disappearing among the great sugar refineries, and in Santa Fe modern cylinder mills are multiplying where there never even used to be traditional ones. Along with these great works arising out of the capital that has taken over the country, Argentine society has acquired all the characteristics of any capitalist society [namely, the exploitation of labor, the creation of unemployment—even in the booming United States, he noted, there were a million able-bodied men out of work—, speculation, profiteering and the juxtaposition of ostentatious wealth with unrelenting poverty].74

In short, the modern world was striding across the pampas, immigration and new technology had brought wealth to Argentina, but—and for Justo, among many others, it came to be a big but—that wealth was highly unequally distributed. After Buenos Aires became the capital of the federal nation in 1880, a comprehensive modernization program began, explicitly designed to turn it into a European-style city. The focal points of economic activity were the ultramodern port, built from 1882 to 1897, and the Stock Exchange. The whole city was remodeled along the lines of what Haussman had done in Paris: many areas were paved and opened up to traffic, including the main thoroughfare, Avenida de Mayo; spacious parks were created; and grand public buildings erected in Italian Renaissance style, notably the Congreso, the Museo de Bellas Artes, and the magnificent opera house, El Colón, where Caruso came to sing. A less elevated project, but one that brought major health benefits to the inhabitants, was the installation of drainage works, which were finally completed, after various interruptions, in 1905, dramatically reducing the mortality rates from infectious diseases. Electric street lighting transformed the city in 1882, and mobility was further enhanced by an electric tramway (1897), followed by buses and, finally, an underground railway (the subte) in 1914. Arcades, shops, department stores (most famously, a branch of Harrods), cafés,

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bars, and restaurants sprung up. A novelistic account of the city written and set in the mid-1890s gives an impression of just how quickly it was changing, as expressed through the voice of a character returning to the city after 14 years in the rural areas: The streets were in an infernal uproar that made me feel dizzy and deafened me, I never bumped into anyone I knew [ . . . ] and there was less natural light and less fresh air; the high buildings suffocated me, the dazzling shop windows surprised me, and the sheer luxury and elegance, and the traffic, the hurly-burly of people on foot, trams, cars, carriages and horses, made me think that this was not my city.75

About half of the new residents thronging the streets were foreign immigrants, including refugees fleeing from the overthrow of the Paris Commune, Bismarck’s outlawing of social democracy (1878– 1890), Spanish and Italian repression of labor movements or, in the case of the majority of the Jewish people who arrived in Argentina, pogroms in Russia. Buenos Aires became a crucible of intensive cultural contact, a microcosm of migratory modernisms: “Many languages and many customs intermingled, breaking up the tableaux of the formerly creole city.”76 Both creoles and immigrants felt their former identities to be in flux, and new ones had to be created “piecemeal.”77 A significant proportion of the migrant workers never settled in Argentina (the famous golondrinas, or swallows). Although there were opportunities for those who did stay to “hacer la América” (to build America), and many of them did succeed in rising up the social scale, it was also the case that access to land was highly restricted, employment was not always secure, salaries oscillated, and living conditions were far from ideal for the majority. Initially, they were housed mainly in conventillos (tenements) in the center and south of the city, which rapidly became overpopulated warrens of poverty and misery. It was not until the second decade of the new century that a process of suburbanization began in earnest. Not far from where Justo grew up, in the district now known as San Telmo, was one of the earliest tenement buildings, where people lived 12 to a room and several families had to share inadequate cooking and sanitary facilities.78 It was probably no coincidence that the first lecture he gave on socialism, in 1893, was on the question of workers’ housing.79 José Luis Romero has vividly described the cultural consequences of this process of uneven modernization.80 The center of Buenos Aires became the citadel of elite culture: the Teatro Colón, the Café

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Tortoni, the University, the literary tertulias, the members’ enclosure at the race-course, the offices of the major national dailies, La Prensa and La Nación (founded in 1869 and 1870, respectively). In these places could be found Parisian fashion, Art Nouveau, then Modernismo—when in 1896 Rubén Darío published Prosas profanas in Buenos Aires—, and then Ultraísmo [ . . . ]. It was a glittering culture, without doubt, but rather conventional and, above all, very dependent on the latest novelties from Paris, which were equally visible in Harrod’s display windows and in the magazine Nosotros, or in the daily controversies at the Café de los Inmortales, refuge of a Bohemian crowd [ . . . ], or in the evolution of creole cookery, modified by the commandments of Cordon Bleu.81

This was the culture not only of the upper classes but also, in aspiration at least, of both the traditional middle sectors and the new middle sectors emerging among those immigrants (the majority of those who decided to settle) who sought integration. This was the city celebrated by Darío as “this ultra-modern, cosmopolitan and enormous Buenos Aires, increasing in size, full of strengths, vices and virtues, cultured and polyglot, half industrious, half soft and sybaritic, more European than American, not to say wholly European.”82 This was the glamorous Buenos Aires that became a place of pilgrimage for intellectuals from elsewhere in the region, second only to Paris in terms of sheer cultural chic. Justo moved in these circles, but he made a point of flouting their conventions, particularly their obsession with being artistically à la mode, and he evidently found quiet satisfaction in making it clear that he had no inclination to pass himself off as a modernist.83 In consequence, he was often accused of being uncultured, a charge from which all his friends resolutely defended him, taking uncommon relish in countering the image of dourness by evoking his fondness for the impassioned verse of Shelley.84 But his interests were not confined to the culture of the elite: he was equally if not more intrigued by the other Buenos Aires—the culture of those among the marginalized who were not desperate to become integrated into elite culture, but accepted and indeed relished their marginalization. It was in these barrios (districts), such as Boca (which elected Alfredo Palacios as Argentina’s first socialist congressman in 1904) that lunfardo (the slang of the Buenos Aires underworld), tango, and street theater thrived. It was here that the public libraries, many of them founded by the PSA, flourished, particularly during the 1920s, attracting a wide range of people to their lectures, training courses, reading

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groups, outings to cultural events and dances, parties, and picnics.85 It is less clear that these libraries actually led to any significant increase in serious reading: women borrowed romantic novels and students used the textbooks, but most of the holdings probably remained gloriously untouched “in luxurious locked cabinets.”86 Even so, there is evidence for the emergence of a mass reading public after the First World War in “the dramatic increase in newspaper runs, the appearance of hugely popular magazines, pamphlets and ‘weekly novels,’ and the wide spectrum of publishers dedicated to printing cheap books.”87 The highest circulation newspaper, Crítica, founded in 1913 and modeled on popular U.S. papers, geared itself to an audience more interested in the novelties of modern life than the traditions of the lettered city, and there was also a real craze for radio.88 As Justo himself noted, by the 1920s there were at least the beginnings of a cultural infrastructure to support mass participatory democracy.89 Justo’s own career, like Rodó’s, was shaped by these developments. The son of an Italian-descended father and an Argentine creole mother, he was born into a reasonably well-off family, his father working as an estate administrator. He was too young to benefit from Sarmiento’s famous educational reforms of the early 1870s, which laid the foundations of public elementary schooling in Argentina. In the absence of any state primary schools when he was a small boy, he was sent to the private “English college,” where he learnt his first foreign language.90 In 1877, aged 12, he entered the Colegio Nacional, where, he miserably recalled, the teaching was still done by old-fashioned methods of repetition and rote, and he found himself drawn to science because the experiments broke the monotony of his other lessons.91 He went to take one of the first courses in modern medicine at the University of Buenos Aires,92 graduating with distinction in 1888. As a student, he supplemented his income by working as a parliamentary reporter for La Prensa, covering the major public debates, especially on secularization, of the 1880s. Later, he established a platform for his ideas in the other major national newspaper, La Nación, for which he wrote a column under the pseudonym “Cittadino.” He also taught a course in the University Faculty of Medicine for a couple of years, having been invited to do so because of early reformist pressures to keep the curriculum up to date. The modernizers could not at that stage prevail, however, as they were to do after the University Reform Movement of 1918, and in 1906 Justo resigned amidst disputes with traditionalists about syllabus content.93 His own

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newspaper, La Vanguardia, absorbed increasingly more of his time, especially after it switched from a weekly to a daily in 1905. While still continuing to practice medicine, he also devoted increasingly more time to his work in the PSA, which culminated in his election as a deputy in 1912. From an early age, Justo experienced the effects of modernization at firsthand not only in Buenos Aires and other urban areas but also out in the campo. His mother’s family owned land in Tapalqué, on the edge of Buenos Aires province, which was frontier territory in the struggle for land against the indigenous peoples of the pampa. As a young medical student, he went to Tucumán to help treat a cholera epidemic, and later, having recently married, he spent three years in the provincial town of Junín (1900–1903) practicing medicine and observing the conditions of Argentine agriculture. Throughout his life he continued to make regular journeys into the interior of the country. He also saw the consequences of modernization in Europe, where as a newly qualified doctor he studied clinical practice for a year (1888–1889 in Bern, Vienna, Paris, and Berlin), and in the United States of America, which he visited in 1895, specifically to observe the social situation there for himself. He went from the United States to Spain, to meet fellow socialists, and then on to Belgium (where he saw in action a socialist party committed to parliamentarism and cooperativism), Germany, and England. This accumulated experience led him to conclude, in 1909, that modern society was full of aberrations: “Wealth is accompanied by sterility. As well as rapid technical progress there is tremendous disorder [ . . . ]. The economy establishes a thousand connections between people [ . . . ] but the craven interests of capital are sometimes enough to pitch one nation against another.” 94 Later, he returned to Europe for conferences of the Socialist International in Copenhagen (1910), Bern, and Amsterdam (1919). Through his contacts in the international socialist movement, he developed wide horizons of comparison to apply to his analysis of Argentina. Like many of his Argentine contemporaries, he was particularly interested in the experiences of the English colonies of comparable natural endowment, especially New Zealand and Australia. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he argued that the success of the Australian Labor Party, which formed the world’s first majority Labor Party government from 1910 to 1913 and held on to power until 1920, was at least in part due to the fact that the Australian state’s administrative capacity was relatively new and so there were fewer

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entrenched obstacles to worker power.95 The dilemma for countries such as Argentina, he concluded from his scanning of international developments, was as follows: Economic progress has incorporated us fully into the world market, in which we are a mere province. That international division of labor demands that we manage our own affairs intelligently if we want to conserve our autonomy. If, attentive only to immediate gains, we forget that in modern societies each person has a political role to play, we will be a mere source of supplies for Europe, with the appearance of political independence, [but only] until they want to take it away from us, or some stronger nation grants us its humiliating and costly protection.96

In other words, the preservation of national independence was dependent upon the promotion of mass participation in politics. As a child, Justo had lived through the violence that accompanied Argentine modernization: the traumatic War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay (1865–1870); Bartolomé Mitre’s armed revolt against alleged electoral fraud in 1874, in which Justo’s father had taken part; the notorious War of the Desert (1878–1879), when many indigenous people were massacred to clear the pampas for commercial exploitation, and a further uprising in 1880 against the federalization of Buenos Aires. Violence always repelled him, and he consistently rejected it as a political strategy, whether in the form of interventions by the armed forces or anarchist direct action.97 His first major involvement in national politics came in 1890, when the conservative-liberal oligarchy of landowners, bankers, and bureaucrats, who had pursued a positivist-inspired nation-building project of export-led growth, foreign investment, and centralization of power in Buenos Aires since 1880, faced their first significant challenge. Runaway inflation in the late 1880s (caused at least in part by land speculation) led to an economic crisis, which provided the pretext for a rebellion by a diverse coalition of interest groups who all felt disadvantaged by the government-by-clique of the ruling Partido Autonomista Nacional (PAN). Young professionals, university students, federalists, Catholics, and new landholders united behind lawyer and Congressman Leandro Alem, who founded the Unión Cívica de la Juventud (UCJ) to demand provincial autonomy, limited social reform, and an end to electoral malpractice and administrative corruption. Justo had already seen for himself the levels of fraud and intimidation that buttressed PAN rule when, volunteering as an election scrutineer, he found that all the other scrutineers were not only absolutely determined to prevent votes against the official

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candidate from being counted, but also fully equipped with arms to help them do so.98 Attracted by the idea of an anticorruption movement, therefore, in April 1890 he signed the founding charter of what now called itself just the Unión Cívica, but he quickly became disillusioned when Leandro Alem proposed a civil-military uprising. On July 26, 1890 (“El Noventa”), Alem and his followers staged a mass rally in Buenos Aires, supported by some units of the armed forces. Justo, who had argued for peaceful action, tended the wounded but refused to take part in any fighting. Loyalist troops prevailed, but the incumbent president was forced to resign, and his successor, Carlos Pellegrini, made some limited concessions to stabilize the situation. The Unión Cívica split between those prepared to reach an accommodation with Pellegrini and Alem’s followers, who formed the UCR, which in itself soon became riven by a leadership struggle between Alem and his nephew Hipólito Yrigoyen. Justo was further disenchanted with the UCR when Yrigoyen led another attempted armed revolt in 1893, and even more so when Yrigoyen became undisputed leader after Alem’s suicide in 1896. Although Justo shared the UCR’s opposition to corruption, he was deeply suspicious of its attempts to cast itself not as a political party but as a movement of national regeneration, and he opposed the Radicals’ self-declared “intransigence,” which he saw as a throwback to the caudillista politics he so despised. As well as being the first year in which oligarchic rule wobbled, 1890 was also the first year in which May Day was celebrated in Argentina. The Argentine labor movement dated back to 1857, when typographers formed the first mutual aid society, which became a union and carried out Argentina’s first successful strike action in 1878. In 1890 various union groups met with the aim of organizing a national labor federation. Socialist organizations (which had begun with the Club Alemán Vorwärts, founded in Buenos Aires in 1882) also became more active in the early 1890s, as other immigrant communities founded their own groups (a French one in 1891; an Italian one in 1894), and initiatives were taken to bring them together, which ultimately led to the foundation of the PSA in 1896. The political crisis of 1890, therefore, produced three main responses: (1) a combination of reformism and repression from the liberal-conservative oligarchy (Carlos Pellegrini); (2) a political movement—the UCR—aiming to represent the divided new middle sectors and advocating “civic responsibility”; and (3) the PSA, which was a party of doctors and lawyers, mostly from immigrant families,99 with a membership of mainly skilled

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workers, and a few short-lived adherents among the literati,100 all of whom left after a few years, disillusioned by the party’s resolute reformism. The main political challenge facing both the UCR and the PSA was to integrate the culture of the marginalized into national life, in the face of an elite that was determined to defend its own way of life, with repression if necessary. Justo’s Approach to Modernity: Clearing Out the Field of Democracy It was Justo’s fellow-socialist from Uruguay, Emilio Frugoni, who wrote about the need for socialism in Latin American countries to perform a task that elsewhere had been carried out by radical parties of the bourgeoisie, namely “a clearing out of the field of democracy” (desbrozamiento del campo de la democracia) in order to prepare “the spirits and mentalities [of citizens] for the adoption of good political habits.”101 The phrase neatly captures the dual force of Justo’s efforts at both eradication and cultivation, within the context of a continuous process of social transformation in which he envisaged the state becoming less interventionist but not dissolving altogether. In itself, Javier Franzé has suggested, Justo’s non-dissolution of the state is “a metaphor” of how he saw the logic of historical change: for him, the question of the state was not structural, but instrumental.102 In the process of transforming a bourgeois democracy into a workers’ democracy, the operations of the state would be directed toward different ends, but the means would remain more or less the same. In other words, Justo did not accept the classical Marxist view that the state was innately an agent of the privileged classes, but argued instead that it could potentially act as “a power to coordinate and regulate [ . . . ] relations of production” in favor of workers.103 As working-class influence on the state gradually increased through the exercise of suffrage, he envisaged, so the state could reduce its policing activities to a minimum and “develop its administrative function to the maximum, for the good of the community.”104 The state would thereby become a vehicle through which the working class could “moderate capitalist exploitation until it was completely abolished.”105 The role of the state, as Justo saw it, was to facilitate the “free development of the working class,” and the law should be designed to remove any restrictions on this development and ensure the optimum conditions for it.106 In order to achieve this aim, the state had to be organized in certain ways. The first requirement was universal and unrestricted suffrage for all citizens, including women. As political

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activity spread through the mass of the people in modern societies, argued Justo, “privilege would weaken and legal institutions would adapt more quickly and easily to technology and economics.”107 Argentina was relatively advanced in stipulating, from 1857 onward, suffrage for all native and naturalized males over the age of 18, with no literacy or property qualifications; voting was both voluntary and public, however, and during the late nineteenth century probably less than 10 percent of those eligible actually voted.108 The significance of the Sáenz Peña electoral reform of 1912 was that it made voting both compulsory and secret, and also introduced a form of proportional representation. It still excluded immigrants, however, who, in Justo’s view, had to be given the opportunity to become citizens as soon as possible (after one year, specified the PSA program), so that they, too, could participate in the political process. He was strongly against both anarchist apoliticism and syndicalist economism, and many of his ideas were developed partly in order to counter the increasing strength of both movements in Argentina during the 1900s.109 The main cause for optimism about U.S. society, he concluded, was that “every man, whether native or foreigner, is a citizen, and every citizen is a voter,” and women, too, were agitating for their emancipation.110 In order to ensure maximum representativeness and an effective system of checks and balances throughout the federal system, he advocated proportional representation, a strengthening of the powers of the national legislature in relation to the executive, and municipal autonomy. He also thought it crucial for the state to be both demilitarized (the PSA manifesto stipulated abolition of the standing army and civilian control of the police force) and secular. The campaign for separation of Church and state came to occupy a lot of his time as a senator; in 1926 he noted approvingly that “the intellectual level” of the Uruguayan population had risen markedly as a result of disestablishment in 1919.111 For Justo, there was a reciprocal relationship between modernization and democratization: not only did modernization have to be democratized but also democracy had to be modernized. Everything that he wanted to uproot—electoral fraud, corruption, and demagoguery; caudillismo and militarism; clericalism; dogmatism in all its forms (including among his fellow socialists) and rhetoric—was encapsulated in the política criolla (creole politics) of the liberal-conservative elites who had run Argentina since 1880, and that Justo quickly also came to associate with Yrigoyen’s populist leadership of the UCR.112 Given that the Argentine state functioned at that time largely as a vehicle for the oligarchy to defend its interests, combating política criolla meant being to an extent “against the

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advances of the State, against the political parasitism of the provinces.”113 Thus there were certain important areas where the state should not intervene, in Justo’s judgment. The most notorious one, upon which the subsequent claim that he was a europeísta was mainly based, was trade. Justo advocated free trade. He did so on the grounds that it was the best way to keep prices low for working people. Since Argentina exported beef that could otherwise have been available to the Argentine population, thereby making the beef they could buy far more expensive, it was all the more important, argued Justo, for other items of food and clothing to be made available as cheaply as possible. The best way to do so, given that Argentine manufacturing was only in the early stages of development, was through allowing imports to enter the country without imposing heavy duties on them.114 It was also an illusion, he maintained, to think that “the country’s progress depended on the implantation of artificial industries or that good industries were in need of legal protection.”115 At this time, it is worth noting, support for free trade was widespread among the Argentine labor movement, and if Justo had supported protectionism he would have been lining up with the sugar barons of Tucumán and the conservatives around Carlos Pellegrini.116 At the Socialist International Congress held in Bern in 1919, Justo made the general case—to little avail—that protectionism was the worst form of nationalism, undermining solidarity between workers who were employed in the same economic sector but happened to live in different nation-states.117 What socialists should do, he urged, was to work for free trade with all customs duties eliminated within 20 years, supplemented by labor legislation to protect workers from exploitation. Through free trade, he argued, cultural and ethical convergence could be brought about in a grand movement of international solidarity: The kind of [international] relations that make peace possible should also materialise in effective economic relations. [To work] against the vested interests of particular companies or groups, we must bring peoples together on the basis of free trade. And these relations must become more spiritual. We are interested in knowing [other] peoples not just for their products but also for their social organisation, their political ways and their morality.118

Although he argued that it was important for utilities to be in public ownership, especially in Argentina where otherwise they were

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likely to be owned by imperial powers, he did not assign a major entrepreneurial role to the state, nor did he think that it should intervene to support businesses that were not competitive: “What we deny [ . . . ] is that it corresponds to the State to promote business interests or artificially to generate companies the rationale for which is problematic, for the simple reason that they have not emerged spontaneously.”119 He produced astute critiques of the role of British capital in Argentina, but was not in principle opposed to foreign investment, which he regarded as an inevitable element in the modernizing process.120 Similarly, Justo maintained that the state should regulate conditions of work, but resisted the idea of collective bargaining through state arbitration. Instead, he wanted to strengthen independent social organizations (which were weak in early-twentieth-century Argentina, especially in relation to employer-worker relations),121 so that the government would no longer be the first port of call for all groups in contention. This was crucial to his project of uprooting the Argentine caudillista tradition, which he identified in the tendency of all social sectors to seek one-off arbitration of disputes by presidential decree rather than working to change the legislative framework through public debate. Even if in the short term the executive might sometimes intervene opportunistically to support workers’ claims, he argued, in the longer run it was only once employers were forced to negotiate without being able to rely on the armed might of the state that they would be obliged to make genuine concessions in the workers’ favor.122 What the state should do, however, in Justo’s view, was to regulate working conditions, to provide education and to support social welfare throughout the whole country. Unlike most socialists at the time, who tended to concentrate their efforts on the urban working class, Justo undertook a thorough analysis of conditions of labor in the countryside and proposed detailed policies for the rural areas, noting in his Programa Socialista del Campo (1901) that the census of 1895 had showed that a majority of Argentines (57.2 percent) lived in the countryside.123 Indeed, Argentina was unusual in Latin America in the extent to which both rural and urban social structures were transformed by modernization. But Justo was one of the few people to take that into account, always insisting that measures to benefit the workers should be applied across the nation: for example, in 1913 he campaigned for a law granting a six-day week to the workers of Buenos Aires to be extended to the rest of Argentina, drily noting that “in the provinces they have Sundays too.”124 There should be no need for

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antagonism between rural and urban workers, he argued, if policies were designed in recognition of their distinct needs. Taking the view that agricultural conditions of production, which required long hours of intensive labor at certain times of year, made standard labor provisions such as the eight-hour day or the six-day week harder to implement than in other sectors, he maintained, nevertheless, that Argentina should emulate New Zealand in legislating for more hygienic and comfortable conditions of board and lodging on estates. A further beneficial measure, he proposed, would be to ban payment by goods-in-kind from the boss’s store.125 It was also the state’s role, Justo wrote, to use taxation to bring about a redistribution of wealth,126 first of all by replacing indirect taxes, which hit the poor hardest, with direct taxes on the incomes of the rich. The founding charter of PSA called for the complete replacement of indirect taxes with an income tax, but Justo later persuaded his party that there were problems with a blanket income tax which made no distinction between rental income, business profits, and earnings from labor or professional work. In Argentina, he argued, it was the large landowners who were not only unproductive but also responsible for the national debt, both through their “squandering” of state resources and through contracting for railways to be built that served mainly to increase the value of their lands. The state should tax their unearned income, he maintained, then it would be able to provide public services without having to cut wages.127 In a workers’ democracy, he foresaw, there would be no indirect taxes on basic commodities; instead, the revenue for public services would come from taxes on alcohol and tobacco, on rental income, and on interest earned on capital investments.128 In sum, the role of the state in any “modern civilised” society, as Justo saw it, was to establish a framework of order, legality, and service provision,129 protecting the civil rights of freedom of association, reunion, and speech, all of which were “indispensable to working people.”130 He maintained that the state and what we now refer to as civil society (the term only became current in Latin America with the introduction of Gramsci’s thought during the 1970s) were necessary complements to each other, the one acting as a check against the potential excesses of the other. His conception of civil society was a blend—another of his famous syntheses—of the liberal idea of a plurality of autonomous voluntary associations existing in productive tension with the state and the Gramscian idea of an overlapping territory between state and society in which the bourgeoisie and the working class played out their battle for hegemony.131

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It was during his formative visit to the United States in 1895 that Justo first became aware of the creative potential of civil autonomy. Justo regarded the United States of America as the closest among modern nations to “the industrial type,”132 where capitalism was developing most freely and where its evolution could best be studied (just as Marx and Engels had seen England as exemplary of the capitalism of their times). What struck him first was that economic development had taken place almost wholly untouched by the state: “apart from the army, the mail service and public education, everything in this country has been left to private initiative and competition.”133 The results were initially beneficial, he noted, but as enterprises became larger and more centralized the lack of state regulation came to militate against the interests of the individual. He gave the example of the railways, which logic would dictate to be most cheaply run on the basis of building one line for any particular route. The theory of free competition had stimulated the building of more lines, however, which in turn generated a whole army of agents trying to outbid each other on prices, all of whom were ultimately living off the public.134 The large companies would then come to some private arrangement among themselves, protecting their own interests at the expense of the public. The main social consequence of unfettered capitalism was that class was just as evident in the United States as in Europe, argued Justo, noting that the term “society” conventionally referred not to the whole nation, or even to the population of any particular place, but to a group of capitalist aristocrats “who pass their time in dissipation and pleasure-seeking.”135 The antithesis of “society” was “the people,” which—nationalist rhetoric apart—conventionally referred not to the whole of the U.S. population but only to that sector of it obliged to work for a living. Thus, while open competition between private propertyowners had undoubtedly stimulated the U.S. economy, it had prematurely aged U.S. society, argued Justo.136 The United States did not promote liberty and equality—even for the limited part of the population that enjoyed them—because of a fundamental commitment to those values, he suggested, but out of economic necessity.137 The resulting lack of a widely shared sense of the common good explained, for him, why U.S. public administration was corrupt and lacking in consensus or clear aims.138 In Argentina, having long looked to an authority figure to rectify all their ills (the caudillista tradition) the workers particularly needed, Justo argued, to develop a strong sense of their own capacity for

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independent action: We want the working class to raise itself up not so much through the help that comes from without but more from the help it can give itself from within, through “self-help.” [ . . . ] This capacity for the working classes to help themselves has to come, above all, from intelligent, disciplined, methodical and active organisation. We do not want the intervention of the State or the extension of its powers [ . . . ] except insofar as the working classes can conquer political power, penetrate to the core of the State and impregnate it with their ideals.139

Going against the grain of the European socialist tradition, therefore, he sought to create the organizational possibilities for an autonomous civil society in Argentina, seeing it as the best means of counteracting caudillismo, clientelism, and the popular myth of the state as the guiding force of society.140 Values and modes of conduct in government and in public opinion were mutually reinforcing, he argued. A self-constituted, independent organizational base would allow the mass of workers to develop the level of class consciousness that would eventually enable them to administer the state in their own interests. In his vision of a workers’ democracy, the state would still be needed to provide public services such as sanitation, education, and welfare.141 But he saw an important role for organizations of civil society in promoting the solidarity and sense of community needed to counter individualism and capitalist exploitation. I now turn to three policy issues through which he sought to bring about what he saw as the desirable balance between state and society: property rights, cooperativism, and education. Public and Private Property Although Justo attacked the liberal principle of unalienable private property rights,142 he was also unpersuaded by the standard socialist mantra of collective ownership of the means of production and exchange. “It’s a hypothesis that has not been verified,” he muttered darkly when the first congress of the PSA voted for it, against his advice.143 He strongly disapproved of the Soviet Revolution’s property confiscations, arguing that it was easy enough to do that in itself, but far harder to create the cooperative ethos and the level of technical knowledge needed to ensure that productive capacity would not subsequently be lost.144 He was also against the syndicalist strategy of workers directly seizing factories, arguing that for one particular

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group of workers to own the property was only a variation on private property and carried with it comparable dangers of monopoly. Although he saw collective ownership as the ultimate goal, because under modern conditions of production it was the only way for workers to be sure that competition would work to their benefit,145 in order for it to operate effectively it either had to be organized on the basis of workers’ cooperatives, or if the state had to be involved, then its role should be limited to acting as a guarantor that the enterprise would be run in the public interest.146 In the context of the Argentine economy, where the main sector was not industry but agriculture, the whole issue needed careful analysis, insisted Justo. In agriculture, private ownership could be beneficial to production, he argued, so long as it was regulated by the state. The priority was to prevent land being used merely as a source of rental income instead of being worked productively.147 New Zealand offered a valuable model: there, the land was state-owned and rented out at reasonable rates for long leases (999 years). Argentina needed a policy along the same lines, he suggested. The government should reform the tax system so that large estates were penalized out of existence, improve economic opportunities for smallholders, protect them from land seizure by creditors, and ameliorate conditions for rural workers. The PSA should develop policies to support independent small producers, a sector that was increasing in Argentina. Unlike their counterparts in Europe, he noted, Argentine independent farmers, who worked relatively large plots of land, requiring the use of machinery, were not reactionary, but a force for modernization.148 Smallholdings were the only form of land division in which “the rural producer develops his personality. Through the small farms [chacras] the book will come to our pampas, and among woodlands, grasslands and fields a garden will appear.”149 These people were primarily workers, he maintained, with whom the PSA should make common cause: They and their families work, their customs and their language are those of the workers, they mix on equal terms with the artisans and labourers of the towns, and, although at certain times of the year they employ waged labour and they are then in a sense capitalists and entrepreneurs, [overall] they have the best of credentials for being admitted into the working class.150

Indeed, Justo proclaimed in Congress, Argentina’s best hopes for genuine democracy lay not only in the urban barrios, but also in the chacras.151

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The creation of more small family farms, granted land by the state so that they would not need to pay rent, and supported by a favorable tax system, would be the best way to ensure that the Argentine land was worked for the general good.152 Their income should then be taxed fairly, according to its value, and then used for public services, so that all the people would benefit from the profits gained from the land. Agrarian reform was, therefore, linked to tax reform: “ ‘The land for those who work it,’ ‘the land for those who cultivate it’ are not, then, wholly adequate slogans. [ . . . ] We want the land to be for the farmer only insofar as the land is a means of making a living, not to the extent that it becomes a source of profit. The land for the people, is our motto.”153 The value of land was a social product, he argued, because the differences in its value were determined not by varying levels of intelligence or effort among farmers, but by the physical and social conditions under which it was worked. The Argentine state should not hesitate to declare so, affirm its right to use it for the collectivity, and intervene if necessary to prevent land speculation.154 Thus Justo rethought the conventional liberal and socialist distinctions between public and private property, redrawing the boundaries to develop a more flexible concept of property that he deemed appropriate to the conditions of the Argentine economy. Cooperativism The principle of solidarity was the best defense against the excesses of economic rationalization, he argued.155 Excess individualism was antirational: under capitalist agriculture “the earth is not worked together, socially, intelligently, but instead is reduced to fragments by property titles and the appetite for gain.”156 Contrary to the standard Marxist position, he did not assume that the advance of technology would necessarily increase the alienation of individuals, but suggested instead that scientific advancement could well be conducive to an extension of human solidarity: because of the huge division of labour between men, each one of us is so incapable of easily performing even a tiny proportion of the excessive number of technical procedures on which our daily life depends that technology in general is now a part of the physical, biological experience, the natural atmosphere, of each and every person. Even as a producer, each person depends on many others for the primary materials and the tools and machines with which to work, none of which he would know how to make himself.157

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Workers themselves were not necessarily hostile to technology, he argued, just because there were various instances of artisans destroying the new machines that put them out of work. It was not the machines themselves that were exploitative, but the historical conditions in which workers were compelled to use them. If the extra profits gained from the use of machinery were to be distributed among the workers, then the technical advantages of mechanization could be maintained without the social disadvantages. 158 One of the main challenges for socialists, in his view, was to create conditions under which progress could occur without exploitation. A central element in his strategy was “free cooperation,” which, he suggested, could “combine the simplicity and ingenuity of a primitive economy with the precision and strength of a modern economy.”159 In an early lecture given to the Centro Socialista Obrero in 1897, Justo reviewed various European experiences of workers’ cooperatives— Robert Owen and the Rochdale pioneers, French, German, and Italian movements arising out of 1848—in order to highlight his views about their potential role in Argentina. He argued that the utopian hopes of cooperativism were misplaced, and that cooperative societies were most likely to work when focused on “more immediate and practical ends.”160 Production cooperatives had not prospered without state aid, he said, noting that by the end of the nineteenth century only a few thousand workers “in the whole of the civilised world” were organized thus, largely because of the structural constraints imposed by large-scale industry that required intensive capital investment. They might be possible, however, in sectors where mechanization was relatively low and large sums of capital were not, therefore, required—such as in the craft industries of Buenos Aires.161 But, overall, he was not in favor of production cooperatives, pointing to the danger that they were vulnerable to competition or to the temptation to become monopolies themselves. He was far more enthusiastic about purchasing cooperatives, which he pointed out were far more common in Europe, covering about 2 million workers.162 He argued that there was no evidence that workers selling goods to each other at cost price resulted in lower wages; indeed, he noted, wages were highest in England, where purchasing cooperatives were the most developed and basic goods were cheapest.163 Even so, the limits of these cooperatives must also be recognized, he warned, arguing that all exported goods had to be excluded, which in Argentina meant the majority of goods. Public services should also be excluded, in his view, because they were consumed by

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everybody and, therefore, should be in the hands of the municipality or the national state. Cooperative societies were no substitute, he later argued, for workers organizing in unions to defend their economic rights and in political parties to defend themselves against excessive taxation and to compel the state to provide services such as education. But they were one way in which the working class could help itself and strengthen its capacities for broader struggles: Free cooperation is solidarity in the making, and demands of its members a much higher degree of historical capacity than the negative union tactics of strike action; it is the field on which proletarians acquire rights and contract obligations amongst themselves, as equals; for them, permanently subjected to the exploitative wage relation, it is the first opportunity to enter into a true contract. Even if elements from different social positions participate, free cooperation is above all a means of worker emancipation, one of the modalities of modern class struggle. It gives the working class a chance to act not as employee, but as consumer, employer and producer, as controller of the means of production.164

Thus he saw cooperatives as a crucible in which workers could learn the skills they would need to run the state and the economy in a workers’ democracy: in acting not as wage laborers, but as consumers, employers, and producers, they would become “the housekeeper of the means of production.”165 He attached increasing importance to the formation of cooperatives as a way of “creating a new economic world,” in which use rather than profit was the main objective,166 and in which work and solidarity were “the two great precepts of the new morality.”167 By the late 1920s, when his fellowsocialist Mario Bravo had finally achieved passage of a Law of Cooperative Societies (1926), Justo was expressing ever greater hopes about the cooperative movement, which he stipulated should be independent of any political party or religious institution. Cooperativism was, he claimed, the route to economic agency for the working class: Let us aim at a world in which each individual [ . . . ] is sufficiently advanced intellectually and morally to create a [collective] economic consciousness and will. The essential and fundamental element in the cooperative movement is the development of a collective psychology, which can raise each human being to the level of an active and aware

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economic agent who can make his/her influence felt in the organisation and direction of human labour.168

A School of the People for the People169 Justo shared the view of the great Argentine educator Domingo Sarmiento that sovereignty resided not in the will of the people but in their reason.170 Justo’s critics have argued that he also shared Sarmiento’s view of the masses as inherently untrustworthy, and that he helped to perpetuate the notorious distinction between civilization and barbarism.171 The evidence is mixed: Justo often recorded optimism about the capacities of the people, but he did also express doubts about how they might act politically without access to education; even so, such passages hardly compare with the racist statements of disillusionment that Sarmiento made toward the end of his life. Unlike Sarmiento (and indeed some other PSA intellectuals, who were inf luenced by the prevailing Social Darwinism), Justo took the position that all races were equal, refuting racial pessimism and attributing all social ills to a lack of education. “Why speak of races?” he demanded. “It can lead only to foolish pride or depressing humiliation.”172 In any case, all peoples were of mixed race, he wrote: “not even on the smallest, remotest islands have unmixed racial types been found,” and some of the most successful people in Latin America, for example, the paulistas in Brazil, were known to be a mixture of indigenous and European.173 He sharply criticized the Australian Labor Party for supporting a “white Australia” policy, condemned the treatment of blacks in the United States, and argued that socialists from Latin America, that “immense breeding ground of mixedrace people [mestizos],” should lead the campaign for racial equality against the prejudices of “the new English-speaking countries.”174 To that extent, Justo was ahead of his times. He has, however, been charged with anti-Semitism. In a notorious article of 1923, he attacked the Jewish belief that they were God’s chosen people as “the very negation of internationalism.”175 Justo’s biographer Luis Pan has argued that he showed no prejudice against individuals (his first wife, Mariana Chertkoff, was from a Jewish family, as were many leaders and members of the PSA), but that he was strongly critical of certain Jewish practices, such as circumcision and the dietary rules, although perhaps no more so than he was of manifestations of Catholic orthodoxy.176

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What is beyond dispute is that education, mixed by both race and gender,177 was central to Justo’s nonviolent model of social change: all reforms could be achieved peacefully, he maintained, through legislation, so long as the laws were understood and implemented by the workers themselves.178 It was crucial, therefore, to equip people to debate issues, to analyze problems critically, and to develop their own opinions, so that reason would come to prevail in relations between individuals and nations.179 Given the complexities of modern life, Justo maintained, people had to acquire a certain capacity for abstract reasoning in order to function effectively, just as they could no longer rely on face-to-face interactions and had to develop a broader sense of community: “For modern man technology can only be grasped in the form of scientific, general, and abstract principles, like the relations of social production, which are economic relations that no longer depend simply on the trade organisation or on cooperation, but on political action.”180 In a bill proposing the creation of 1,000 schools to celebrate Argentina’s independence centenary, Justo justified his demands on the grounds that people without education would be unable to be good parents, good workers, or good citizens: They will not know how to look after either their own or their children’s health and so they will become a decrepit and degenerate people [raza]. [ . . . ] They will have no more aptitude for technical progress than slaves, and in politics, what can illiterates, obliged to vote by a law that they cannot read, possibly be except fodder for charlatanry and fraud?181

At that time, nearly seventy years after Sarmiento’s groundbreaking report on the importance of elementary education,182 nearly half of Argentina’s school-age population of just over 1.5 million still did not attend school. With an illiteracy rate of 35 percent, Argentina was way behind competitor economies such as Australia (4.5 percent), New Zealand (1.7 percent), Canada (17.1 percent), and the United States (7.7 percent).183 Like virtually all Latin American educators of his era, Justo saw the provision of a common education for all the nation’s children as “one of the essential functions of the [modern] state.”184 He argued that primary education should be privileged over higher, because the most important thing was that all citizens should learn to read and write in order to prevent “lies and fiction, which easily spread where the majority of people are in a state of ignorance, [from

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emerging] in every sphere.”185 It was far preferable that the majority of the people were instructed in the basics to equip them for “historically conscious action” than that a minority should implement even “the most enlightened and humanitarian despotism.”186 In particular, it was crucial for the working class to develop a cadre of people capable of managing the production process so that they would have no need of “a privileged class to supply them with directors.”187 The Russian Revolution had demonstrated, argued Justo, how important it was for workers to have their own technical personnel: “The Proletariat should not be looking [ . . . ] within the ranks of the enemy for the advanced technical skills and economic skills that are essential to the maintenance of social life, and even more so for its progress.”188 What chiefly distinguished Justo from the majority of his contemporaries who were in favor of state education was that he saw it as a necessary but not in itself sufficient condition for the well-being of a modern socialist republic. For Justo, it was the “general culture” of a population that was the significant measure of the working-class consciousness that alone, in his view, would determine whether or not the people were truly sovereign. He deemed such consciousness to be high in Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia, France, and Italy, but generally low in Britain and the United States, which were proof, he thought, that it was perfectly possible to have an educated workforce that was still operating at a reduced intellectual level overall.189 He attributed this, at least in the United States, to the prevalence of religiosity in society, which “has to a large extent neutralised the beneficial effect that advances in industrial technology could have had on the intelligence of the people.”190 It was extraordinary, he wrote, the extent to which the hotchpotch that is religion [el frangollo religioso] invades everything [in the USA]. The State has no religion, but there is hardly an official function or document of any importance without invocations to the deity; there is hardly a monument, even among the most modern, that is not disfigured by absurd inscription.191

A widespread popular belief in miracles was an “inhibiting, paralysing belief, which suppresses individual initiative.”192 Justo was adamant that all public education should be secular. Catholic education stunted the spirit by cultivating hypocrisy, he wrote.193 He took a conventional Marxist view of religion as “the fraud that complements or substitutes for force as a means of maintaining obedience

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among the subjugated classes. The Church with its dogma is in this respect a substitute for military power.”194 He did not object, he stated, to children going to mass if they chose to, just as he had done as a boy, but he was thoroughly opposed to schoolchildren being indoctrinated with Catholic beliefs: “That is to corrupt them, and also to brutalise them, instilling them with dogma that will sterilise their intelligence and inhibit their will.”195 Thus, Justo emphasized, it was essential to promote secularism in the wider public sphere as well as in state policy. In terms of cultivating the general intellectual level of the people Argentina’s late modernization could be an advantage, in Justo’s view, because it meant that the masses had not already been indoctrinated with alternative ideologies.196 The daily press was a crucial forum for the development of public opinion: “In a modern society, [ . . . ] if political life is dissolute, its vices for the most part come from the Press and are reflected in it.”197 The broadsheet La Vanguardia is a valuable source for gleaning a sense of Justo’s ideas about the role of a newspaper in informing public opinion. The seed money was provided by Justo himself and one of the other founders, Augusto Kühn. The paper appeared every Saturday during its first decade, with no permanent editor and a group of nearly twenty people taking it in turns to edit the issues. When it went daily in 1905, Justo fulfilled the role of editor for the first five years. From the outset La Vanguardia combined severe criticism of the current government (which resulted in closures on several occasions) with plans for building a new society. On its masthead was the slogan “Scientific socialist newspaper.” Its remit, as set out in the first editorial, was as follows: We come to represent in the press the intelligent and sensible proletariat. We come to promote all reforms tending to improve the situation of the working class (the 8-hour day, abolition of indirect taxes, protection for women and children). We come to foment the political action of working people both Argentine and foreign, as the only way to obtain these reforms. We come to combat all privileges, all laws [ . . . ] made by the rich for their own advantage [ . . . ]. We come to spread the economic doctrines created by Adam Smith, Ricardo and Marx, to present things how they are, and to prepare among ourselves for the great social transformation that is approaching.198

No other Argentine political party founded a publication that lasted so long (until 1955, including four years of clandestinity under Perón). Sober in tone and appearance, it carried relatively few illustrations,

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apart from cartoons. Typically it consisted of eight pages of substantial reports and commentaries on Argentine politics, economics, and labor affairs, covering the whole country, not just the capital; articles on social issues such as housing, alcoholism, and the role of sport; and accounts of international affairs such as the Russian Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, or the executions in 1927 of U.S. anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.199 It sold for the price of a tram ticket.200 It was a party newspaper and, as was to be expected, there was plenty of information about the activities of the Socialist Party and its deputies, including explanations of policy positions, but it was by no means a mere party tract. From 1919 onward, a special Sunday edition was produced, with supplements on literature, cinema, theater, and sport. The emphasis was on accessible reporting and analysis of contemporary affairs, and it is plausible to claim that, through the pages of La Vanguardia, Justo promoted “a marvellous migration of language and ideas from the scientific world to the field of politics.”201 Justo worried that La Vanguardia, as a specifically socialist newspaper, would be unable to reach broad sectors of the working class, and he, therefore, aimed to establish a more widely accessible source of news by starting El Diario del Pueblo in 1899. More militant in tone than La Vanguardia, its first editorial promised to oppose “the política criolla of the inept and rapacious oligarchy that weighs upon the country,” to defend “the working people of the cities and the countryside” and to take a stand against “the tyranny of the foreign [British] companies that monopolise the great public railway lines, and against the mercenary press.”202 For lack of funds, El Diario lasted only a couple of months, which was a source of lasting regret to him. When it closed, he noted, the office and the printing press passed into the hands of the Church, who proceeded to publish their own daily called El Pueblo, first carrying out an exorcism of the premises.203 Justo also encouraged a series of press publications based on the local cultural centers he helped to found, a good example of which is Germinal, published by Centro Social Democrático in Junín. Germinal was a newspaper, slightly bigger than British tabloid size. Copies from 1928 were six pages in length, most of which was taken up with box advertisements, of varying sizes, for a great variety of goods, services, and entertainments, most of which aimed to sell themselves on the basis of being “modern.” These newspaper arcades advertised everything from confiterías (“the best equipped, most hygienic, and best stocked in the area”) to cinemas to courses in accountancy. Amidst the exhortations to buy typewriters, steam irons (“an ultramodern machine”), bicycles, hats, and household goods,

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were articles on workers’ conditions, the activities of the PSA, local government issues and education; exhortations to vote; manifestos for peace; items about sport and announcements of local events at cinemas and libraries (including, prominently displayed on the front page, an overdue notice for one unfortunate citizen who had forgotten to return his library books).204 Justo’s whole approach to modernity was founded on a rejection of the Marxist concept of the intellectual vanguard, a scorn for “intellectual showing-off,”205 a denial that he had anything in common with “monarchical anarchists, occultist men of science, supermen [or] Illuminati whom nobody understands,”206 and a dismissal of the claims made by many of his contemporary intellectuals to be the voice of the people: We are not the people, but a small part of it; we do not see ourselves as called upon to free it from oppression, we do not attribute the role of liberators to ourselves. We merely make a contribution to enabling the working classes to liberate themselves, by teaching them to understand what we have already understood.207

In order for the workers to be able to emancipate themselves, it was crucial for socialism to purge itself of the legacy of German metaphysics, he argued, and to develop a language that was easily understood: As a popular and scientific movement, in order to be genuine socialism has to be ingenuous; in order to be fully conscious, it has to be of the common people [vulgar]. Despite what Engels said, socialism cannot admit any difference between “ordinary consciousness” and “real thinking,” a distinction which is discouraging for all those ordinary people who, without [being able] to go beyond their everyday consciousness, [nevertheless] aspire to the intellectual inheritance of humanity; socialism cannot embrace a doctrine that is esoteric, mysterious and accessible only to a few privileged people, each of whom interprets it in their own particular way.208

Justo’s own use of language was notable for precision, directness, and economy. His style was described by Frugoni as “severe, sarcastic, burning like a cauterising agent, incisive as a scalpel.”209 He was reputed to be highly particular about his choice of words, “scrupulously” eschewing metaphor or any other linguistic artifice in pursuit of the most precise possible expression of his ideas.210 His aim was to be, above all, accessible. 211 He sought to manipulate language

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as a tool of demystification, wielding irony and sarcasm “to ridicule deceit, lies and fiction.”212 Language mattered to him, as it did to Mariátegui (see chapter 5), because of its capacity to create myths, and whereas Mariátegui saw value in some myths, Justo always sought to debunk them. A telling example is his view of the gauchos: they were not, he argued, “ ‘a people fully conscious of their interests and their political rights,’ ” as had been romantically claimed by a well-known nineteenth-century Argentine historian, but nor were they “ ‘a filthy plague of bandits in revolt against the national authorities.’ ” They were “simply” (a favorite word in his struggle against baroque obfuscation) “the population of the countryside corralled and displaced by capitalist production, [ . . . ] who rose up against the ever more voracious landowners.”213 No authorities from the past, not even the great intellectuals of Argentine history such as Alberdi, should be accepted without critical reexamination, urged Justo, arguing that each generation had to think through its own problems in the light of its specific historical context.214 Foreign models and nationalist myths, such as argentinidad, were likewise subject to continual critical scrutiny. In an echo of Rodó’s emphasis on plasticity, Justo celebrated flexibility of mind as intrinsic to a truly socialist approach to the world. “We are the party of ideals, but we are not the party of illusions,” he famously declared. 215 Socialist theory, like all scientifically-based theory, was relative, he maintained, and no more than a framework for an unending practice of reflexivity.216 Conclusion All of Justo’s work was shaped by the conviction that the character of public discourse mattered: We are stimulated by debate, but we condemn diatribe; we are wholehearted supporters of a clash of ideas and feelings, but we are no less wholehearted opponents of a clash of personalities; there is nothing more fertile than real, lived democracy, and nothing more sterile than the pretence of democracy. Dissidence is not division, just as discipline is not a straitjacket.217

Although he was literally a legislator, he sought to demystify the aura of the legislator, arguing that citizens should adopt a critical, even subversive approach to all claims to authority.218 Political life should be “intelligent, virtuous, and accessible to all.”219 His dream was “a

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world without myths,” “in which all human beings, in solidarity with each other, develop fully and freely as individuals in a context of cooperation and equality.”220 He resisted the archetypes of cultural nationalism, which was just then emerging in Argentina. His proposed alternative to argentinidad or gauchismo (advocated by intellectuals such as Ricardo Rojas and Leopoldo Lugones)221 was a civic nationalism— “the sanest and most intelligent” form of nationalism—compatible with the internationalism that he saw as the main trend of the modern world.222 In his vision, the modern Argentine nation would be founded on a plural, popular (but not populist) nationalism, based on the shared symbols of “the outstretched hand, the Phrygian cap, the words liberty and equality, the strains of the national anthem, and the colours blue and white.”223 In other words, he sought a transformation of Argentine political culture, without which apparently progressive measures would be of little avail, he thought. He expressed doubts about the Sáenz Peña law in this respect, describing it as a response not to “a new sense of virtue, [ . . . ] but to a new notion of what the country needed at that moment.”224 He saw socialism as a moral force: “more than a historical theory, an economic hypothesis or a political doctrine,” it was “a mode of feeling, thinking and working that would invigorate and embellish the lives of both individuals and peoples.”225 It was a means to strike a balance between individual autonomy and social justice; between a sense of collective identity and a commitment to universal values. The key to sustaining this balance was participatory democracy, both within organizations for all working people and as a national political process. “Let the workers congregate,” he exhorted—the image of public space is vivid here—in a “workers’ democracy” that would be “different from bourgeois democracy,” which had brought “castle, throne and altar” to ruins only to make a new absolute of capitalist property rights.226 In sum, it can be said that Justo dedicated his life to creating not only an organizational network but also a language that could assimilate the world of the heterogeneous Argentine subaltern classes, who were immersed in a convulsive process of social and cultural stratification accentuated by rapid economic growth and by the instability of cultural values caused by diffusion of European norms over a terrain recently and only partly detached from the Hispanic-creole nineteenth century.227

In the event, it was to be an organicist, populist discourse, embodied first by Yrigoyen and later by Perón, that succeeded in expressing the

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“fragmented and diffuse inheritance of modernisation and archaism” and in capturing the constituency the socialists sought.228 Justo did not manage to implement a different model of the state from the paternalist one that prevailed both before and afterward, but in trying to reconfigure the relationship between the state and society in favor of working people, he had addressed concerns that were widely shared, not only in Argentina but throughout Latin America. His approach to modernity was fundamentally different from the technocratic model of the Generations of 1837 and 1880 in its emphasis on social justice, participatory democracy, associational life, and mass cultural activity. Borrowing from Manuel Garretón’s stimulating analysis of the contemporary situation, evoked in the epigraph to this chapter, it could be said that Justo proposed a model of modernity “capable of [ . . . ] combining scientific-technological rationality [and] expressivecommunicative rationality.”229 He was perhaps less effective at addressing the third component that Garretón identified as crucial to an alternative modernity, namely “historical memory and diversity of identities.” This is the subject of chapter 4.

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Chapter 4

Translating the Past into the Present: The Synthesizing Modernity of Alfonso Reyes

The past living on in the present “is not lost innocence, but integrated knowledge.” Aníbal Quijano1

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he idea that historical rupture is fundamental to the condition of modernity, as proposed by Marshall Berman and others, has been widely questioned in Latin America. Conservatives have not been alone in expressing fears about the consequences of profound upheaval: even revolutionary movements, committed to modernizing policies, have tended to cast themselves not so much as a break with the past as the culmination of its underlying trends. When Castro declared that history would absolve him, he was not only expressing faith in the judgment of the future, but also claiming legitimacy from his identification with a long line of “rebels against tyranny,” from the sages of ancient India and China all the way down the centuries to Rousseau and Tom Paine.2 The Mexican Revolution was born alongside “a burning defence of the past”;3 the Cuban Revolution declared its own end of history long before Fukuyama wrote his famous book; and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua represented their revolution as the long-deferred triumph of Sandino’s heroic struggle against U.S. occupation in the 1920s. Latin American revolutions have tended not to repudiate the past, as happened in France and Soviet Russia, but instead, to stake a claim to transcendent continuity based on creative assimilation of the past. In the context of what Carlos Fuentes has dubbed the “Nescafé civilization” of Latin America, in which

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advocates of technocratic modernity have long claimed that it was possible to become “instantly modern by excluding the past and negating tradition,”4 the very decision to accept even some aspects of the past has paradoxically acquired a potentially revolutionary impetus. Thus, the relationship between history and the modern in Latin America turns not only on the key political issues of which past, and whose past, is in play, but also on epistemological questions about how history is conceived. As has been extensively explored by cultural critics, the theme of overlapping temporalities—the coexistence of different perceptions of time and history—has reverberated through many Latin American literary texts since the late nineteenth century, from the novels of Machado de Assis to the stories of Borges and the poetry of Vallejo. This chapter explores the relationship between modernity and history in Latin America through the lens of Alfonso Reyes of Mexico (1889–1959), in whose work can be found an early development of ideas that would nowadays be referred to as transculturation or hybridity. Rodó had raised the question of how modern Latin America could exist in history: Reyes devoted his life to working out an answer. Although he wrote poetry and fiction that were well received, Reyes’s reputation during his lifetime was primarily founded on an extraordinary range of essays, reviews, and commentaries upon the arts, literature, history, politics, and science of Europe, the Americas, and beyond. Celebrated at the time for his in-depth knowledge of the classics (he translated part of The Iliad into Spanish verse)5 and Golden Age Spanish culture, he is often dismissed today—just as Rodó is—as a conservative Hellenist and Hispanist, worthy of note mainly for his highly successful term as the first director of the prestigious Colegio de México. Yet he was thought of by his contemporaries as a man of “absolute modernity.”6 They habitually referred to him as “the humanist,” which, in the context of early-twentieth-century Mexico, did not just mean a classical scholar, but rather someone who was “aware of his social responsibilities, in command of a culture not besieged by the limitations of excessive specialisation, an enthusiast for other disciplines that help him the better to know his own, eager in short to keep up to date with scientific progress so that he can try to channel it for the world’s benefit.”7 Mexicans have long celebrated their version of humanism, which dated back to the sixteenth century, for being a movement in touch with the people, not one that set itself apart from the vulgar herd, as European Renaissance humanism was thought to be.8 Reyes was acclaimed during his own era for having adapted this distinguished tradition to modern conditions. More

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recently, when he is recalled approvingly it is usually for his promotion of an americanismo that he envisaged as the fulfillment of the cultural and political potential of the New World. His birth centenary in 1989 (also the thirtieth anniversary of his death) stimulated a revival of interest in his writings on that theme, notably in the revealingly titled anthology Vocación de América.9 Within that context, the existing commentary on his work focuses mainly on its literary aspects, especially his contribution—by means of extensive reviews and critical essays—to the invention of a Latin American literary tradition,10 which was, in itself, part of the process of becoming modern. As is illustrated later, however, his Americanism arose out of a profound interest in Latin America’s relationship not only with the future but also with the past. Like Rodó and Justo, Reyes was repelled by Romanticism (with its “nauseating sentimentality”)11 and by utilitarianism, and was seeking to move on from positivism. Like the majority of his contemporaries, he regarded the Enlightenment belief in the possibility of governing everything, including the material world, by means of “reasoning reason” as an illusion, and a dangerous one at that because of its repression of the human spirit.12 Even so, more confidently than Rodó, and with far more awareness of the alternatives than Justo, he maintained that reason was “the best faculty that we human beings have available.”13 Reason had its limitations, he was all too aware, especially when it was turned into the object of a new cult as modern states took steps to defeat Church power,14 but he, nevertheless, consistently argued that the best orientation in life came from “reason and ideas, guiding forces [maestras] in the whirlwind of the subconscious.”15 He often invoked Kant as an exemplar of the difficult self-imposed quest of modern man for autonomy and reflexivity (“Kant’s dove soars thanks to the obstacle”).16 He was not, like many of his contemporaries, drawn to irrationalism, because, his friend Pedro Henríquez Ureña recalled, he was too committed to reason as a tool, “which lends order, channels [things] and leads to a successful conclusion.”17 He shared the Enlightenment conception of reason as committed to pursuing truth and avoiding error, imprecision, and prejudice. But, like Rodó, he did not accept the universalism that had come to be associated with the Enlightenment project; for him, too, reason had to operate in history. Reyes welcomed many aspects of modern life. Like Rodó and Justo, he particularly relished the possibilities for communication it afforded, and is reported to have had an insatiable appetite for news and novelties of all kinds.18 From Charlie Chaplin to Albert Einstein,

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Reyes was interested in it all.19 But he articulated, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, the widespread Latin American concern that the Enlightenment, despite its emphasis on the social responsibility of the individual, 20 had failed to elaborate an ethical guiding principle. As a result, argued Reyes, modern culture was becoming “a mosaic, for lack of a nexus, for the rusting of the compass. Each piece strikes us as much better worked in itself than the rather crude building blocks of the previous epoch. But the pieces do not fit together easily in the jigsaw, for lack of a plan of the whole.”21 In these circumstances, Reyes’s guiding concern—as Octavio Paz put it—was a “search [for] equilibrium, an aspiration toward measure, and [ . . . ] a grand universal appetite, a desire to embrace everything”; his desire was “not to repress contradictions but to integrate them in broader affirmations.”22 Like Rodó, Reyes resisted extremes. Excessive individualism was a danger, 23 in his view, but so also was excessive dependence on society: “How can we defend ourselves against the growing tendency to look for our self’s centre of gravity outside ourselves; how can we counteract that fear of liberty and of responsibility that nowadays seems to be endemic?”24 For Reyes, the main threat to the modern world lay in dehumanized science (which was far more dangerous, in his view, than the dehumanization of art denounced by Ortega y Gasset) combined with dogmatism: “Technocracy with the presumption of theocracy: that is the enemy.”25 In order to avoid any form of absolutism, Reyes proposed a synthesizing approach to modernity, based on a critique of the idea of history as progress. Reyes’s Experiences of the Modern If Reyes felt the disorienting effects of modernization more acutely than did either Rodó or Justo, it was because of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). Mexico was the first Latin American country to experience social revolution during the twentieth century, the first country in which widespread violence was provoked by the exclusion of the majority from the benefits of economic modernization. Although historians now tend to emphasize the continuities between the capitalist-oriented development projects of both the dictatorship of Porfírio Díaz (1876–1910) and the postrevolutionary governments, it is worth recalling the extent to which everyday life was severely disrupted by the absence of law and order in Mexico for much of the 1910s, and, to a lesser degree, by the continuing high levels of insecurity and violence that persisted over the next two decades. The Mexican state may have become a “philanthropic ogre” sometime

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after 1940, but during the earlier decades of the twentieth century it was for the most part neither benevolent nor particularly powerful outside urban areas. All this had its impact on how modernity was conceived in Mexico, particularly in relation to history. Had it not been for the Revolution, Reyes, born into an elite Mexican family in 1889, would have been in a position to lead the life of a gentleman-scholar. His father, General Bernardo Reyes, was then governor of the state of Nuevo León, the capital of which, Monterrey, was known as the “Chicago of Mexico” because of its modern industry and infrastructure.26 General Reyes believed, his son recalled, “in all the capital letter words of that time—Progress, Civilization, the Moral Perfectibility of Man.”27 Reyes received his early education in private schools in Monterrey, then at the French lycée in Mexico City—elite education was “very much in the French style” at that time in Mexico.28 In 1905 he started at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP), which was then equivalent in prestige to getting into the Ecole Normale in France, 29 and in due course enrolled at the university law faculty (graduating in July 1913). As in Argentina, modernization of the cultural sphere came relatively early to Mexico, and the first decade of the twentieth century saw an expansion in availability of reading materials and opportunities for publishing. In Mexico City alone, there were 23 magazines from 1900 to 1914, with 17 elsewhere in the country (a figure that declined after the Revolution).30 Some of these were literary publications, but there was also a range of popular magazines (usually weeklies, such as El Mundo Ilustrado), which made extensive use of photography and graphics to display the wares of modern life, as did the weekend supplements on culture and lifestyle that all the main newspapers began to produce. There were elements of a modern cultural infrastructure, therefore, and Reyes slotted easily into the lively café society then emerging in the capital, where a new generation, known as the Centenary Generation, was just starting to establish itself as one of the most distinguished in Mexican history. Reyes’s contemporaries included Antonio Caso, who became a renowned philosopher; José Vasconcelos, who, as minister of education after the Revolution, undertook an impressive crusade to build state primary schools throughout Mexico; and Pedro Henríquez Ureña (originally from the Dominican Republic but based in Mexico City from 1906), who became one of Latin America’s most famous literary critics and went on to play a key role in disseminating Latin American literature both within the region and beyond. Henríquez Ureña has vividly described how his generation, influenced by Rodó, became suspicious of the “sublime certainties” of the

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narrow positivism promoted by the científicos who implemented Porfirio Díaz’s technocratic modernization, and began to read anyone and everyone else in search of something better (even to the extent, he recalled ruefully, of taking Nietzsche seriously).31 Reyes was part of that rebellion against the Mexican establishment, but he agreed with Rodó in discerning some benefits in positivism, not least that it had challenged the hegemony of scholasticism in the universities.32 In fact, most members of the Centenary Generation expressed due appreciation of the intellectual rigor of the scientific training they received at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP) founded by Gabino Barreda (1818–1881), who had studied with Comte and was imbued with his mathematical conception of the world. Reyes himself maintained a lifelong interest in science, arguing that Russell and Whitehead’s Principia mathematica was “the most truly and profoundly revolutionary [work] published in our time.”33 He often introduced mathematical analogies and metaphors into his discussions of history and literature, and remained strongly against the separation of arts and sciences into two cultures. But he could not accept scientific politics—the proposition that politics should be founded on pure science, ignoring human impulses to cordiality and solidarity.34 By the time that Reyes arrived at the ENP, science had become a god, he recalled, elevated into an end in itself rather than a means, and the arts and humanities had virtually been excluded from the curriculum. As a consequence, students had lost any sense of the history of Mexican thought, with the inevitable result that they tended to privilege the European ideas that were becoming more easily available in imported books and periodicals. The transmission of a Mexican intellectual tradition had, therefore, become the preserve of conservatives, Reyes observed in dismay.35 Moreover, the científicos had not even followed their own tenets of modernization by introducing economics or industrial-technical education, despite their own financial and business success. Given all this, explained Reyes: The youngsters of my generation were what you might call disdainful. We didn’t believe in the majority of the things our elders believed in. [ . . . ] We were beginning to suspect that our education had— unintentionally—been a fraud. [ . . . ] Mexican Positivism had been reduced to a routine pedagogic method and had lost legitimacy in our eyes. New winds were arriving from Europe. We knew that classical Mathematics was wavering and that Physics was not guarding itself very well against Metaphysics. We lamented the gradual decline of the Humanities in our programmes of study. We were doubtful about the knowledge of the all-too-brilliant and oratorical teachers who had

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been educated in the generation immediately before us. We were surprised by the constant signs of weakness of culture in the Modernist writers who had preceded us, and the academicians, who were even older, could not satisfy us. Nietzsche recommended the heroic life, but cut us off from the sources of charity.36

In the light of all this, the Centenary Generation declared itself to be committed to “critical reconstruction.”37 In his memoirs, Reyes recalled the stages of what he referred to as their “campaign”: launch of the revista Savia Moderna (1906); an exhibition of modern art, including works by Diego Rivera and others who challenged the conventional pompier style; a commemoration, around the theme of artistic freedom, of leading modernista poet Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera; the formation of a Sociedad de Conferencias, which organized a series of lectures, including Antonio Caso’s famous critique of positivism; a commemoration, in 1908, of Gabino Barreda, celebrating his original liberal principles in order to claim that the ENP had betrayed its founder by promoting a debased version of positivism; and, in culmination, the founding, in late 1909, of the Ateneo, which became the main forum of this generation, where they all regularly met, presided over by a bust of Goethe. In 1910, a further lecture series was organized at the Law School on specifically Latin American themes, part of the coalescing process of inventing a Latin American literary tradition: Pedro Henríquez Ureña spoke on Rodó, Antonio Caso on Eugenio María de Hostos, Vasconcelos on Barreda, others on Fernández de Lizardi and Sor Juana. Reyes himself gave a lecture on Manuel José Othón, 38 who is little remembered now, but had a notable reputation at the time as a nature poet and shared Rodó’s view that modernismo was lacking in sincerity. All these events at the Ateneo were especially important given the lack of formal education in philosophy or the humanities then available in Mexico: many of this generation were effectively autodidacts in the subjects that really interested them.39 Although many of their discussions were literary and philosophical rather than overtly political, the close identification of the Porfiriato with positivism meant that any critique of positivist ideas was interpreted as an attack on the regime. In 1912, with the Revolution in full flow, the Ateneístas founded the Universidad Popular, a “flying squad” of intellectuals who went to teach working people in their factories and meeting places, snatching half-an-hour here and there to tell them about history, literature, and politics.40 Cumulatively, these activities laid the basis for what was later described as the humanist aspect of the Mexican Revolution.41

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Most of this intellectual life was disrupted, irretrievably, by the outbreak of revolution in 1910, which began with the challenge of the moderate reformer Madero to the continuismo of Díaz—a moment memorably evoked by Reyes as “a shot sounding in the deceptive silence of a polar landscape”42 —but soon led to prolonged civil war and two military interventions by the United States, as the various sectors of Mexican society excluded from the Porfirian project— from landless peasants to the younger sons of the elites—struggled to win control and influence over the Mexican state. Reyes witnessed the violent death of his porfirista father, who was gunned down by supporters of the reactionary Huerta in February 1913, and noted wryly in his diary that his intellectual commitment to critical distance hardly derived from a life in the ivory tower: “Don’t forget that a Mexican university student of my generation knows what it is to travel across a city besieged by bombardment for ten days in a row, [ . . . ] with mourning in his heart and a textbook under his arm.”43 Soon afterward, having declined a malicious invitation from Huerta to become his private secretary, he reluctantly succumbed to pressure to leave Mexico for Paris, where he was appointed to a junior position at the Mexican legation.44 Reyes’s vivid memoirs bring to mind the possibility that in such circumstances, where physical survival is at stake, the city no longer fulfils the modernist function of being the location of the transient and the ephemeral, but in itself becomes ephemeral and impermanent, rendering impossible the role of detached observer.45 Anyone experiencing such conditions is likely to be reluctant, as Reyes subsequently proved to be, to glory metaphorically in the dizzying lack of groundedness of the modern condition. Reyes did not return permanently to Mexico until 1939 (although after 1920 he made occasional visits), when he was invited back by President Lázaro Cárdenas to head the newly founded Casa de España, later to become the prestigious Colegio de México. From 1920 onward, when more a stable government returned to Mexico under the reformist Presidency of Alvaro Obregón, Reyes worked as a diplomat, representing the Mexican revolutionary government in France, Argentina (where he found the cultural life too politicized to be altogether stimulating),46 and Brazil. By all accounts, he was highly dedicated to his diplomatic work, seeing it as a compromise between the political activism that he felt to be temperamentally alien to him and a retreat into the ivory tower, which—like most Latin American intellectuals—he always shunned.47 In the 1930s, he was active in trying to improve relations between Latin America and the United States, particularly

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once Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy was underway. Reyes attended the famous seventh Pan-American Congress held in Montevideo in December 1933, where the United States declared (albeit with carefully worded caveats) that it would no longer intervene militarily in Latin America. The Peace Code that Mexico presented to that gathering, and again in 1936, was co-drafted by Reyes. It was a comprehensive plan for dispute settlement, arbitration, and the creation of an American Court of International Justice, and influenced the contents of the Pact of Bogotá in 1948, which established the Organisation of American States (OAS).48 For Reyes, as for many other Latin American exiles, Europe proved to be a site of rediscovery—of both self and homeland—rather than a particularly rewarding experience in itself. Having witnessed the effects of Haussman-style urban restructuring in Mexico City, he arrived in Paris, in 1913, with the image of a modern city in mind. He was somewhat taken aback at how smelly, dirty, and in many ways old-fashioned Paris turned out to be. It was full of dark narrow passageways, he noted (electric street lighting was just beginning to be installed), and it compared starkly, although not necessarily unfavorably in his eyes, with the ultra-hygienic U.S. urban ideal, “Spotlesstown,” evoked in the advertisements for soap he had seen in Mexico. Old things were slow to disappear in Paris, he observed, expressing delight at seeing in the pharmacies the “enormous green, red and golden jars that used to entrance us as children.” He recorded his sense of disorientation, however, at the pace of life. His image of Paris was “Cubist,” he wrote: “I close my eyes, and I see a fragmentary Paris, dispersed into tiny planes that don’t fit together, as if they were broken up by being glimpsed through the four main supports of the Eiffel tower.”49 Intellectually it was a great disappointment: he found attending classes at the university “perfectly useless.”50 Overall, it was a disillusioning time for him, according to his correspondence: “And don’t think that I’ve made any progress or even had any great intellectual experiences: [I’ve only had] vulgar experiences, of bitter and discouraging realities.”51 He felt homesick and disenchanted and, after the First World War had broken out the following year, that he was “an intruder into France’s pain.”52 His experience was far from unusual for Latin Americans: Darío, who as a boy used to pray that God would not let him die without seeing Paris, recalled bitterly, after many years living there, how he had played perfectly his designated “part as the sauvage” in the “centre of neurosis.”53 Life became even more difficult for Reyes after Carranza took over the Mexican state in 1915 and, as part of a drastic cutback in the

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diplomatic service, dismissed him from his post. He moved on to Madrid, where he lived far more of a bohemian life than suited him, scraping together an income from teaching, writing, and translating until his appointment to the Mexican legation in 1920 restored a degree of financial security. He did, however, find it easier to integrate himself into an intellectual community in Madrid. It was during this period that he acquired his extensive range of scholarly skills—linguistic, textual, and bibliographical—through working for various publishers, journals, and as a research assistant on a scholarly edition of Góngora.54 He also came to realize how different usage of the Spanish language was in Spain compared to Mexico, which made him think about modern Mexico’s need for a new political language. It was also in Madrid that he became convinced of the importance of history, particularly through his work at the Centro de Estudios Históricos established by the Spanish government to analyze the role of history in cultural regeneration. History and the Modern The desire to encourage Latin America to overcome a prevalent sense of geographical fatalism, or, in other words, to escape from under the shadow of Hegel, was the premise of Reyes’s entire project of modernity.55 He wholly rejected the claim that Latin America was incapable of participating in history, 56 which may well have derived from Latin Americans having read José Ortega y Gasset’s essay of 1924, “Hegel y América,” rather than Hegel’s own words from his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. In the late 1920s Hegel’s lectures had still not been translated into either Spanish or French, whereas Ortega y Gasset’s essay was published in the Revista de Occidente, which enjoyed wide circulation in Latin America. While Ortega y Gasset interpreted Hegel’s placing of the Americas as outside history to mean that they were incapable of history (which he did for reasons of his own, mainly related to his view of the United States as barbaric), Reyes argued that Hegel’s implication was that while the Americas did not yet have a history, its history was still to come, therefore, it was inserted into a human temporal scheme and not condemned to a state of nature. In other words, Reyes focused not on Hegel’s claim that “America has always shown itself to be physically and spiritually impotent,” but rather on his conclusion that “America is the country of the future.”57 He then went on to argue, as Dussel and others were much later to do, that the discovery of the Americas was a constitutive

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part of modernity and that the promise of modernity was most likely to be realized in the Americas.58 Reyes rejected not only Hegel’s view of history as the self-realization of universal reason, but also all monocausal explanations of history.59 He placed Hegel’s World Spirit in the same category as Saint Augustine’s city of God, the Spaniard Paulo Orosio’s view of history as divine punishment, Bossuet’s providentialism, Buckle’s and Taine’s natural law, Marx’s economic determinism, and modern theories of geopolitics.60 Even Kant, with whom Reyes often agreed, had erred, he felt, in placing his faith in a natural design for history, as proposed in his late work Philosophy of History (the first Spanish translation of which was published by the Colegio de México). Such a concept of history, Reyes implied, was no less absurd in its way than a plan, propounded by a gypsy bandit character in a little-known novel by the Marquis de Sade, to carve up Europe into four republics, named after the points of the compass.61 Both were products of a utopian way of thinking—which could be inspiring, but was also inherently fictional and prone to grandiose fantasy. By resorting to the metafiction of a guiding force in history, Reyes suggested, the great “legislator of the human mind and builder of the iron institution of Pure Reason and Practical Reason” had betrayed his own commitment to autonomous critique.62 Reyes was equally unpersuaded by doctrines that countered determinism by emphasizing the role of heroism in history, such as Carlyle’s hero, Emerson’s representative individual, Burckhardt’s great man, or Nietzsche’s superman.63 Individuals had a role in history, he agreed, but they always operated within a social context that it was crucial to understand. Columbus, for example, was surrounded, Reyes argued, by “a crowd of learned men and practical men, sane men and madmen,” all of whom prepared him for his endeavors. His one, but overwhelming, objection to Carlyle’s heroic conception of history was that “there were many more heroes than were dreamt of in his philosophy.”64 Reyes maintained that, “the fabric of history is woven with the threads of the every day,” and “a national hero [ . . . ] could be no less than this or that humble neighbour whom everybody knows, that good old Pancho of whom nobody used to take any notice.”65 This insistence on the significance of “ordinary” people in history may have been what drew him to the writings of G. K. Chesterton, whose pathologically unassuming priest, Father Brown, was renowned for his ability to spot the telling detail that everybody else missed.66 In a sweeping indictment

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of all nineteenth-century European theories of history, Reyes argued that they had oscillated between “absolute teleology” and “absolute pragmatism”: Either it’s the History as progress of the Enlightenment and the gradual triumph of Reason, in the mode of Voltaire; or it’s the pre-Romantic reaction of Herder, who came to tell Voltaire that the heart too has its reasons; or the sociological typology of Vico which seemed, to a certain extent, to announce Auguste Comte’s law of three stages; or Rousseau’s sentimental naturalism, reined in by the supposed pact that made living together possible and that Kant adopted, if not as a fact, at least as an allegory and a criterion for justice; or it’s the metaphysical imperialism of a Fichte, or a Hegel, for whom History is the history of the Idea as it plays itself out in the World, a doctrine of which historical materialism came to be virtually a parody, where the Idea gave way to the process of economic necessity.67

All such theories, suggested Reyes, were inherently imperialistic, because they were all symptomatic of an ultimately always fruitless attempt “to rectify the chance outcomes of history,” a fundamental inability to come to terms with the contingency of history and a refusal to accept that human agency in history was not the preserve of a select few.68 Thus the idea of history-as-progress was, to Reyes, merely the latest in a long line of inadequate grand narratives of human experience, dating back to Alexander’s concept of homónia (political concord) and manifest also in Hobbesian ideas of a balance of power in international relations, in “the dream of nationalism,” which often acted as “a façade for other ambitions,” and in “‘racisms,’ for which impoverished science serves as a cover.”69 He did not discount the possibility of progress, but did not see it as either inevitable or predetermined: societies, like individuals, could both lose their way and regress.70 And what was progress for some was not necessarily so for others. In the Mexico where Reyes grew up “Progress”—the great sustaining myth of the Porfiriato—had meant British railways, Parisian boulevards, American soap—and the exclusion of most of the population from access to these goods. Indeed, not only the impoverished majority but also significant sectors of the national bourgeoisie had been deemed ineligible to participate in the Porfirian model of development through links with international capital, which was partly why revolution came early to Mexico.71 The científicos, despite being Spencerians, “were afraid of evolution, of transformation,” mocked Reyes; they represented Mexico as a country in which history was

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over, a state of civilization having already been achieved.72 Witness to all this, Reyes questioned the supposed connection between progress, liberty, and justice, coming to the conclusion that progress was just one more manifestation of humanity’s need, expressed throughout history, to believe in a better society, whether it lay in the past or the future.73 It was not a guide for action, therefore, but an appealing fiction: founded on illusion and deception, but still necessary to sustain ideals.74 Thus, although the aspiration toward progress was a constant, he argued, its actual realization was “uneven and never definitive, it appears here and there, yesterday or tomorrow, in a form of unstable equilibrium.”75 He saw a pendular oscillation in the rhythms of history, with a tendency for one extreme to correct itself by the other: “The complicated and ultra refined are succeeded by simplistic savages; the cultured decadent, by the illiterate.”76 Causation was complex and subject to fluctuation through “the rotations of time.” Emphasis shifted in human affairs: what was negated during one period later came to be affirmed; issues lost and gained in significance: “A ‘yes’ often turns into a ‘no.’ At other times, what used to seem indispensable becomes incidental and ornamental.”77 History was not entirely arbitrary, then, in his view, but it was capricious. In terms of his own methodology, Reyes sought to steer a course between historicism and scientism. While accepting that all historical interpretations were necessarily subjective (in that sense, Croce’s exaggerated claim that all history was history of the present had a certain limited validity, he argued), Reyes maintained that historians should not allow historicism to eliminate history. Although no one grand narrative could answer for the complexities of historical experience, neither was complete relativism acceptable to Reyes. Historians had to be aware of all the theoretical possibilities and all the different viewpoints in order to apply them, selectively and appropriately, to the subject matter.78 It was important for historians to be self-conscious and explicit about their theoretical approaches, deploying them—as mathematicians did—not as axioms but as working assumptions integral to a rigorous methodology.79 He did not agree with Croce that there was no possibility of objectively establishing historical facts, but he did worry that the modern obsession with verification— with scientific models for history—was obscuring the importance of the arts of narration and interpretation.80 The industrial approach to writing history had fomented the idea that finding new sources was sufficient in itself, even if they were insignificant or redundant. History was, in his view, “a dynamic necessity for being human, the value of which is more definite and transcendent than the static truths of the natural

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sciences.” It was a mistake “to confuse the immobile entities of scientific truth with the fluid entities of historical or artistic truth.”81 History was both a science because of its “attachment to the possibility of truth” and an art because of “the aura of beauty that accompanies any evocation of what has already happened.”82 While modern historical methodology based on documents was crucial (“I subjected myself for many years to the disciplines of the document”), it was a necessary but not sufficient condition for writing great works of history, which had to be illuminated by judicious evaluation and imaginative interpretation.83 The positivist emphasis on facts and techniques had led to the failure to stimulate historical imagination in students. He saw counter-factuals—which he compared to “mathematical diversions”—as a useful way of doing so. History was both “good judgement and loyalty to the documents, and all the rest [was] deviation.”84 One historian whose approach he greatly admired was Jacob Burckhardt. In a long prologue to a Spanish translation of Burckhardt’s Reflections on History (1905), published in Mexico in 1943,85 he welcomed Burckhardt’s refusal to accept that history was governed by reason, progress, or evolution; acclaimed his insistence on the importance of identifying significant trends and structures rather than getting lost in factual detail; identified with his views on the importance of culture; and admired the flexibility of his mind and the vitality of his prose. Burckhardt was completely committed to scientific methods of proof, argued Reyes, and it was precisely the clarity of his rational foresight, his ability to accept “the world just as it has been given to us,” together with his universal perspective, that enabled him to resist the force of “the magnetism of the national and the chronological.”86 Observing (mostly from afar) the turbulent politics of postrevolutionary Mexico during the 1920s, it was particularly difficult for Reyes to accept the doctrine of the inevitability of progress, which privileged scientific, economic, and technical developments as the criteria for periodization. As part of his challenge to the ideology of progress, which inevitably left Latin America stranded in the backwaters of history, Reyes asserted the importance of cultural criteria in determining those “precise, definite moments [ . . . ] when the human compass, passing from one zone to another, trembles with signs of giddiness.”87 With hindsight (in an essay written in 1944) he represented the “Mexican transformation” in cultural terms as the discovery of “the spectacle of the [ . . . ] national tradition, from which historical vicissitudes had imperceptibly been drawing us away throughout the nineteenth century [ . . . ].”88 However, revising the

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criteria for a temporal approach to Latin America’s history was not in itself sufficient to address the problem of how to write the history of Latin America, because, as Aníbal Quijano has suggested, the difficulty was not that in Latin America time was perceived as simultaneous rather than sequential, but, rather, that it was perceived as both simultaneous and sequential.89 In order to address the challenges of these realities, therefore, Reyes began to think about the conditions of possibility for integrating space and time in a different model of modernity. There were no essentialisms, he maintained: identities were realized “in time and in space.”90 In saying this, Reyes was intervening in a long-standing debate about the relationship between space and time in the modern world, a debate summarized by Lefebvre.91 It begins, as the philosophical conception of modernity itself does, with Hegel, for whom space came to eclipse time as the World Spirit of history achieved its ultimate realization in the state. Many of Hegel’s successors recoiled, however, from his absolutist conception of reason transcending history, and indeed only Nietzsche pursued his emphasis on space over time (from the very different standpoint of interpreting history not in Hegelian terms as the fulfillment of human destiny but rather as the source of tragedy because of its eternal return to weakness). After Hegel, there was a powerful movement in European thought to restore the place of time—upon which the ideology of progress was dependent—in modern consciousness: Marx envisaged historical time as revolutionary time; Bergson explored the immediacy of consciousness and Husserl examined the flux of phenomena. All three had their constituencies in early-twentieth-century Latin America. By the late twentieth century, when social scientists began to argue for a “reassertion of space,” the prevailing assumption was that the modern world had prioritized time over space with its ideologies of modernization, development, and, most recently, globalization, all of which assume one inevitable path for all societies to follow, reducing the “simultaneous coexistence” of different lifestyles “to place in the historical queue.” 92 Reyes’s own attempt to draw the emphasis away from linear time toward a more spatialized conception of modernity was certainly related to his commitment to helping Latin America to escape from the trap of belatedness. He conceived space rather as postmodernists do—not as an emptiness to be conquered, a surface upon which to place objects, or an assemblage of frozen moments in time—but—in Doreen Massey’s evocative words—as “a simultaneity of stories-sofar.” 93 But although he would probably have agreed with Massey that

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thinking spatially was necessary in order to allow for the coexistence of histories other than that set out in the blueprint of modernization, he would also have argued that merely countering an emphasis on time with an emphasis on space was not the solution, at least not for Latin America. It would not be enough, from Reyes’s Latin American perspective, to accept that historical time was plural (one of Koselleck’s defining features of a modern historical consciousness, what he called the “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous”). Plural historical time still left Latin America as always already behind. Nor would it have been enough to abandon oneself to the synchronic, glorying in its abundant creativity but ultimately accepting that Latin America would never be able to realize its founding values of liberty, justice, and solidarity—that it would never escape, as García Márquez memorably put it—100 years of solitude. If historians tend to emphasize the sequential while literary critics explore the simultaneous, then Reyes, a literary critic turned historian, committed as he was to “the discipline of the documents” but also to the power of the imagination, tried to integrate space and time, rather than conceiving them as opposites (space conquered by time) as in technocratic models of modernity. In this, he was inspired by Einstein’s synthesis of space and time, which he saw as a model “in which solid objects and thoughts seem, even if metaphorically, to begin to amalgamate, giving new stimuli [ . . . ] to philosophical idealism.” 94 For Reyes, then, history was not without meaning, but it was unpredictable, diverse, and multiple in its meanings. While Benjamin saw history as an angel, Reyes evoked an Aztec bird: “I refuse to accept that history is the mere working of dumb fates. There is a voice that comes from the depths of our past sorrows; there is an invisible soothsaying bird that still sings: tihuic, tihuic, above our chaos of resentments.” 95 He represented history as both process and event, arguing for the importance of a hermeneutic approach and a diversity of perspectives. But—like Rodó—he emphasized the importance of adopting a historical, rather than a philosophical, approach to Latin American culture. Without a sense of history, he wrote, the American landscape would be “like a theatre without light.”96 But, moving on from Rodó’s conception of a distinctively Latin American spirit, Reyes argued that what was distinctive about the history of Latin America was that it was constituted of a summation of histories, traditions, and beliefs from many places. It was precisely in this capacity to be hospitable to a variety of identities that its own distinctiveness lay. Mexico City in itself was a microcosm of the coexistence of past, present, and

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future, as described by Pedro Henríquez Ureña: Mexico City offers, if not the twenty ages of Rome, at least the compendium of four centuries: the lakeside Tenochtitlan of the Aztec emperors, the court of the Spanish viceroys, the tormented independent capital, its republicanism intermittently eclipsed by monarchy. And unity (in duality, if you wish) asserts itself still: in 1921, as in 1521, the Spaniard who fights at the command of Cortes or Iturbide still passes through the streets, as does the Indian who fights at the command of Cuauhtémoc or Morelos.97

What these various histories shared was their presence on Latin American territory, the geographies of which helped to shape a common approach to contending with reality. He envisaged “America” (by which he usually meant Latin America, and I translate “América” as Latin America) as a territory upon which it might be possible to create “a space in time” where culture could act as a force for synthesis.98 A Culture of Synthesis Reyes ploughed a lonely furrow in the postrevolutionary Mexican intellectual field by distancing himself from both essentialist cultural nationalism and europeísta cosmopolitanism. Against the prevailing trends—and herein lay his main difference from Arielismo—Reyes argued that it was “absurd” to speak of “the possibility of a future different and specifically ‘Latin American culture’ [ . . . ] in the current situation of expanding communications networks and geographical levelling.” 99 He preferred to defend the universal value of the culture produced by Latin Americans. In a piece written in 1941 for the inauguration of a series of radio broadcasts on Spanish American literature by Columbia Broadcasting System, Reyes declared in ringing tones: Our language and our culture are on the move, and they bear the seeds of the future. We are not a curiosity for aficionados, but an integral and necessary part of universal thought. We are not peoples in a state of innocence, who are easily dazzled by the gadgetry of external culture, but peoples who inherit an old civilization and demand the utmost excellence in culture. [ . . . ] We do not feel inferior to anybody; rather, we are people in full enjoyment of capacities equivalent to those that are valued in the market place.100

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Thus, despite his respect for Rodó, whom he saw as a key mentor, Reyes became a vehement opponent of the hispanoamericanismo promoted by many Arielistas, especially that militant branch of it that proclaimed a common inheritance with Spain. He campaigned actively against it, especially while living in Madrid, arguing that many abuses had been carried out in the name of hispanoamericanismo: abuses of history (the rejection of independence and the assertion that the American republics dreamed of returning to the Spanish embrace); of geography (insisting on the extremes of the climate, especially in the tropical regions); of the Bible (claims that America was the Prodigal Son, or Spain the incarnation of Ecclesiastes); and of the classical texts, especially The Iliad (the identification of Cortés with Hector and Moctezuma with Agamemnon).101 He agreed that there were certain shared interests that formed a basis for strong links between Spain and Spanish America, such as concern about U.S. intervention in Mexico during the revolution, but the racial element was not important: “It’s not worth insisting on the blood tie. What’s lacking is a campaign based on reason.”102 He was acutely aware that Spanish Americans were ridiculed in Spain, and repeatedly protested publicly about the stereotypical and exoticized images of Spanish Americans in the Spanish press and cinema.103 Even amongst intellectuals, he found that the contempt was barely concealed: Ortega y Gasset told him that “seen from the heart of a Spaniard, you Spanish Americans always appear soft.”104 Reyes’s main concern was that Spanish Americans should leave behind their obsession with Spain, because either love or loathing in excess was symptomatic of a lack of independence and dignity.105 It was not that Spain was unimportant to him, far from it. Indeed, he insisted on the importance of Mexico’s Spanish heritage, but he was not hispanista in the sense that, say, José Vasconcelos was, of privileging supposedly quintessential Spanish values over indigenous cultures. Indeed, the value of the Spanish colonial legacy lay primarily, for Reyes, in its integrative measures, which had created the framework for a viable modern nation-state: No Mexican can recall without gratitude the fortunate endeavours represented by the Laws of the Indies, to which we look today for inspiration in our campaign to defend the Indian, to safeguard the common lands or communal property of the people, and even to assert the control of the State over the national sub-soil resources, which are forever inalienable according to the principles established by the moral conscience of Roman law.106

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Thus, Reyes identified so strongly with Spain precisely because he saw the Spanish legacy as the key to universalism in the Americas, partly because it linked the New World back to the humanism of the ancient world, and partly because the colonial origins of the American republics had from the outset obliged them to look outside themselves for a rationale for their policy and their culture, thereby endowing them with “a precocious sense of internationalism”: “American culture is the only one that could, in principle, ignore national and ethnic barriers.”107 Having achieved political autonomy at a time when the Spanish language no longer dominated the world, the independent republics had been obliged “to look for the figure of the universal by bringing together human types (especies) dispersed through all languages and all countries,” with the result that “we are a race of human synthesis. We are the true balance of history.”108 The peoples of Latin America were “singularly prepared not to exaggerate the trivial value of differences of race, a static concept without scientific basis or any bearing on human dignity or intelligence.”109 For Latin America, “the only race is the human race.”110 In this sense, Latin American culture was a model for the rest of humanity. For Reyes, the only distinctiveness that it was worthwhile for the region to emphasize was its distinctive openness to all cultures. From the point of view of the Americas, argued Reyes, the division between East and West, or Atlantic and Pacific, was irrelevant, and an unnecessary limitation on human possibilities. The worst thing Latin Americans could do was “to take sides” at a time when “the two great elements are amalgamating into a single synthetic metal, at the right time for we Latin Americans to use and enjoy it.”111 Citing Scheler’s three orders of knowledge: the understanding of spiritual and physical self-discipline of India; the “knowledge of culture” of China and ancient Greece; and the practical knowledge gleaned from the Western natural sciences, Reyes argued that exclusive emphasis on any one of these three would create an imbalance: Knowing only about salvation would turn us into prostrate peoples, would-be saints, begging and thin; knowing only about culture, into sophists and mandarins; knowing only about control, into scientific barbarians, which, as we have already seen, is the worst kind of barbarism. Only equilibrium guarantees us loyalty to the earth and to the sky. That is what is incumbent upon Latin America.112

Reyes’s concept of universalism was not, like Rodó’s, confined to the European canon. It is true that he returned often to ancient Greek,

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Latin, Spanish, and French traditions, but he also drew extensively upon ancient Egyptian, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian cultures. He advocated cultural synthesis in order to create “a new collective heritage in which nothing gets lost” (un nuevo acervo patrimonial donde nada se pierda), which he saw not as a final destination—“acompendium or summary”– but, rather, as “a new point of departure.”113 Indeed, the Spanish term “acervo,” translated here with the temporal term heritage (something handed down through the generations), is originally a spatial metaphor, drawn from “undivided estate,” or “common property,” where nothing gets lost. Reyes here enacts in language the spatialization of the idea of cultural inheritance. What did Reyes mean by culture? It was certainly not the “civilisation” that had been common in mid-nineteenth-century Mexican discourse,114 and was famously canonized as the opposite of barbarism by Sarmiento. Nor was it the “progress” that was ubiquitous under the Porfiriato. Reyes was seeking a concept free of the connotations both of positivism and Social Darwinism, yet he was also drawing upon the long history that the term “cultura” had in Mexico as a marker not so much of any particular cultural expression but rather of generic human fulfillment.115 He wrote a “homily to culture” in which he stated as follows: “It is a unifying function” (es una función unificadora),116 by which he seemed to mean that its role was to unify all the different possible meanings of the term, both artistic and anthropological. Art was a part of culture but by no means the whole, for Reyes, who did not see art either as an imitation of life or—as Oscar Wilde proposed—as a model for life. Indeed, Reyes spurned the European modernist stance of setting up art in opposition to life; his aesthetic—like Rodó’s—was founded on a reciprocal relationship between art and life.117 Reyes was interested in all manifestations of cultural activity, not just what is known as high culture. One of his main criticisms of Romanticism was that it had “introduced a divorce between popular taste and the sacred, solitary personality of the poet.”118 He was very drawn to Góngora, at least in part because Góngora had addressed the question of the meeting of high and low cultures in the context of discussing the rationality and humanity of man.119 Reyes often introduced colloquial phrases and popular sayings into his own work, partly as a way of puncturing intellectual seriousness.120 Reviewing a volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature, he lamented the absence of “chapters on folklore, stories, sayings, prophecies, refrains and children’s games.” “What about conversation?” he demanded. The sixteenth-century Spanish humanists, “who had one eye on their books and the other on what

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was going on in the street,” would have been horrified at the idea of trying to understand the works of Dr Johnson, or Oscar Wilde, without trying to reconstruct their conversations, of which, he claimed, traces always remained, and it would be less of a travesty of historical truth to present a hypothetical account than to ignore the matter altogether.121 Thus when he defined culture as a unifying force, he saw unification not as the renunciation of individual preferences in favor of a collective ideal, but rather as the extension to everyone of opportunities to connect: To unify is not to stagnate: it is to facilitate movement. To unify is not to stifle things into loss of self-expression, but rather to establish between them a regular system of connections. A life is lived more fully the more its different parts are brought into contact. [ . . . ] Thus, then, unified life is life in all its dignity and also in all its danger. The aeroplane and the radio are our best instruments of unification, in the sense that they are our most active transmitters.122

Culture was not, therefore, a static or monolithic object for Reyes; it was process rather than product. As such, it encompassed a broad range of social practices: “religion, philosophy, science, ethics, politics, manners and mores [la urbanidad, la cortesía], poetry, music, the arts, trade and industry.”123 Culture only existed through processes of transmission, he maintained, which took place both horizontally or synchronically, between contemporaries, and vertically or diachronically, from one generation to the next. He saw it, above all, as a communications network: [Culture] consists in safeguarding, transmitting and disseminating all the conquests of humankind, material and spiritual, with equal ease among all peoples; it consists in smoothing and channelling the earth to bring about better circulation of the human good. Thus culture is, in essence, cooperative coordination: it is just as much about bridges and tunnels, roads, modes of locomotion, as it is about the sharing out and distribution of the fruits of economic and intellectual activity.124

In these processes of migration, culture “is transformed in turn, it makes detours, it expands, it picks up new things and abandons others.”125 Its impulse was to bring together the synchronic (cosmopolitanism) and the diachronic (national tradition), through contemporaries (exchange) and through generations (history).126 Culture was, therefore, not only a way of establishing continuity between the

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present and the future, but also a means of assimilating the past.127 “To believe that it is possible to advance in any area of human activity without taking into account the riches accumulated by tradition is presumptuousness rather than farsightedness,” he argued.128 Reyes insisted that the idea of continuity, culture, unification of the intelligence in the core of its being has nothing in common with nostalgia, right-wingness or reaction. . . . It is not a question of bringing the present closer to the past, but, on the contrary, of bringing the past closer to the present. To draw upon a tradition does not signify a step backwards, but a step forwards, on condition that it is a step taken in a clear direction, not at random.129

Culture, thus conceived, was a means of preserving the integrity of human experience, overcoming the division between theory and practice and the corresponding binary divides of local/universal, tradition/modernity, and continuity/change. Reyes’s approach to ancient Greece provides an illustration of how he applied this idea of culture as synthesis. Like most of his generation, especially in Mexico, Reyes was a devotee of classical culture, but he regarded it not as a static object of veneration, but as a means of communicating his ideas about culture to European intellectuals who would have been unlikely to understand Latin American references: “‘Greece’ is a way of speaking, it’s a language that has the advantage of being universally understandable.”130 Although he was widely read in the classical texts, he approached them not so much in the spirit of a scholar but, as he himself put it, a “furtive hunter.”131 His essay “The Strategy of the Gaucho Achilles” is indicative of how he employed Greek analogies and references to illuminate discussion of Latin American cultural phenomena. The essay told the story of an encounter he had with two gauchos, when he overheard the younger man confiding in the older about a woman with whom he was obsessed. The older man told him, “no te dejes ganar al lao de las casas,” which, Reyes found out, meant roughly the equivalent of “don’t expose yourself on your most vulnerable side,” or, colloquially, “don’t let her get to you.” The gauchos explained to him that “laos,” meaning “lados” (lit. sides) were, in their vocabulary, “zones of attack and defence,” and “el lado de las casas” was “the place of refuge where a man makes himself strong and concentrates on himself,” as opposed to the expansive plain that was open for all to conquer.132 This made Reyes think of book XXII of The Iliad, when the twice-postponed

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confrontation between Hector, the great warrior of Troy, and Achilles finally takes place. Gaucho conceptions of “the magic sense of space” and “the ceremonial sense of space” had given him an insight, he said, into why Hector was immovable in his resolution to fight Achilles, despite the entreaties of his parents: “Achilles managed to get at Hector’s most vulnerable point. Hector then had no choice but to confront him.”133 Reyes did not specify exactly which incident he had in mind for the moment when Achilles “really got to” Hector, but it was probably when Achilles killed Hector’s younger brother Polydorus. In thus illustrating how an aspect of gaucho culture had helped him to understand an episode in ancient Greek culture, Reyes enacted his vision of transculturation taking place through history. In “Discurso por Virgilio,” written in 1930 to commemorate 2,000 years since Virgil’s birth, Reyes identified parallels in the story of the conquest of Mexico and the tale of King Latinus, Turnus (suitor to the King’s daughter) and Aeneas (his foreign rival for her hand) in book VII of The Aeneid. Just as King Latinus, obeying the commands of the oracle, resigned himself to welcoming the emissaries from Aeneas of Troy, so Moctezuma accepted Cortés and his men as the new masters. Both believed that to fight the invader would be to engage in a futile struggle against the will of the gods. The next generation, Turnus and Cuauhtémoc, less devout than their predecessors, represented, according to Reyes, “nationalist reaction,” because they were closer to “the good sense of the people” and had not been “made sophisticated by an excess of superstition”; as a result, they sought to defend their peoples, who had been betrayed by Latinus and Moctezuma.134 Even the famous Aztec symbols of the eagle and the serpent were also to be found in book XI, he noted. In drawing this comparison between The Aeneid and the conquest of the Americas, Reyes’s purpose was twofold: he wanted both to establish the claim of Mexican culture to greatness and also to overcome any tendency to a narrow cultural nationalism by locating it within a universal cultural inheritance. The images, symbols, and mythology of Mexico should “be incorporated into the general patrimony of human culture and imagination,” he contended, because they were too great and powerful to be “shut away like mere family mementos.”135 Reyes argued that knowledge of Latin was essential for an understanding of the history of Mexican culture. He regretted that the dominance of positivism in state institutions of higher education had meant that many of his generation had not been taught Latin, which by that time was confined to Catholic seminaries, and tended to look upon it as a “church relic.” Even in the university law school, he

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recounted, a travesty of Roman law was taught, in sublime disregard of whether or not the students knew Latin.136 Previous generations of Mexican intellectuals, by contrast, had been renowned for their excellent Latin.137 Reyes wanted to reclaim “Latin for the Left,” he declared, “because I see no advantage in giving up conquests that have already been made.”138 Mexico had a rich scientific and cultural heritage written in Latin, he argued, from the arrival of the Spanish until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. There were important works of Mexican medicine, engineering, chemistry, and law that were unknown and untaught in contemporary Mexican universities, principally owing to the lack of Latin. If such works became known, then the cheap jibe that “Mexican science” was a contradiction in terms could no longer be defended. This was the real route, he argued, “to the Mexican soul.”139 Reyes would never have had Mexican schoolgirls dancing in togas, as Vasconcelos did.140 Universalism was a way of moving closer to his own society, he always emphasized, not a way of distancing himself. The rise of official cultural nationalism in Mexico during the late 1920s, which led to repression of institutions and intellectuals deemed to be too cosmopolitan, created a context in which Reyes, who spent most of his time abroad, was accused of “dissociation” from his native country (most famously, in an attack published in El Nacional in 1932).141 He responded with the essay “A vuelta de correo,” in which he argued that he consistently promoted Mexican culture while working in other countries, despite the fact that his position as a diplomat meant that he had to be particularly careful about what he said in any context. As on other occasions, however, the core of his rebuttal lay in confronting the issue of what kind of attitude was indicative of true patriotism. Ritual invocation of Mexico was a mere affectation, he argued. Being Mexican did not lie in “the folkloric, the literature of local customs (costumbrismo) or the picturesque,” but in the particularity of an approach to life—“a psychological intimacy”—that was still “in the process of being clarified.”142 His saw his identity as a Mexican as “involuntary,” as “a fact and not a virtue.”143 There was no need to invoke it on every page for it to be expressed in his work. In any case, to be truly national necessarily meant to be universal, since the two could only be understood in relation to one another. He did not want to be weighed down, he wrote, by the limitations of any one tradition; he considered himself the heir to all human culture “by rights of love and eagerness for work and study, which are the only authentic titles.”144 Nationalism was potentially a trap, rendering a people unable to access the full range of human experience. In the

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modern world, where communications and ideas spread increasingly rapidly, there was no cause for people to limit themselves in this way.145 To do so was merely to accede to the requirements of capitalism: “All closed groupings, differences and frontiers strike me as merely necessities imposed by the laws of economics, because of the threat posed by the masses, because of the rule of the division of labour.”146 He always opposed cultural nationalism, arguing that intellectual endeavor was necessarily universal in outlook: “Science cannot have a fatherland. [ . . . ] The Mexican chemist will be a better Mexican by becoming a better chemist [ . . . ]. The Mexican architect will be a better Mexican as he becomes a better architect [ . . . ]. All the things that Mexicans do well will become Mexican.”147 The ideal, he claimed, was for people to be formed with “the greatest proportion of national sap that history can distill [ . . . ]. And then [ . . . ] in good time universal currents will pass through.”148 Reyes could not be accused, as Rodó justifiably was, of ignoring the indigenous cultures of Latin America. His essay “Visión de Anáhuac,” written in 1917, the same year as the revolutionary Constitution, included a lengthy section on the indigenous peoples;149 in which he evoked the landscape of the central plateau of Mexico and the encounter of Moctezuma with Cortés. In a piece suffused with metaphors of light, color, space, and movement, which has been vividly described as “a great fresco in prose” by Octavio Paz,150 Reyes depicted indigenous societies as aesthetic, energetic, and poetic, a unique source of beauty that should not be rejected.151 Anáhuac was represented as the symbol of an ideally reciprocal relationship between nature and man. But, he argued, only fragments of their moral representation of the world had come down to modern Mexicans, and were of archaeological interest only, lacking in the ethical dimension that was necessary to the founding of a tradition, with the result that the Mexican spirit had assumed the hue of Latin waters.152 He was, therefore, dismissive of the essentialist claims of either indigenistas or hispanistas, arguing that it was impossible to identify any purely “Aztec” or “Spanish” traditions after three centuries of “the immense [work of] elaboration and amalgamation that has determined Mexican identity.”153 Indigenous and European peoples had been brought together, he argued, by the common effort to tame the natural landscape, and by the sense of community created by sharing day-to-day life on the same land. Citing the old Mexican saying “in Mexico the Cortés did not remove the Cuauhtémoc,” Reyes argued that all authentic cultures were founded on mixing.154

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Form as Event, or Walking in Language155 It was important for Latin Americans to apply a critical method to analyzing their own realities, argued Reyes, rather than merely seeking to emulate foreign models or engaging in soul searching. Reyes’s own training in literary and historical scholarship enabled him to become a key figure in the new school of criticism that emerged in early-twentieth-century Latin America, a type of criticism based on “a solid body of research, [ . . . ] a programme of work, [. . . and] effective and mature norms of procedure.”156 He emphasized his commitment to the critical evaluation of evidence in an attack on those Mexican enemies of liberalism who had “censored” the historical record of the reforming presidency of Benito Juárez (1867– 1872): “one of the most acute and unrecognised forms of mental laziness is blind incomprehension [ . . . ] in the face of the obvious; lack of capacity to be objective; failure to apply the procedures of logic to facts that should be accepted as facts.”157 Refusing to acknowledge historical developments because of unwillingness to face up to the evidence, he argued, led to political demoralization. Therefore, in order for Latin Americans to achieve a secure sense of themselves, they needed to cultivate critical distance when analyzing their circumstances: “the best way to resist the attraction of the whirlwind is to raise one’s eyes and seek out the line of the horizon. A more distant perspective cures us of the ills of proximity.”158 There were, however, Reyes noted, several approaches to the practice of criticism—some less constructive than others. In a piece entitled “El criticón” (the hypercritic), Reyes argued that critique could become little more than an intellectual game, stimulating ever greater feats of ingenuity and sophistry in argument, but lacking any moral perspective. In consequence, the questioning approach necessary to any full understanding of the universe (skepticism in the weak sense) was in danger of becoming skepticism in the strong sense, in which one way of looking at the world was as good or bad as any other. Alternatively, at the opposite end of the spectrum the world became reduced to one idea, one system that purported to explain everything. Both extremes—skepticism and dogmatism—led to intellectual egotism, in which the world only had meaning for the critic “filtered through his [own] mind.”159 True understanding could only be achieved by emulating “metempsychosis” (migration of souls from one body to another), argued Reyes. The critic had to perform a double operation of movement toward the desired object of knowledge and retreat from it, in order to balance identification and distancing.

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Drawing on Rodó’s Motivos de Proteo, Reyes suggested that a protean relinquishing of ego would thus be countered by a recuperation of self. Criticism, which he defined as “rebellion of the spirit,” was thus, like the hand of Penelope, possessed of the two opposed capacities of creation and destruction, and was constantly caught in the tension of seeking to destroy the existing world in order to create a better future one. The critic had constantly to negotiate a balance between openness to experience of human life, notwithstanding all its suffering, and readiness to imagine and articulate alternative ways of being. Existentially, he concluded, rebellion of the spirit was “a desperate remedy,” but in the modern world it was the only morally valid option.160 Any form of retreat into the world of the mind would result in an inability to be moved by human anguish, and, therefore, an incapacity to change anything for the better (he accused Goethe of such “Olympian prejudice”). Any attempt to escape through sensual experience (the “frisson nouveau”) was to live in a fantasy world. Any focus on the material aspects of life alone would conjure up the grotesque image of “machine-man [running] after his engineer shouting . . . ‘Give me a soul, give me a soul!’ ”161 Like Rodó, but far more extensively, Reyes sought to develop a critical practice that was appropriate to Latin American experiences. The greatest “sin” of contemporary intellectuals, argued Reyes in the early 1940s, was “that distrust of poetry” that led to the use of “polysyllabic, abstruse terms and lexical vacuities (nothing but bloodless mythologies).”162 Language was “inescapably” metaphorical, but the gap opened up between language and history brought opportunities as well as constraints (as tentatively explored by Rodó). Writing in itself—“el ejercicio de las letras”—showed Reyes that there were no absolutes, that ideological certainties were always unsustainable.163 But creativity was “not an idle game: any fact conceals a secret eloquence, and you have to seize it with passion to make it release its hieroglyphic substance.”164 The key was to find a mode of expressing hope in the midst of doubt, a mode that he referred to as prophecy: What is this excessive eagerness to succumb to prophecies? Perhaps we have lost our scientific orientation? [ . . . ] No: prophecy cannot satisfy science, but it can satisfy our longing for existence and in that sense it too contains a truth. If the Dialectic concerns itself with what is, the opposite of the Dialectic, Rhetoric, concerns itself with what we would like to be. Right now we Latin Americans have the right, perhaps we even have the duty, to be somewhat prophetic.165

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In all the continuing debates about the extent to which the Mexican Revolution brought real change, there is consensus among historians that one thing that did change was discourse. Reyes himself described how the Revolution had “left behind, with the swiftness of a cataclysm, the audacities of the letrados,” who had been dominant since the great Liberal jurists who had drawn up the 1857 Constitution.166 Oratory, at which the Liberals had excelled, became associated with the old order: it was necessary to find a new language. Thus, although Reyes’s writing style was not antagonistic or adversarial—not modernist in any conventional sense—even so it was highly experimental within the context in which he was working. It is a highly mobile, gymnastic style, which serves to demonstrate elasticity and plasticity, the unfixedness and indirectness of all things (as in the title of his collection of essays, The Oblique Plane).167 Metaphors of movement abound throughout his work: transportation, translation, transformation. Reyes saw the possibilities of translation for widespread circulation as one of the great opportunities of modern times—“our epoch of communicating vessels”—arguing that it removed barriers to “immediate contact between the souls of yesterday and those of today.”168 He undertook many translations himself, not only while he was in Madrid when it was a necessary source of income for him, but also later in life when he had more choice about what he did, especially at the Colegio de México, where he oversaw a series of translations of classic philosophy texts.169 In his own writing, the emphasis was on measure, proportion, and balance, and he further opened up discursive space with metaphors of light and color. His root metaphors were primarily visual, but all the time perspectives were shifting, so that there was no single position of authority, no all-seeing, omniscient gaze. His style was conversational, often colloquial, and he used humor as a way of wearing his erudition lightly. Pedro Henríquez Ureña captured his approach well: “In Alfonso Reyes everything either is or can be a problem. His intelligence is dialectical: he likes to turn ideas inside out to discover if there is any flaw in the weave (si en el tejido hay engaño); he likes to change focus or point of view to confirm relativities.”170 Reyes took an analogous approach to experimentation with form. Most of his work was in the form of the essay, a genre that, as discussed in chapter 2, was singularly appropriate to an eclectic approach to fashioning modernity. One genre, then, but no fewer than 10 different types of essay have been identified in his work, and it is worth briefly listing these to indicate the extent to which he turned this particular form inside out to explore its potential to the utmost. In

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addition to the more conventional varieties of (1) the classic, literary essay (“at once invention, theory and poem”), (2) the interpretative essay, (3) the theoretical essay; and (4) the essay of literary criticism or history, there are also (5) the short, poetic essay; (6) the “essay of fantasy, ingenuity or digression,” in which he employed Freudian techniques of free association to make surprising, illuminating connections; (7) the essay that was also a speech or oration; (8) the expository essay, of explanation and synthesis; (9) the memoir essay; and (10) the chronicle-essay, written for newspapers, a report/commentary on current affairs.171 Within the essay, too, Reyes tried out a broad range of techniques. In line with his view of reason as a tool of communication, he often employed dialogue. For example, in “El presagio de América,” Reyes divided his essay into 21 short sections (of 2–3 pages each), like a set of variations on a theme, or a series of snapshot images. The essay opens with a discussion of the mythical evocations of a New World, dating back to Egyptian times, then goes on to outline various accounts of explorers reaching the Americas before Columbus (the “unknown Columbuses”). It chronicles theories about early landings by Asian peoples, across the Bering Straits; Scandinavian legends, including the saga of Erik the Red; and Renaissance humanist imaginings of utopia, before reaching the main theme, which is the legend of Columbus and how it has obscured historical understanding of him. Reyes then staged a “Light Comedy about Columbus”—a dialogue between Columbus and his financial backer Martín Alonso Pinzón, who was traveling with him in the hope of finding a route to Asia. One version of their journey claimed that out in the middle of the ocean, about 750 leagues from the Canary Islands, Columbus, despairing at not having found the Antilles, where they should have been located according to his maps, allowed Pinzón to change direction, thereby explaining why Columbus thought he had landed in India. The dialogue is partly imaginary and partly drawn from “reliable testimonies.” Reyes invited the reader to “imagine the daring sailors, nervously scrutinising their maps, [ . . . ] scanning the sea and the sky, staring fixedly at each other, as if each one wanted to find the lands he was looking for reflected in the pupils of the other.”172 The combination of monologue and dialogue in itself illustrated Reyes’s approach to historical understanding, in which both rational argument and empathy had a part to play. Another fragmentary form that Reyes developed into a fine art was the anecdote. An anecdote was like a flower, he wrote—a portable piece of “living virtue”: “a warm, visible, harmonious combination

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that you can cut with your own hands and wear in your lapel.”173 Borges wrote revealingly about Reyes’s use of the anecdote, arguing that he reformed the genre by ignoring the convention of the climactic last line, to which everything else was geared, and which could be tedious to await. Instead, Reyes “presents us with a little world and makes it come alive,” offering “charm” instead of “surprise.”174 Thus the old claim that anecdotes were antithetical to image and metaphor was shown to be true only of a certain type of anecdote: it was quite possible, argued Borges, to use the anecdote—as Reyes had done—to create powerfully poetic texts charged with metaphorical meaning. Not unlike the “small worlds” painted by Paul Klee, these resembled the patterns of a kaleidoscope, momentarily coalesced into a state of perfection, but always precariously on the verge of dissolving again into fragments. Reyes developed a way of writing in which form itself became an event, a synthesis of space and time or, as Octavio Paz put it, an “instant of reconciliation in which discord is transformed into harmony.”175 Thus form, which Reyes saw as ethical because it was a way of resisting excess, became a way of reconciling harmony and liberty, time and space. He, like Rodó, was interested in Bergson’s exploration of new ways of thinking that departed from rational logic.176 Bergson’s distinction, later developed by Deleuze, between discrete difference and continuous difference, is illuminating in this respect. While “discrete difference” conceives diversity as a multiplicity of separate entities that in time displace each other, “continuous difference” imagines it as a multiplicity of continuous entities that evolve out of each other—a notion closer to the ideas about plasticity and metamorphosis first raised by Rodó and taken further by Reyes.177 For Reyes, then, writing was a praxis, a particular way of constituting a culture. His vocabulary was extraordinarily wide-ranging, drawn not only from a wide range of subjects but also from different social classes and ethnic groups in Mexico. He introduced technical terms, foreign words, and neologisms.178 All the above came together to enact the idea that unity should be an aspiration but could not be a reality, at least not permanently; his work is full of ellipses, digressions, allusions, and playfulness but displays an eternal return to reason as the orientating force. He emphasized the importance of goodwill, which he saw as the “only respectable attitude towards life.”179 Indeed, although irony is sometimes present in Reyes’s work, it is usually softened by the luminous good humor that pervades his writing like a beneficent smile (with all its virtues and limitations). In sum, Reyes’s texts embodied what Bakhtin described as “an

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indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with the unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality.”180 Conclusion Reyes’s determined critical odyssey through the Western canon— pursued despite repeated charges by chauvinistic nationalists that he was indifferent or antagonistic to Mexico—placed beyond question the idea that Latin Americans were just as entitled as anybody else to claim the legacy of Western thought. Reyes was the first Mexican of the twentieth century to think and write “with autonomy and nobility,” as Carlos Fuentes put it, without asking permission of anybody.181 In doing so, he sought to escape from the weight of traditional pessimism about Mexico’s future. The concern with origins and originality that so preoccupied many of the Latin American cultural nationalists needed to be replaced, in Reyes’s view, with a creative recuperation of the best of all previous cultures that could only be achieved in the Americas. It was in Latin America’s capacity for amalgamation of different cultures that its own distinctiveness lay. Like Rodó, Reyes feared that the United States would seek to impose its own version of modernity on Latin America. The appropriate response, he argued, entailed going beyond the hermetic processes of self-affirmation advocated by many Latin American intellectuals (whether they sought to base it on indigenismo, hispanismo, mestizaje, or Latinity). For Reyes, self-affirmation could only take place in dialectical relationship with the other. Attempts at self-knowledge through acts of mystical self-communion had not advanced the Latin American nations one step, he maintained.182 In order to affirm their own qualities, Latin Americans needed to look outward, not inward—not in order to imitate, but instead to apply techniques acquired abroad to investigate Latin American phenomena.183 Once this dialectical learning process was underway, it would be possible to effect a synthesis which, in turn, would supply the confidence needed for an “open spiritual attack against any kind of vassalage.”184 For Reyes, dialogue was both a form and a strategy for the elaboration of a cultural practice that could play a key role in educating public opinion, and was, therefore, “identical to active democracy.”185 It was the duty of the Left to dream, he argued, drawing strength from the abstract ideals of political equality, social justice, and rational economics rather than being limited—like the Right—by the concrete and the specific.186 His conception of modernity went beyond the aesthetic/ethical dimensions explored by Rodó to incorporate a

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fully historical awareness. Historical writing acquired meaning, for Reyes, when (as Koselleck argued) it enabled those addressed to integrate past or foreign events and processes into their own lived experience.187 Reyes’s project for modernity was based not on a passive program or an unrealizable dream of the future, but instead on the latent potential of the peoples of the region sustained by the vitality of their daily activities, their history, and traditions.188 He envisaged the region as “a potential theatre of better human experiences,”189 where solidarity and justice would govern social and international relations. Reyes said relatively little about how such a society would be created in practice. Following Plato, he saw the state as necessary to the fulfillment of the individual as a good citizen, and argued for government by an educated elite who appreciated the cardinal virtues (wisdom, courage, temperance, and justness). Following in the Mexican Liberal tradition, education was crucial to his vision of a modern society. He advocated redistribution of land—a policy that he detected in Virgil’s Georgics.190 The great mistake of the nineteenth century, he argued, had been to found “a civilization” on “the accumulation of material goods distributed unevenly.”191 As well as literacy—“pan de alma”—the people needed “pan del cuerpo.”192 Mexico’s culture would develop, he maintained, when “we feed our people, when we reconcile them to existence, when they can enjoy a certain degree of self-government.”193 There were also hints of some potentially radical and challenging ideas about the role of women in modernity. In an article discussing Montaigne’s reactionary views, Reyes noted that he saw women’s approach to life as “an invitation to break down the concentrated ego.”194 He did not challenge the assimilationist policies of the Mexican State, however, arguing that it was a national obligation to incorporate the indigenous peoples into “the full benefits of civilised life.”195 Reyes’s main contribution to the elaboration of an alternative modernity was not political, however, but epistemological. He mistrusted all grand narratives, prophecies, and certainties.196 Ultimately, he wrote at the end of his life that “social problems are never [ . . . ] resolved once and for all,” but it was still “up to each moment in history to attempt their partial solution.”197 He was less concerned with where humanity was going (which he did not see as wholly within the control of either individuals or societies) than with how it was getting there. The overwhelming need was for people to preserve a sense of their own humanity, to communicate, enter into dialogue, synthesize ideas and experiences, stay close to the everyday and the local, whilst

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at the same time cultivating an awareness of the ineffable and the universal. Against modernist heroism, Reyes proposed the quiet cultivation of Kantian “good will,” wryly noting that “we are better at fighting and dying than at living in harmony with our neighbor for fifteen days on the trot.”198 The role of the intellectual was to promote mutual knowledge between individuals and cultures—in short, to act as an interpreter.199 Reyes did not preach—and was far less moralizing than either Rodó or Justo—but tried to live as an example of his own ideals. The Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez recalled him in geometrical metaphors as a man of “seven personalities: the oblique, the rounded, the upright, the pointed, the square, the horizontal, the vertical”—the embodiment of the plurality of Latin America itself. Alfonso Reyes, “saviour of all that could be saved,” 200 was neither antagonist nor agonist, in conventionally modernist style, but in his early explorations of culture as process he launched a distinctively Mexican rebellion “against fate and ascription.”

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Chapter 5

A Vital Form of Public Space: Mariátegui’s Revolution in Modernity

The problem was not to choose between the modern and the traditional [but] to try out a different encounter. Alberto Flores Galindo1

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he question of how to develop an authentic alternative to the technocratic modernity favored by local elites and imperialist powers has long preoccupied the Latin American Left. By the 1920s, social democracy (discussed in chapter 3) was increasingly seen as deficient, not least because of the continuing readiness of the elites to repress even peaceful demonstrations of labor power. In this respect, a major turning point was Argentina’s Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) of 1919, when the reformist Radical government—which was only in power at all because of an increase in working-class electoral participation— ordered the troops to fire on striking workers. Many Latin American radicals initially sought inspiration in Soviet Russia (both socialist and anarchist groups converted themselves into communist parties in the early 1920s), but the dogmatism of the Communist International quickly took its toll, hindering the efforts of Latin American communists to attract mass support. In the debates generated by disillusionment with the Soviet model, a great deal hinged on how revolution was conceived. For many on the Latin American Left, revolution was seen less in terms of an act of seizing state power but more as a process “in which intellectual and moral reform [was] an integral part rather than a possible consequence.”2 This theme has been dominant in twentieth-century Latin American history: anyone who knows anything about the Cuban or Nicaraguan Revolutions, for example, will instantly recognize it. Even the strategy of guerrilla warfare

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elaborated after the Cuban Revolution (foquismo), which inevitably redirected attention back to the insurrectional act, drew upon the idea of revolution as a morally transformative process in claiming that revolutionaries would be purged of all their original bourgeois sins through participation in the guerrilla group (the foco). A wide variety of oppositional groups have assigned culture, rather than ideology, a central role in creating the spaces of experience in which to pursue Latin America’s founding ideals of liberty, sovereignty, and justice. This distinctively Latin American conception of social revolution, which is the radical culmination of the rethinking of reason, democracy, and history discussed in the previous chapters, found its first formal expression in the work of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930). Mariátegui has been hailed, rightly, as one of the earliest Latin American thinkers to apply Marxism flexibly and creatively to a specifically Latin American context, and his resulting influence on various sectors of the region’s Left has been thoroughly documented.3 After the Cuban Revolution, which was interpreted by many on the Left as confirmation of Mariátegui’s theories, his books became obligatory reading for the radicalized generation of the 1960s, a process aided by the publication of his complete works from 1959 onward. As Gramsci’s ideas began to spread in Latin America, many people saw similar concerns in Mariátegui, who in the mid-to-late1970s became a touchstone for debating the continuing relevance of Marxism to Latin America. A congress held in Mexico on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, 1980, hailed him as a beacon of hope for the disoriented Latin American Left.4 In Peru, he became a marker of authenticity, with various sectors of the divided Left claiming to be his true heir.5 Notoriously, Mariátegui was invoked by the Maoist guerrilla movement that launched its struggle against the Peruvian state in 1980, designating itself the Communist Party of Peru by the Shining Path of José Carlos Mariátegui. His legacy went far beyond the Left, however: his key work, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928; hereafter Siete ensayos),6 became a canonical work on Peruvian national identity, one that is still widely read and cited today. After the redemocratization of the 1980s, however, and especially since the centenary of his birth in 1994, which stimulated a new round of scholarship, it was Mariátegui’s insistence on open-minded, critical thinking in the context of participatory citizenship that came to be viewed as the most relevant aspect of his legacy.7 Even now, when few people seriously regard socialist revolution as an option, Mariátegui’s work is

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still seen as a rich source of inspiration for thinking about an alternative modernity. It would be no exaggeration to say that Mariátegui was enthralled by modernity. His texts betray little of the anxiety, doubt, or ambivalence that was apparent in Rodó and, to a lesser extent, in Justo and Reyes. His style was nervy at times, but it was more the nervousness of anticipation, excitement, and exhilaration than of apprehension, boredom, or dread. He portrayed the modern world as an endlessly fascinating spectacle, latent with dramatic potential for overcoming the constraints of the past and reinventing itself anew. To an extent unusual, if not unique, amongst his Latin American contemporaries, Mariátegui’s work conveyed the splendor and, indeed, the sheer pleasure of modern life. “I find it good, great and magnificent,” he announced in 1917. “I am happy that I was born into it. I enjoy the horse races [ . . . ]. I take pleasure in going for a drive in a car. Electric light gladdens me. I like aeroplanes. I’m interested in cinema.”8 He rarely wrote about those darker aspects of modern experience that came to preoccupy so many European and Latin American intellectuals after the First World War. For Mariátegui, it was not modernity itself that caused alienation, uniformity, and dehumanization, but rather the bourgeois capitalist version of it that was undergoing crisis in Europe.9 He went further than any of his generation in trying to reconcile ideas from the international Marxist movement with indigenous thought to create a distinctly Peruvian model of democratic socialism. Behind this specifically political project lay a broader vision of modernity that was the most radical and inclusive of the four discussed in this book. In Marshall Berman’s vivid phrase,10 Mariátegui envisaged modernity as a vital form of public space—one that was to be occupied centre-stage by the workers and peasants. The significance of Mariátegui’s radicalism as a sounding board for the anxiety of his contemporaries about Peruvian modernity is suggested by the succession of “polemics” that he was engaged in during the 1920s. The two best-known are his disputes over revolutionary strategy with the Communist International and with fellow intellectual and militant Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who founded APR A (the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), Peru’s most important political party for most of the twentieth century. Both of these quarrels continued after Mariátegui’s death, with orthodox Communists condemning him as a petty-bourgeois populist and Apristas dismissing him as a Europeanizing intellectual who was incapable of effective action.11 These arguments, the intricacies of which are not relevant here, are indicative of the hostilities provoked

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by any attempt to develop a distinctively Latin American approach that was nonetheless open to ideas from abroad. A comparable issue about the relationship between internal and external influences lay behind Mariátegui’s disagreements with Haya de la Torre over imperialism. Whereas Haya de la Torre argued that its defeat was the crucial precondition for social change in Peru, Mariátegui responded that anti-imperialism was a diversionary tactic and that the main target of popular action should be the Peruvian oligarchy.12 In other words, while Haya de la Torre saw technocratic modernity primarily as something imposed from outside the region, Mariátegui contended that it was so difficult to combat precisely because it had been internalized by the elites of Latin America. Controversies also flared up over indigenismo, of which there were at least three versions developing: the official policy promoted from 1920 to 1923; the literary and artistic indigenismo of avant-garde intellectuals based mainly in Lima; and the organizations built by indigenous people themselves. Further divisions developed along regional lines, notably Cuzco against Lima.13 In this volatile context, Mariátegui’s claim that the future of Peru lay in its indigenous peoples provoked assertive responses from those Peruvian intellectuals who shared the majority view among the elites that Peru’s national culture was and should be Hispanic. The Christian democrat Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, a leading member of the previous intellectual generation and an advocate of whitening, wrote an essay entitled La realidad nacional (1930) explicitly to refute Mariátegui’s ideas. Mariátegui also had an acrimonious ad hominem exchange with the liberal Peruvian intellectual Luis Alberto Sánchez, who took the view, common among reformists in Latin America at the time, that a policy of mestizaje would enable Peru both to integrate its indigenous peoples and to modernize along technocratic lines. Sánchez attacked Mariátegui for analyzing Peru in terms of an alleged division between the indigenous sierra and the white-and-mestizo costa, which he claimed (not without some justification) was an oversimplification of Peru’s social realities. For Sánchez, the “true opposition” was between the “autochthonous” and the “foreign”—a claim that was becoming ever more common in Latin America by the 1920s as essentialist cultural nationalism took hold—and he identified Peru’s problems as mainly the result of “europeización,” hinting that Mariátegui was exactly the kind of intellectual who was part of the problem.14 Mariátegui responded that for him the main issue was class, not race; that in distinguishing between costa and sierra he was pointing to relative levels of class consciousness not to hard-and-fast geographical

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boundaries; and that in any case the urgent task in Peru was to unite all the oppressed to fight against feudal structures, not to squabble about which group was more or less autochthonous.15 Mariátegui’s radical ideas, which probed the limits of what the intelligentsia were prepared to countenance, were received far more enthusiastically in the indigenous organizations. He was also involved in lively debates with their leaders, however, not least over the extent to which they should acquiesce in government attempts to co-opt them, and with trade unionists, particularly those who remained loyal to anarchism and were correspondingly chary of Mariátegui’s commitment to a revolutionary state. By the mid-1920s Mariátegui’s ideas had become a major point of reference not only for the intelligentsia of Lima and Cuzco but also for labor and peasant leaders. At his funeral in 1930 thousands of urban workers and peasants from the nearby valleys accompanied the coffin on a procession through the streets of Lima, to the manifest dismay of the elites. Mariátegui was unusual among Latin American intellectuals in the extent to which his ties with popular organizations went beyond the rhetorical, which makes him an especially revealing case study for assessing the extent to which ideas about an alternative modernity went beyond intellectual circles. In the light of his participation in popular struggles, I interpret Mariátegui not so much as an isolated modernist in agonized conflict with his times, as Alberto Flores Galindo suggests,16 but rather as a lightning conductor for a model of modernity founded on the supposedly antimodern masses. Such a model was more than most of his fellow intellectuals were prepared to contemplate, but it was one that was being explored and enacted in Peru’s emerging popular organizations during the 1920s. Mariátegui’s Experiences of the Modern Mariátegui’s career as a journalist, political activist, and autodidact intellectual was a product of the opportunities presented by modernization, perhaps even more so than was the case with Rodó, Justo, or Reyes.17 His childhood, which was spent mostly in or near Lima,18 coincided with the first period in which modernization had a major impact on Peru. The process had begun in the 1870s, but had been slowed down by economic collapse and the War of the Pacific (1879– 1883), as a result of which Peru lost territory to Chile and an anguished debate started about Peru’s future as a nation. During the 1890s, economic revival came at the cost of virtual British control over the Peruvian economy, a state of affairs that brought direct foreign

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investment into mining and commercial agriculture (first from Britain; later from the United States). Modern textile production began in 1890, and the decade saw the onset of industrialization, encouraged by the introduction of electricity in 1895. A process of modern state building slowly began, overseen by a new ruling coalition of sectors that shared a commitment to technocratic modernity (mining, sugar, and cotton interests; financiers; businessmen; property developers, and professionals). In 1895 the incoming president, Nicolás de Piérola, buoyed up by having been brought to power by a civilian protest movement against the previous military government, declared his intention to create a “technical State” and a modern national culture. What became known as the “spirit of ‘95” stimulated the establishment of a Ministry of Development, with departments of planning, industry, welfare, and public works, a Council to oversee public education policy and, later, the Historical Institute of Peru. Visible markers of modernization on the streets of Lima included public electric lighting and the city’s first tram line, both introduced in 1902. Public leisure facilities were opened: a zoo, an exhibition hall, and a museum of national history. But any far-reaching social modernization was stymied by the weakness of the central Peruvian state, which meant that the urban-based elites continued to operate in alliance with the rural gamonales (local bosses) throughout what became known as the Aristocratic Republic (1895–1919), when the Partido Civil (the civilistas) prevailed. As Mariátegui was growing up, new centers of intellectual life were gradually emerging to compete with the hitherto dominant University of San Marcos, which had been the focus for the preceding liberal Generation of 1900. At the start of the new century, Lima’s newspapers began to invest in technology, to expand coverage to include more national news and cultural issues, and to become more professional, thereby offering employment opportunities to a new generation of young writers. Mariátegui’s modest background and his need to work from an early age, without completing formal education, has often been emphasized in accounts of his life, and indeed it was the case that the family lacked financial security, because his father abandoned his mother soon after José Carlos’s birth. It was true, too, that his mother worked as a seamstress for a time, but she also became a schoolteacher—again, an opportunity that would not have been available only a short time earlier—and was, according to her grandson, a well-informed and cultured person,19 who encouraged the young Mariátegui’s desire to read. His reading received a great stimulus during his three-month stay in the French hospital in Lima, after an

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accident to his leg in 1902. He found himself in a ward with several European adults, who helped him to learn French and German, eagerly lending him the books they were sent from Europe, which Mariátegui’s mother readily collected from the main post office.20 At that time, European books were still a relative rarity in Lima: Peru was not initially targeted by Spanish publishing houses to the same extent as Argentina, Mexico, or Uruguay, so the influx of foreign materials that took place in the 1900s in those countries was postponed until the 1920s for Peru. Even so, by 1905, aged 11, Mariátegui was reading a literary journal, Prisma, which published works by leading Peruvian and French writers.21 When he was 14, in 1909, he found a job on the liberal newspaper La Prensa and soon attached himself to the city’s small bohemian set, becoming a regular at the Bar Americano, where journalists met, and frequenting the bookshop La Aurora Literaria.22 Well into the 1920s, Lima’s intellectuals continued to live this kind of pavement life, not least because, even for the middle classes, housing conditions in the city were poor and deteriorating.23 Baudelairian decadence was in vogue amongst the Lima literati, and as an adolescent Mariátegui went through a distinctly dandyish phase. His work as a full-time journalist gave him knowledge of Lima’s politics and society at a variety of levels, however. It took him out onto the streets, where he encountered not only the modern Parisian fashions that so obsessed the elites, but also the beginnings of mass politics in Peru. Lima’s population grew steadily (from 114,733 in 1890 to 173,007 in 1920) but not spectacularly until the 1920s, when large-scale migration from the rural areas began. Early in the twentieth century, however, the introduction of harsh modern production techniques led to the formation of a rural proletariat and widespread unrest on the plantations. The First World War caused even more acute unemployment and immiseration in Peru than elsewhere in Latin America, mainly because of Peru’s high dependence upon food imports. An urban labor movement, largely anarchist or syndicalist in orientation, with a regular and lively press, emerged and became especially strong among workers in foreign-owned corporations. Indigenous people were beginning to make their presence felt in the public arena, not only politically in the form of uprisings but also with the emergence of traveling indigenous music and theater groups.24 A Pro-Indigenous Association functioned from 1909 to 1916, originally liberal and paternalist in orientation, but later radicalized through the experience of trying to secure basic land rights from the refractory authorities. The secretary, Pedro Zulen, who had lived in Jauja, where he

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learnt the local language, later became a close friend of Mariátegui’s. Mass labor and student unrest in 1918–1919 brought the Aristocratic Republic to an end and Peru embarked on its first explicitly state-led modernization project with Augusto Leguía’s authoritarian and technocratic “New Fatherland” (1919–1930), just as the first shantytowns were forming on the edges of Lima. Leguía’s initiatives to extend the capacity of the Peruvian state involved not only public works but also the development of a repressive apparatus, from which Mariátegui suffered when he was arrested twice for alleged “subversion,” in 1924 and 1927. Much of Mariátegui’s experience of Peru’s modernization occurred, therefore, in or around Lima, where he spent most of his life. He only went once to the Peruvian sierra, for about three weeks, although the visit seems to have made a vivid impression upon him. In July 1918 (in the midst of winter), he traveled by train on the breathtaking allday journey from Lima to Huancayo, marveling all the way at the magnificent feat of modern engineering that had, over the course of four decades, taken the railway (built by a U.S. adventurer) across the Andes. There is a story told that at the highest point, 4,816 meters above sea level, Mariátegui rose to his feet and proclaimed to the other passengers—who were all a little bemused by this apparently famous but diminutive young journalist who sat amongst them with his walking stick—that the locomotive was one of the most miraculous inventions of the human mind.25 In Huancayo itself, which was a trading center for all the surrounding provinces, Mariátegui would have encountered a wide variety of people, many of them indigenous, coming into the town for the Sunday markets. He was apparently struck by the energy, warmth, and humor—not to mention the commercial aptitude—of people whom he had been led to believe were passive, mournful, and pessimistic.26 Several manifestations of modern life had reached even distant Huancayo: everyone was avidly following the news of the First World War as it arrived by cable; town planners were overseeing a redesign of the Constitutional Park; and, although horse-riding was still the main mode of transport, a minibus had recently begun to clatter its way through the streets. In its incessant, vigorous trading activity, carried out by regular migrants and enhanced by modern communication facilities, Mariátegui saw Huancayo as a microcosm of progress and nascent cosmopolitanism.27 He returned to Lima, he wrote, with his sense of optimism restored.28 Mariátegui’s experiences of modern life were further extended by three years spent in Europe, where he arrived in October 1919,

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aged 25. Notoriously, this stint in exile was not entirely voluntary. He had come under pressure from President Leguía to leave the country after his active and effective campaign in support of the general strike held earlier that year, and, controversially, had accepted a government grant to do so, a decision for which he was criticized from all sides in Peru (some attacked him for accepting Leguía’s bribe; others for going to Europe at all). He stopped off briefly in New York during the voyage, so he did catch a glimpse of modernity U.S.-style, which he apparently found “too violent for his senses.”29 Unfortunately, little correspondence survives from his time in Europe, so for evidence of his impressions historians are reliant on a few recorded memories and the newspaper articles he sent back to Lima, most of which were about Italy.30 Famously, Mariátegui subsequently claimed— echoing Reyes—that it was during his odyssey in Europe that he truly discovered Latin America.31 He went first to Paris, where he met his idol Henri Barbusse and, inspired by him, started to think more about the psychology of revolutionary consciousness and the political responsibility of the intellectual. When asked what he had enjoyed about Paris, Mariátegui recalled workers’ meetings at Belleville, where former Communards gathered and he could feel the intensity of “the religious warmth of the new multitudes”; the Louvre, where he saw Renaissance paintings for the first time; the Luxembourg Gardens and the cosmopolitan Latin Quarter, “with its restaurants from every country.”32 The Parisian climate did not suit his fragile health, however, and he soon left for Rome, arriving just before il bienno rosso (two years of worker militancy). He had been in Italy about four months when the Turin general strike broke out in April 1920, and the following year he attended the Congress of Livorno, at which the radical wing of the Italian Socialist Party seceded in order to affiliate to the Communist International. Mariátegui was duly fascinated by Italy’s political crisis and by the debates between Marxists and Liberals over how to respond to it, and several of his articles on Italy cover the political situation. But he seems to have been equally interested in Italy’s own distinctive modernity. He wrote about Italian cinema, Futurism, other modernist art movements, and the “values of modern Italian culture.”33 Italian intellectual life was far more open to international influences than was the case in France, he argued, observing that “everything” had been translated into Italian, and that he had even met someone in Rome who knew Quechua. It was a pity, he added, that Latin American writers had always turned to France rather than Italy in their attempts to escape from the legacy

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of Spain.34 Yet Rome was not a truly “modern” city, he claimed, despite being the seat of bureaucratic power, because it had no major economic function (“its only industry was the past,” he wrote) and was not a “city of opinion.” He contrasted Rome’s “provincial atmosphere” with the industrial energy of Milan, which he saw as the “true capital of modern Italy.”35 Like many visitors to Italy, he found the landscape and the people “theatrical” (“everything is a bit like a mise en scène”), but, intriguingly, he also found the weight of history oppressive: “There’s not a single patch of sky or earth that has the good fortune not to be illustrious. Or, at least, I haven’t found one.”36 He favorably compared the “virgin landscape of Amazonia,” where, he imagined (since he had never been there), there was nothing to impede “possession of it, knowledge of it, enjoyment of it, without prior assumptions, without prejudice, from the first contact.”37 Mariátegui left Italy in June 1922, briefly revisited Paris, where he met Romain Rolland, and then went on to Munich, Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and Budapest. In all of these places, he studied the various ways in which European Marxists were maneuvering to take advantage of the crisis in capitalism generated by the First World War, and observed the different forms that modernity assumed. He was fascinated by Berlin’s vast modern construction projects—especially in contrast to the venerable splendors of Paris or Rome—and he was even somewhat reluctantly impressed by the achievements of the Social Democrats, spending six months learning German and visiting museums, educational institutions, and the famous clinics.38 He had originally hoped to see Soviet Russia, but was unable to do so. After returning to Lima in March 1923, Mariátegui hardly went anywhere else for the rest of his life, mainly because traveling became very difficult after his right leg was amputated in 1924, leaving him permanently in a wheelchair. A proposed trip to Buenos Aires, where he could have had treatment that might have enabled him to walk again, never took place, at least partly for political reasons. None of this dimmed his vivacity, however. He seems to have felt compelled to be optimistic,39 at least in public, and everyone who knew him recalled his cheerfulness, his sense of fun, and his complete lack of pretentiousness. What Mariátegui came literally to embody, even for those who did not support him politically, was faith in a better future despite adverse circumstances. It is this quality—his readiness to embrace the modern world and all its possibilities—that has been invoked by virtually everyone who has written about him, from whatever ideological or political perspective.

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Even though he could no longer travel, Mariátegui, who was fluent in French, German, Italian, and English, continued to range extraordinarily widely in his search for evidence about all the different things that it could mean to be modern.40 He exchanged books, journals, and ideas with most of the leading Latin American writers of his day, and with key figures in Europe and the United States. His correspondence shows how much time and energy he devoted to sending out copies of his books to writers and journalists throughout Peru and the rest of the Latin America (perhaps partly because the situation with respect to distribution of published works seems to have been little better in the Peru of the 1920s than it was two decades earlier in Uruguay when Rodó was trying to publicize Ariel).41 Often accused of being obsessed with Europe, he was actually interested in a wide variety of experiences both within Latin America (especially Argentina and Mexico) and beyond, including not only the predictable France, Britain, and the United States, but also Italy, Germany, Turkey (because of Ataturk), India, Russia, China, and Japan.42 Like several other Latin American intellectuals at the time, including Reyes, he thought that Japan (after its reopening to the West in 1853) provided an instructive model of how to reconcile openness to international influences with preservation of a distinctive culture. Mariátegui also stands out among his contemporaries for his rejection of the Arielista view of the United States as “just a materialist, utilitarian, manufacturing nation” and his emphasis on its great idealist tradition.43 For all his interest in other experiences, however, it is worth emphasizing that Mariátegui’s political thinking was radicalized mainly by his involvement with the Peruvian labor and student movements in 1917–1919, not by the debates between revisionists and revolutionaries within the international socialist movement, which it would have been well-nigh impossible for him to follow in any detail until he was in Europe. Peru had no socialist tradition (unlike Argentina, Uruguay, or Chile), news of the Bolshevik Revolution was electrifying but erratic, and very few works by Marx or Engels, let alone Lenin or Trotsky, were available anywhere in Latin America before the formation of Communist parties. Indeed, they remained scarce for many years. But political debate was vigorous and lively among the generation of young writers to which Mariátegui belonged, known variously as the Centenary Generation or the Generation of 1919, all of whom rejected the cautious reformism of their immediate predecessors and saw themselves—Arielista-style—as the founders of a new Peru. The only forefather they acknowledged was Manuel González Prada

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(1848–1918), a radical liberal-positivist, renowned for his uncompromising anticlericalism, who resisted the Social Darwinist connotations that positivism typically acquired in Latin America, and was one of the earliest Peruvian intellectuals to argue that his country could never achieve full nationhood without including the indigenous peoples. His house became a meeting place for the young radicals, who read and discussed whatever material they could get hold of, especially from Europe: a few socialist texts; Spanish literature, particularly by the Generation of 1898; Nietzsche; fragments of the European avant-gardes—Marinetti’s futurist manifesto began to circulate in 1917; and Bergson, whose work rapidly became influential in Peru at that time because his ideas were seen as a means of creating a national spirit.44 Much of this material came in the form of translated extracts in periodicals from other Latin American countries. Books, which were scarce, were handed round from hand to hand—for example, Mariátegui first read the French anarchist thinker Georges Sorel, whose work became so important to him, thanks to an Italian immigrant friend. It was difficult, but with persistence not impossible, to encounter a wide range of ideas, albeit in somewhat eclectic fashion. By 1918 Mariátegui was already identifying himself as a socialist, helping to found a Committee of Socialist Propaganda and Organisation, and rapidly moving toward the radical end of the spectrum between reformism and revolution. Once in Europe, Mariátegui was able to observe for himself how the European Left saw its options in the aftermath of the First World War. He followed these debates mainly through the prism of the Italian L’Ordine Nuovo group, admiring the way that they combined close contacts with the working class with a revival of idealism, drawn from historicist thinkers such as Benedetto Croce, in order to counter the cautious gradualism of the Second International. Mariátegui was always attracted to unorthodox thinkers, of whatever hue. One significant source of inspiration was Piero Gobetti (1901–1926), a radical but nonsectarian liberal member of L’Ordine Nuovo, who founded a series of journals to function as a forum for the disunited Left, as Mariátegui later did in Peru. Gobetti’s project was to revise liberalism by excising the étatisme it had acquired in Italy; his explorations of the relationship between economics and culture resonated with Mariátegui, especially his concern with the role of the economy in creating new moral values, as did his interest in developing participatory democracy through associational life. 45 It is worth noting that Mariátegui went out of his way to emphasize to his Peruvian readers that Gobetti’s ideas were modern, even though the Italian’s work was

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“unfinished and unsystematic” (he died young, after being beaten up by Fascist squadristi) and as a result the reader had to “search for its vivid and profound modernity [ . . . ] in the suggestive ensemble of his attitudes.”46 Mariátegui’s list of the qualities he admired in Gobetti is a summary of the values that came to be associated with Latin America’s alternative modernity: “a sense of justice, an unadulterated sympathy for mankind and his work, a loyal purpose to contribute to knowledge of the purest and highest values of Italian culture.”47 Bukharin was also an important source because of his use of historical evidence to refute theories of racial superiority, which helped Mariátegui to think through the relationship between class and race. Bukharin’s almost casual aside—“we now know how much the ancient Greeks borrowed from the Assyro-Babylonians and the Egyptians”— made a point that is regarded as commonplace nowadays but was revolutionary in its time, 48 challenging as it did the origin myth of Western civilization. For Bukharin, the variations in success of different peoples at different stages of history—which, he argued, could not be concealed by the “benevolent subterfuges of liberalism”—were mainly attributable to changes in the conditions of production.49 In Siete ensayos, Mariátegui applied similar ideas to the relationship between the Incas and the Spanish, to equally revolutionary effect in his own context. One other thinker mentioned several times by Mariátegui, whose impact on his work has not always been noted, is Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Simmel was long known only in Germany, but has recently been more widely recognized as one of the most subtle and perceptive writers on the sociology of modernity. There are several correspondences between his work and Mariátegui’s. As one of the first sociologists to have studied ethnology, Simmel focused on culture, which he defined broadly to include the practices of everyday life—from the sociology of the meal to the psychology of money—the study of which he pioneered.50 He employed a dialectical and historical approach to develop a model of modernity that encompassed both objective and subjective factors. Mariátegui tuned in specifically to his suggestion, as elaborated in “The Conflict in Modern Culture” (1918),51 that the central feature of modernity was a latent tension between life (subjectivity, individuality) and form (objectivity, standardization). Throughout history, Simmel argued, generic life had incessantly generated specific forms for itself in a constant ebb and flow of death and resurrection, but the modern era had brought a “repudiation of the principle of form,” which had resulted in a heightening of conflict in all areas of life: economics, art, personal life, and

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religion.52 Mariátegui was similarly interested Simmel’s analysis of space, which also tried to steer a course between two extremes. As one commentator put it, “While he shows how space is in some ways socially formed, he does not treat space as simply a social construct. It retains a reality of its own. Simmel’s overall position, then, lies somewhere between spatial determinism and social constructionism.”53 In other words, Simmel’s approach to modernity, like Mariátegui’s, was to pursue an alternative to both instrumentalism and irrationalism, rejecting monocausal explanations and trying to analyze subjective, psychological factors together with more objective, material conditions. Mariátegui’s selection of European literature for review in Lima periodicals provides further clues both about his own concept of modernity and about what aspects of European experience he wished to communicate to his readers in Peru. He greatly admired the works of Pirandello, arguing that the Sicilian was so “much more modern” than Marinetti, who simply aestheticized technology, whilst Pirandello had the “faculty to register the innermost tendencies and deepest vibrations of his age.”54 Mariátegui acclaimed Pirandello for exploring the liquidation of the bourgeois ideal of the coherent, stable personality, for enacting the drama of the disenchanted soul through surrealist forays into the unconscious. Pirandello dramatized “the fluid aspect of life—the [combination of the] transitory and the concrete” that so interested Mariátegui,55 and which he later pursued through reading Freud and the surrealists (see later). Intrigued by Joyce, particularly his reaction against a Jesuit education, Mariátegui declared himself temperamentally alien to Proust’s “morbid apathy,”56 although he admired his explorations of the uncertainties of identity. Most revealingly of all, he declared the “noblest voice” in contemporary European literature to be Romain Rolland, the French Nobel Prize–winning novelist, playwright, pacifist, socialist, and mystic, who, like Mariátegui, wanted to retain a role for both art and religious experience in the modern world. According to Freud’s own account in Civilization and Its Discontents, it was Rolland who persuaded Freud to take religious feeling seriously as a factor in human motivation, and who introduced him to the idea of the “oceanic” feeling, the “feeling as of something limitless, unbounded.”57 In his article on Rolland, Mariátegui conveyed his enthusiasm for Rolland’s “fundamentally religious” spirit, which adhered to no particular creed, but heroically created “his own faith in each instant.” 58 It was a mistake, however, Mariátegui added, to maintain that all men could do the same. Mariátegui also emphasized to his Peruvian readers

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Rolland’s commitment to searching for the soul of France, not on Parisian boulevards but in the French countryside, and drew their attention to Rolland’s involvement in a popular theater, which he saw as comparable to the popular universities in Latin America. Mariátegui played down Rolland’s Tolstoyan condemnation of violence, and his disdain for politics, preferring to emphasize his “human faith” and “the religiosity of his action and his thought.” By 1923, through his accumulation of imagined and lived experience, Mariátegui had become committed to the view that the creative potential of modernity could only be realized through a revolution of the masses. He then asked what would constitute an authentic revolution in Peru. Reviewing the existing options, all of which were European imports, he came to the conclusion that such a revolution could not be anarchist (too individualistic and romantic), syndicalist (too materialistic and pessimistic), Social Democratic (too fatalistic and prosaic), liberal (too secular, too cautious), Bolshevik (too state-centered and too focused on the industrial working class) or Comintern-inspired (too gradualist and Eurocentric before Stalinization in 1928; too dogmatic and isolationist afterward). Nor—as the well-known polemics attest—could it be Aprista (too naive about the national bourgeoisie and far too populist). Instead, Mariátegui’s own influential analysis of Peru led him to promote a distinctively Peruvian version of socialism as the best means of releasing the liberating potential of modernity. The rationale for this was that he saw Peru’s economy as already capitalist (not feudal, as the Comintern maintained). Aspects of feudalism remained, for example, the large landed estates with their practices of debt-peonage, but they had survived, he argued, only to the extent that they had adapted to the demands of a capitalist market. Peru’s main economic problem was that capitalism had been introduced through imperialism; therefore, the entrepreneurial dynamic lay outside the nation-state and the country’s capacity to generate its own capital was highly constrained. Capitalism in Peru was stunted and distorted, argued Mariátegui, but it was nonetheless capitalism and had to be fought on those terms. The revolution in Peru, therefore, could not succeed as a democraticbourgeois one to overthrow feudalism, as Moscow recommended, but would necessarily be socialist and anti-imperialist. Analogously, instead of seeing the peasantry as petty-bourgeois opponents of revolution, as did the Comintern, Mariátegui insisted that they constituted the majority of the exploited masses and, therefore, formed the basis of any revolutionary movement, in alliance with the industrial proletariat. He also refused to accept the Comintern’s division

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of the masses along racial lines, arguing that Peru’s indigenous peoples were the foundation of a united nation, not candidates for separate nationalities in line with the Comintern model. The revolution would be made by workers and peasants; their potential allies were students, teachers, and independent intellectuals. The political debates over this well-known model have been exhaustively analyzed elsewhere, as has its widespread impact on the Latin American Left, and will not be my main concern here. 59 Instead, I focus on how Mariátegui’s revolutionary project was the product of his rethinking of two key aspects of modernity: reason and history. In both cases, his conception of space played a significant part. A Radical Critique of Rationalism Mariátegui was hardly alone, either in Europe or Latin America, in seeing the aftermath of the First World War—when the prewar consensus around an evolutionist, instrumentalist, positivist commitment to progress and reform had been shattered—as the dawn of a new “romantic, revolutionary and Quixotic age.” He was more unusual, however, in insisting that this new romanticism was, unlike the “essentially individualistic” nineteenth-century version, “spontaneously and logically socialist.”60 The Russian Revolution, which he saw as a product of Western culture, showed, in his view, that bourgeois capitalism was not the only possible historical outcome, as Spengler assumed in The Decline of the West (1918 and 1922). Unconvinced by any of the idealist critiques of positivism that continued to emerge from Latin America (such as Vasconcelos’s theory of the cosmic race), Mariátegui embarked upon a more radical critique of rationalism, which centered on its failure to address humankind’s fundamental need for a metaphysical understanding of life: The experience of rationalism has had the paradoxical effect of leading humanity to the desolate conviction that Reason cannot show it the way. Rationalism has only served to discredit reason. [ . . . ] [T]he rationalists have killed the idea of Reason. Reason has surgically removed the residues of the old myths from the soul of bourgeois civilization. For some time now, Western man has placed Reason and Science on the altarpiece of the dead gods. But neither Reason nor Science can be a myth. Neither Reason nor Science can satisfy all the need for the infinite that people feel. [ . . . ] Only Myth possesses the precious virtue of satisfying their profound selves.61

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Mariátegui’s alternative approach was to bring together historical materialism and revolutionary idealism, insisting that historical materialism (the idea that social formations derive from economic structures) should not be confused with philosophical materialism (the idea that matter is the only reality), and that adopting the former did not necessarily imply agreement with the latter.62 He rejected the liberal tendency to associate rationalism with secularism, dismissing anticlericalism as a liberal diversion tactic,63 and arguing that a revolutionary critique would not deny religion its place in history. Like anything else, religion could be positive or negative, ecumenical or dogmatic, depending on the socioeconomic conditions that sustained it. Religion had made a major contribution, he argued, to Inca society, where it was integrated into the social and political structure; Catholicism’s capacity to absorb indigenous ritual had helped to ease social tensions after the Conquest; religiously inspired idealism had played a formative role in the development of the United States. Even scholasticism, which was axiomatically condemned by all reformers in Peru, had at one time been highly creative in Spain, he argued, especially during the period when it had been enriched by the mystics. The nineteenth-century rationalists had failed to reason religion out of existence by delegating its concerns to philosophy, and the pragmatists had been more realistic about acknowledging the importance of religion in many people’s lives. By the twentieth century, continued Mariátegui, the concept of religion had evolved to the point where it could no longer be reduced to Church and rite, and could not automatically be equated with obscurantism. The secret of organized religion’s continuing strength in the modern world lay in its power to inspire, he argued, and anyone who wanted to see the triumph of reason over superstition and dogma would have to offer an alternative source of inspiration. For Mariátegui, disenchantment, like most other ills, was associated with bourgeois decadence, not with the modern world itself. He rejected Ortega y Gasset’s “disenchanted soul” in favor of Romain Rolland’s enchanted one, which he envisaged as the soul of the founders of a new civilization.64 A revolution, he famously declared, was always religious,65 in that it commanded passionate devotion and promised spiritual transformation. As a socialist, Mariátegui expressed the hope that, in time, contemporary revolutionary myths would “take hold in the depths of people’s consciousness as fully as the old religious myths.”66 Rationalism was potentially dangerous in that it led all too easily to skepticism, which compromised what Mariátegui called the “pathos”

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of revolution—its power to compel sympathy for the plight of fellow human beings. He identified the agent of historical change as the workers and peasants allied, but the operations of reason (argument and organization) would, in his view, be insufficient to bring about such an alliance. A motivating, unifying myth of revolution would also be needed to inspire the intensity of collective spirit required to change history. As has often been observed, Mariátegui explicitly drew here on the work of French anarchist Georges Sorel, but it is worth adding that Mariátegui’s observations on Peru actually took him a long way from Sorel, who retained a conception of culture as homogeneous, whereas Mariátegui was specifically invoking myth to act as an integrating force for Peru’s heterogeneous cultures.67 It was at this point that Mariátegui’s specifically Peruvian perspective led him to conclude that each set of historical conditions required not only a flexible application of revolutionary strategy and tactics (as many Marxists would have agreed) but also its own particular epistemology. The European model of monolithic reason based on a position of critical distance was inappropriate to analysis of Peru, he maintained. Peru’s experiences of conquest, the resulting dualism of indigenous/European, and the persistence of at least three types of economy operating simultaneously within its territory (the feudal economy introduced by Conquest, residual elements of a communal indigenous economy, and a bourgeois economy growing up on feudal and colonial foundations)68 meant that it could not be understood through the purely rational and empirical methods that might be more valid in European countries. In order to grasp the complexity of Peruvian realities, intuition, imagination, and will were required as supplements to reason.69 The model of critical distance also had connotations of academic life, which was by that time irredeemably associated in Peru with scholasticism and colonialism. In his prologue to Siete ensayos, Mariátegui— calling on the authority of Nietzsche as the master of struggle and affirmation against the passivity and fatalism of evolutionary thought— staked out his own claim to legitimacy from a position far removed from the rarefied cloisters of academe: “I am not an impartial and objective critic. My opinions are nourished by my ideals, by my feelings, by my passions. I have a strong and declared ambition: to take part in the creation of Peruvian socialism. I am as far as it is possible to be from professorial technique and the spirit of the university.”70 Having moved out into the public arena, absorbing the public gaze, he was publicizing the fact that he wanted, like Nietzsche, to “put all my blood into my ideas.”71 Siete ensayos was not, he stated, “an organic

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book. My work unfolds according to the wishes of Nietzsche, who loved not the author who was wedded to the intentional, deliberate production of a book, but rather the one whose thoughts formed a book spontaneously and inadvertently.”72 Indeed, Siete ensayos is not a book with a clear line of argument, although it is coherent in its own way, with common themes throughout the seven essays, such as the significance of economic structures, the inadequacy of the European model of linear progress, and the consequences of colonialism. It is a book full of highly vivid images, cinematic in approach, with the author acting more like a cameraman, panning over the seven aspects of “Peruvian reality”—examining each from a particular angle in turn, sometimes from afar, sometimes in close-up—than the omniscient narrator pursuing the deductive reasoning characteristic of the Western intellectual tradition. Adopting a narrative strategy of creative juxtaposition, Mariátegui sought to challenge existing ways of seeing and to open up new perspectives that could bring about changes in consciousness. The idea that there was any single “key” to understanding anything was anathema to him;73 he saw all knowledge as necessarily historical and provisional, and the whole positivist apparatus of categorization, cataloguing, and classifying as against the true spirit of modern reflexivity. He offered, therefore, “a theory or a thesis” to stimulate discussion, “not an analysis” that by definition claimed finality and thereby closed down options.74 The very title, “interpretative essays,” is symbolic of the historic shift in the role of the intellectual from legislator to interpreter. Mariátegui was implicitly engaging here with a debate about what is meant by relativism. He advocated what we might call strong relativism, which allows for recognition of difference within a broad general framework (by stating only necessary conditions at the general level, thereby leaving room for sufficient conditions to be specified at local level); he abhorred weak relativism, which could lead only to skepticism and apathy because in seeing all possible points of view it became impossible to sustain one’s own. The latter type of relativism was liberalism taken to its logical extreme, argued Mariátegui: “Absolute liberalism wants an agnostic State. A State neutral towards all dogmas and all heresies. It matters little that neutrality towards extreme doctrines is equivalent to abdication of its own doctrine [of tolerance].”75 This was what Mariátegui set himself strongly against: retreat into a sterile intellectualism that precluded active engagement with reality or a moral stance in relation to it. Of crucial importance was that the process of reasoning was not permitted to interfere either with hope or with commitment to action. Mariátegui chafed at the

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dissociation of reason from passion, seeking to recover what he called the “ardent reason” of the eighteenth-century rationalists. He wrote approvingly of Manuel González Prada that his use of reason was “passionate,” audacious, and “revolutionary,” in contrast to the vapid and “domesticated” rationalism of nineteenth-century bourgeois positivism and historicism.76 Mariátegui endorsed Vasconcelos’s motto: “pessimism of the real and optimism of the ideal,” which he saw as “definitive” for the new Ibero-American generation facing the contemporary crisis,77 although he added the caveat that realization of the ideal should be enacted, not just contemplated.78 Anyone hoping to bring about change was bound to be pessimistic in the sense of condemning the present, but would equally need to be optimistic in terms of sustaining hope for a better future, he maintained. He condemned pessimism about the future as the recourse of melancholic intellectuals seeking a rationalization for their reluctance to become involved in the revolutionary struggle because of their “disdain for any mass activity.”79 This was the strongest statement yet of the ideal of the committed intellectual first sketched out by Rodó and developed by Justo and Reyes. For all his radical doubts about reason in overabstract form, however, the crucial point about Mariátegui’s response to the crisis of European rationalism is that he was no more disposed to reject reason itself than were the other three protagonists of this book. The voluntarist aspects of Mariátegui’s thought tend to be overemphasized at the expense of his strong and consistent commitment to both reason and science as sources not only of knowledge but also of understanding: “the value of science as a stimulus to philosophical speculation cannot be ignored or overestimated.”80 It was no coincidence that when founding a journal, in 1919, to campaign for workers’ rights and university reform, he called it La Razón. Voluntarist, intuitionist commitment lay behind Bolshevism, but it could also lead to fascism, he argued, adding that recourse to voluntarism was a symptom of the crisis of bourgeois modernity, not the solution to it.81 Mariátegui’s quarrel was with any claim that reason could or even should be ahistorical, universal or dispassionate. But he saw reason and its capacity for self-reflexivity as fundamental constituents of modernity that were especially crucial in Peru because of the nation’s compromised autonomy. Notwithstanding this commitment to reason, however, Mariátegui was more interested than Marx—or indeed, than either the German Social Democrats or the Bolsheviks—in the subjective aspects of both individual and social experience.82 What he sought was a

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reconciliation between Reason and Subject: just as access to the fruits of reason was one of the great benefits that revolution would bring to the masses,83 so intellectuals would need to supplement their cold, calculating rationality with spontaneous human warmth in order to arrive at a revolutionary consciousness.84 The role of critic was, therefore, crucial, but it had to be exercised with due care and attention to the social responsibility entailed. In order to be effective as a critic, he maintained, technical understanding and skill in judgment had to be complemented by a sense of history, philosophy, and politics. Mariátegui’s approach was akin to what has been called, in a different context, “critical closeness.”85 Building on ideas initially explored by Rodó about the practice of criticism in Latin America (see chapter 2), Mariátegui sought to make criticism a vehicle for the revolutionary struggle, drawing on empathy rather than distance, synthesis over analysis, and dialogue instead of monologue. The moral force of a critic, which Mariátegui saw as no less important than the intellectual force, derived from the degree to which he was “a man of his times.”86 This was the distinguishing feature of the “modern humanist,” “[the] authentic critic,”87 whose purpose was not to legislate, but to interpret. As Bakhtin has discussed, closeness—the demolition of distance—is also a prerequisite for comedy,88 which Mariátegui employed to telling subversive effect. He was never one for high modern seriousness; for him it was always important not to take yourself too seriously: “The old-fashioned artist used to feel like a hierophant, a priest. The new artist feels more like a player, a minstrel.”89 Mariátegui had a modernist’s sensitivity to language and form, which he saw as central elements in the revolutionary struggle. One manifestation of this strategy was a modest degree of formal experimentation, particularly in his adoption of the genres of the carta (open letter) and the crónica (personal column in a newspaper).90 Through his fragmentary forms, Mariátegui tried to suggest that in the modern world of large cities and capitalism, the experience of dispersal did not have to result in a Baudelairean sense of aimlessness, but could, alternatively, act as a stimulus to making connections and contacts, fusing the public and the private in an alchemy of the everyday. Flores Galindo has captured Mariátegui’s “special knack for introducing a touch of intimacy, a confession or a memory that opens up an unexpected moment of contact with the reader.” 91 His writing style has been astutely described as “clear, crystalline, clipped [ . . . and] cutting”;92 it was vigorous but not emotional. He eschewed rhetoric or obfuscation, seeking the classical virtues of

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order, concision, and clarity. In an interview he explained as follows: I tend to work methodically. I am very concerned about order in the exposition. I worry even more about expressing ideas and things in concise and precise terms. I detest pomposity. I cut down my pages as much as I can given my vice of writing at the last minute. Before I start to write, I try to have an itinerary of my work in mind.93

Mariátegui associated a failure to care about language with the type of demagogic, caudillista politics that he so mistrusted. In a letter of 1928 he described his horror at Haya de la Torre’s cavalier attitude toward language: You cannot imagine how much I have suffered over those manifestos by the supposed central committee of a supposedly nationalist party. Language is not of the slightest importance to Haya; but it is to me, and not for literary reasons but ideological and moral ones. If we do not distinguish ourselves from the past at least in our political language, I have a well-founded fear that, in the end, through mere adaptation and imitation, we may finish up by not differentiating ourselves from it at all except [in terms of] personalities.94

To use archaic terms was to be imprisoned by absolutist, dogmatic thinking, argued Mariátegui, for language was necessarily historical and relative. Terms such as “revolution,” “tradition,” or “myth” could carry positive or negative values according to context. For example, in Latin America the idea of revolution itself had become debased, he noted, because the term was so often applied to mere power struggles within the ruling elite.95 Likewise, there were good traditions and bad ones. Colonialism and indigenismo were both Peruvian traditions, but whereas colonialism, based on “a nostalgic idealisation” of the Vice-royalty, was the cultural bastion of feudalism, indigenismo had “living roots in the present,” drawing “its inspiration from the protests of millions.” 96 Thus, while colonialism was a tradition that had to be “liquidated” as “a basic condition for progress,” the “vindication of the Indian” was part of a program for revolution.97 Myths could be delusions, the vehicles for false consciousness (e.g., the myth of Peru’s independence) but they could also be motivating forces, helping to raise consciousness (e.g., the myth of social justice). It was part of the contribution of socialist intellectuals to the class struggle to reinscribe such words with a revolutionary meaning, but it was not always easy to tell, observed Mariátegui, whether one was dealing

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with the forces of revolution or with those of decline. The gap between language and what it expressed pointed to its magical, mythical qualities, which Mariátegui celebrated, but he also raised the problem of how wide such a gap could become in the Latin American context, where the issues of imitation, copying, caricature, and travesty were all highly sensitive. Style was all too easily taken for substance; formalistic devices could distract attention from reactionary content. Too many people thought that they were embracing the modern world by waxing lyrical about cars and aeroplanes, he observed wryly, without having the slightest commitment to realizing modernity’s potential for reshaping society to enhance human freedom.98 His strategy of critical closeness was one means of distinguishing revolutionary forces from reactionary ones. A second route lay in his concept of history. History and Authenticity To an extent, Mariátegui accepted the Marxist view of history as a process in which humanity advanced in stages. But he did not see progress as irreversible or inevitable, arguing, for example, that the Spanish Conquest had imposed a feudal economy on the ruins of what he characterized as fundamentally socialist economic relations among the Inca.99 Again contrary to orthodox expectations, that feudal spirit—“the antithesis and negation of the bourgeois spirit”—had created a capitalist economy, which then turned out to be worse for the indigenous peoples because a new ruling class seized their lands.100 Progress, like anything else, could prove to be fictitious, argued Mariátegui.101 Nor did he follow orthodox Marxists to their teleological conclusion, maintaining that there was no ultimate goal to human history and that the idea of one was merely an illusion necessary to motivate people to fight for a better future: Humanity has a perennial need to feel itself close to a goal. Today’s goal will certainly not be tomorrow’s goal; but for the theory of humanity on the march, it is the final goal. [T]he messianic millenium will never come. People arrive somewhere in order to leave again. They cannot, however, do without the belief that the new day’s journey is the definitive one.102

In the search for solutions to the dilemmas of modern life, Mariátegui condemned any idealization of the past, whichever part of it was selected: “In modern man, the most cowardly abdication is to seek refuge in the past.”103 It was no good looking for the necessary motivating myth in bygone eras: each age had to create its own myths.104

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He acknowledged some sympathy with the Futurists’ longing to sweep away Italy’s museums and ancient ruins so that contemporary, modernizing Italy could be enjoyed in its own right, uncluttered by the debris of historical splendor.105 He rejected both Romanticism’s escapist nostalgia and conservatism’s opportunistic invocation of the past to justify resistance to change. In a discussion of a Lima carnival, in which Medieval, Renaissance, and rococo costumes were mixed in with modern fashions, Mariátegui challenged the conventional claim that carnival “annulled time,” arguing that in fact it “contrasted time.” What was once dramatic, such as a crusader’s outfit, became comic. There was no element of nostalgia; the Present was simply “roaring with laughter.” It was not people who were iconoclastic, he remarked drily, but life itself. Thus, carnival was the only appropriate forum in which the past could be displayed: “It is not possible to restore the past. It is not possible to reinvent it. It is only possible to parody it.”106 In this respect, he was scornfully dismissive of Rodó’s claim that Spanish America was Latin, which he saw as a complete fiction, and not at all a useful one.107 When in Rome itself, attending the festival of the city’s birth, he experienced a sense of “the extent to which we Spanish Americans were foreigners” at such a gathering, and he felt keenly “the artificiality of the arbitrary and feeble myth of our kinship with Rome.”108 Various races had combined in Hispanic America, he maintained, in which the Latin element was probably the least significant. Notwithstanding the influence of French literature, he observed ironically, it was all too evident that: “The ‘clear Latin genius’ is not within us. Rome has not been, is not and will not be ours. And the people of this flank of Spanish America are not only not Latin. They are, rather, a bit oriental, a bit Asiatic.”109 Spiritually and ideologically, he argued, the new generation of “Iberoamérica” (or “América Indoibera,” which seemed to be his own preferred term) could not sympathize with the old Latin world, not least because the fascist lexicon was imbued with nostalgia for the Roman Empire. What, then, was Mariátegui’s own approach to the past, if he set out to avoid nostalgia and selective idealization?110 He certainly did not condone the view of many of his Peruvian contemporaries that the past was so barren that any attempt to establish a degree of continuity would prove disastrous to a successful future.111 Instead, he deconstructed many of the standard binary divides of liberal-positivist history in order to show how they misrepresented social relations and had acted as an ideological justification for continuing domination by the elites (adopting a strategy comparable to the Frankfurt School’s

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critical theory). For example, the fact that the indigenous peasantry had not embraced individual smallholding as liberal legislators had hoped was not, he argued, because they were hostile to progress, as was usually maintained, but because in a situation that was basically feudal, they had no incentive to become individualistic. Collective work and action were their only realistic means of defense, and such strategies had been adapted to the onslaughts of the “modern” world in highly flexible and effective ways, he maintained, refusing to inscribe the indigenous peoples as “traditional.”112 Analogously, he unpacked the supposed opposition between regionalism and centralism in Peru, arguing that both, in their different ways, had served to perpetuate feudal social structures and practices. To insist on either was only to evade the main issue, which was economic reform, and to acquiesce in the continuation of social inequalities that neither regionalism nor centralism would resolve.113 The challenge was to bring old and new together in adaptive, creative synthesis, “brushing history against the grain,” in Benjamin’s memorable phrase.114 Mariátegui refused to accept the European Enlightenment axiom that tradition had to be eradicated in order to create a modern world, arguing instead for “a revolutionary theory of tradition.”115 He drew a distinction between tradition as “a combination of inert remains and extinct symbols” and tradition as a living force. Precisely because it had come down through history, he argued, tradition had undergone successive transformations that made it “heterogeneous and contradictory,” so that to reduce it to a single idea was to see only its core elements and not “its diverse crystallisations.”116 The significant divide, therefore, was not between tradition and the modern, but between seeing tradition as static (traditionalism, which Mariátegui claimed was actually “the great enemy of tradition”) and seeing it as a vital process (revolutionary modernism). Through understanding the fluidity of tradition, revolutionaries would protect themselves from the dangerous illusion that everything began with them. To effect lasting change, they would have to be more than iconoclasts: they would need to draw upon vibrant traditions that would be “ethereally invisible in the work of creating a new order.”117 Outside this concept of adaptive tradition, there was only romanticism or ruthless rationalization, both of which Mariátegui saw as utopian, therefore divorced from history and consequently sterile.118 In the specific context of Peru, Mariátegui argued that the nation’s tradition was neither colonial, as the conservatives insisted, nor indigenous, as revolutionaries claimed. Rather, an authentically revolutionary perspective would acknowledge that Peru had evolved a “triple”

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tradition: indigenous, Spanish, and republican. The wars of independence had introduced a “foreign” element into the heart of the national tradition, and the only way to escape that paradox was to stop denying it.119 The ways in which people thought about history determined their capacity to make history, he maintained: revolutionaries ran the risk of being too “subjective,” but at least they had an image of the past as alive in all its anxiety and complexity, whereas traditionalists saw only a dead world of “mummies and museums.” People who could not imagine the future were, as a general rule, claimed Mariátegui, unable to imagine the past.120 It has often been pointed out that Siete ensayos devoted less than one-third of the text to the supposedly determining elements of the material base of Peru’s history—economic development, the “Indian problem” (included in that section because Mariátegui saw it in economic terms), and the question of land. The remainder of the book was devoted to what Marxists conventionally regarded as the “superstructural” issues of education, religion, regionalism, and literature. At less than 20 pages long, Mariátegui’s “outline” of Peruvian economic development must be one of the most concise summaries ever written of four centuries of history. The brevity is especially striking given that his economic interpretation was wholly at odds with any other standard accounts of Peru’s history, most of which ignored social forces in favor of the glorious deeds of great men guided by God.121 The emphasis in the first three chapters is on structural features; in the last four spatial metaphors abound. The reader has the impression that the past has been telescoped into the present. Through the very structure of Siete ensayos, history loses its oppressive force, as authoritarian time is converted into democratic space, where it is possible to escape the weight of tradition and recreate oneself anew. The final chapter is especially interesting in this respect, because in his discussion of Peruvian literature Mariátegui explicitly invoked the idea of a tribunal to put the past on trial, but stated that he was doing so not in order to pass judgment from a position of authority, but, rather, “to vote against” the past from an explicitly revolutionary point of view.122 He stated that he was not aiming to be “impartial or agnostic,” doubting (as discussed earlier) that true criticism could be either. To this effect, he adduced Croce’s argument that the history of art was impoverished by a narrow emphasis on either aestheticism or historicism: true aesthetic appreciation encompassed a philosophical conception of art that had to take history into account; true historical understanding entailed an appreciation of the conditions in which value was attached to certain artistic styles and not

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others. Likewise, Mariátegui’s own conception of aesthetics was bound up with his moral, political, and religious ideas and could not operate independently, he argued.123 The main reference point for his own review of Peruvian literature was one of the first comprehensive surveys of that topic: José de la Riva Agüero’s Carácter de la literatura del Peru independiente (1905). Riva Agüero was a member of the Generation of 1900, an aristocrat and a civilista supporter; Mariátegui saw his book as the product not only of elite politics but also of “caste sentiment.” The very fact that Riva Agüero sought to judge literature “with the norms of the theorist, the academic, the scholar” betrayed his colonialist and aristocratic perspective according to Mariátegui. Challenging Riva Agüero’s judgments on many Peruvian literary figures, Mariátegui—adopting the role of master of ceremonies— dismissed some and introduced others into the public arena. He was particularly keen to promote those who had incorporated popular language and speech patterns into their work. This was one of first essays published in Spanish America that explicitly took into account the effects of colonialism and its legacy on cultural production. Mariátegui argued: “The still-unresolved Quechua-Spanish dualism of Peru makes the national literature an exceptional case that it is not possible to study with the methodology valid for organically nationalist literatures, born and grown without the intervention of a conquest.”124 Peruvian literature did not fit into the standard scheme of classicism, romanticism, modernism; neither was the Marxist class-determined framework much help, argued Mariátegui. Instead, he proposed the alternative organizing principle of colonial, cosmopolitan, and national, carefully defining what he meant by each in a demonstration of how critical closeness could coincide with demystification. To take just one example, he reversed the conventional assessments of Peru’s two leading poets, José Santos Chocano and César Vallejo. The modernista Santos Chocano, who returned to Peru in the early 1920s, was officially celebrated as the great autochthonous voice of the nation; Vallejo, who left Peru permanently in 1923, after the critical savaging of his highly original collection Trilce (1922), was thought of as an imitator of the European avantgardes. Mariátegui argued, however, that Santos Chocano was only superficially modern, and at root his work expressed a nostalgia for colonial times, conserving “the intonation and the temperament of a superstitious Spanish romantic with all his grandiloquence.” Vallejo, on the other hand, was both authentically modern and authentically Peruvian, precisely because he was the first to express “indigenous feeling” in the very texture of his language, proving that “via those

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cosmopolitan, ecumenical paths that we are so much reproached for, we are coming ever closer to ourselves.”125 Authenticity, a term that Mariátegui favored, sets alarm bells ringing for many people. Conservatives condemn it as a smokescreen for moral laxity and self-indulgence, radicals mistrust its essentialist connotations, pointing out the dangers of losing historicity, agency, and rationality (see Adorno’s famous critique of 1964, The Jargon of Authenticity). First seriously explored by Rousseau to illustrate the limitations of Kant’s ethics of autonomy, the concept became a watchword for the German Romantics, who drew particularly on Herder’s influential claim that each individual had a unique way of realizing the human condition. The idea of authenticity was also, notoriously, introduced into visions of collective identity, initially by early German nationalists who eagerly set about deciding what—and who—was or was not genuinely Germanic. It subsequently became central to existentialist thought, from Kierkegaard through to Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre. In general, it appealed to those who took the view that rationalism’s achievements came at too high a cost to both individual and community, and who wanted to oppose the status quo but were unconvinced by either Hegel’s dialectic of Reason-in-History or Marx’s revolution of the proletariat. There is probably no other term that touches so closely upon the key issue at the heart of modernity: namely, the tension between Reason and Subject. By the early twentieth century, in European modernist thought a concern with authenticity had become closely identified with idealist approaches to subjectivity that were conceived in opposition to rationalism. From the perspective of Latin America, however, the question of authenticity looked rather different. Romantic nationalism, based on the identification of certain racial or cultural characteristics as intrinsic to the people of the imagined nation, had been evident in parts of Latin America at various stages during the nineteenth century. Its influence, uneasily blended with cultural pessimism, was later visible in the national character essays of the 1930s and 1940s. But for Latin American intellectuals to accept the Romantic account of authenticity was tantamount to their acquiescing in Europe’s cultural division of labor, which assigned to the periphery the role of supplier of symbolic raw materials in the form of exotic themes and images. In the early twentieth century, intellectuals such as Mariátegui began to argue that Latin America’s history of colonialism and neocolonialism showed the impossibility of emphasizing either autonomy or authenticity at the expense of the other. Rousseau’s argument that authenticity was necessarily a condition of autonomy (because the suppression

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of impulses was likely to result in fragmentation of identity) seemed equally valid the other way around. How was any kind of authenticity possible in the absence of autonomy? After all, the word’s etymology went back to the Greek authentes, meaning one who acts independently. Authenticity was necessarily self-referential, perhaps, but it could only be understood in relation to demands from beyond the self; far from being primal, it was necessarily cultivated. Mariátegui’s approach to authenticity switched the emphasis away from discovery of essential selfhood to development of autonomy through engagement with the other—in dialogue and hospitality, but also in struggle. Authenticity was not, then, for Mariátegui, an object to be found at the end of a quest, but, rather, a constitutive element of a liberated subjectivity, which could only be created through a continuous process of public debate, cultural contestation, and political activism. His view was based not on seeing identity as unchanging and static but, rather, as work-in-progress, as it is usually seen today. He argued (as Sartre was later to do) that authentic selfhood could be reconciled with a commitment to critical reason and social change. In this endeavor to reconcile Reason and Subject, he represented critical reason as a necessary tool in the process of identifying and transforming “hollow shells and travesties” into meaningful forms of experience. In this sense, being authentic entailed challenging the status quo and moral convention. Mariátegui’s focus on the relativity of terms and their reification in ideological structures recast authenticity as an epistemological question rather than an ontological one. He, therefore, opened up possibilities for authenticity to be seen as a potentially liberating, demystifying practice, rather than as a rationale to oblige people to accept their lot. Culture and Public Space As the earlier discussion implies, Mariátegui saw modernity not so much in historical terms of achieved states of industrialization or capitalization, but more in geographical terms of an area to be mapped out, both literally and figuratively, with boundaries continually subject to negotiation. Throughout his work, he evoked a wide variety of public spaces, both actual and metaphorical. He was specially preoccupied with street life—processions and parades caught his attention as well as political demonstrations. He liked the fact that in one of Pirandello’s plays, the street itself is a character: “The street, [that] stormy channel of life, of pain, of pleasure, of good and of bad.”126

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He was drawn to all the new arenas of modern culture: theaters, bullrings, concert halls, art galleries, and the famous Palais Concert, the fashionable Lima literary café where writers dashed off their latest masterpieces on the paper serviettes.127 Above all, Mariátegui adored going to the races, and he edited a racing newspaper, El Turf, for a couple of years (1915–1917). He depicted the race-course as a potentially democratic modern space, where people of all classes could mingle (although in practice, they were segregated, a fact that he publicly deplored). He liked to portray Peruvian high politics by means of theatrical metaphors and analogies, particularly from operetta and burlesque, and he often made his point through imagined dialogues or dramatic scenes. He saw newspapers and journals as crucial fora, not just for debate but also for display, and was fascinated by the consequences of publicity and the many—often masked—faces of fame. The discovery of a popular movement operating through journalism, theater, song, and street life was important in Mariátegui’s turn toward Marxism.128 Public space was the stage upon which the drama of the clash between revolutionary and decadent forces was enacted. For Mariátegui, it was where history could be challenged; where culture and politics could mix; where reason and myth could forge the alliance necessary for a successful revolution; where all the potential supporters of revolution—workers, peasants, students, and freethinking intellectuals—could mingle and their commitment be put to the test. It was where social theories, political models, and cultural examples from all over the world could be disseminated and debated, absorbed, or discarded; and where spontaneity, imagination, and humor could thrive. It was a vigorous, crowded, noisy place, where a new generation sang of a new spirit and a new society. In thinking about how to create a democratic public space, Mariátegui was not actually an advocate of voluntaristic methods. His main strategy for revolution consisted of patient organizational work across the range of potentially revolutionary sectors. Violence would almost certainly be necessary to achieve the final overthrow of the old regime, he conceded, but the prime motor of revolution, to his mind, was the development of full class consciousness, which would emerge from workers’ organizations and from their daily experiences, not from ideological discussions, political programs, or congress resolutions. Such organizations, proposed Mariátegui, should be as locally based and as participatory as possible, with many smaller units joining together to build a larger, ultimately nationwide, whole. This meant establishing bases in each key sector of the economy: unions among textile workers, other urban industrial

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workers and the miners, whom Mariátegui saw as a crucial bridge to the peasantry; peasant leagues among sharecroppers and smallholders, syndicates among the rural proletariat, and organizations for comuneros (members of the indigenous communities). Each sector’s local bodies would be brought together in a federation; these federations would, in turn, join together in one united confederation of the masses. A political party was also necessary, in his view, but more as an organizational, coordinating device than as a Leninist-style vanguard. As is well known, Mariátegui played a major role in creating such an organizational framework, founding the Peruvian Socialist Party (PSP) in 1928, the Federation of Yanaconas (indigenous sharecroppers) and the Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP). By 1930 the CGTP had a membership of 58,000 industrial workers—over half the total number in Peru—and 30,000 rural workers, peasants and comuneros).129 His house also became an important meeting place, not only for students and intellectuals (who recalled finding books there that were not available anywhere else in Lima),130 but also for indigenista artists (who hung their pictures on his walls in the hope of a sale), workers, and peasants. Many Latin American intellectuals’ homes were effectively turned into places of pilgrimage, but Mariátegui was unusual in the social range of people that regularly visited him. Invaluable oral history projects in Peru have recently collected the memories of some of them. Eliseo García, a textile worker from Arequipa, who later became a member of the PSP and a leader of the CGTP, remembered being taken to see Mariátegui as a truculent 17-year-old anarchist, strongly suspicious of intellectuals and deliberately dressed in his scruffiest clothes in order to convey indifference toward the imposing reputation of his host. Mariátegui won him over, however, with attentive charm, and García became a regular attender of the meetings in Mariátegui’s living room, where—he recollected—intellectuals sat on one side, workers on the other, and Mariátegui spun his wheelchair back and forth between the two groups.131 Mariano Larico Yujra, an Aymara peasant who went to Lima as a teenager, worked for Mariátegui, and stayed with him for a while, recalled how leaders of the attempted indigenous uprising in Huancané in 1923 betook themselves to 554 Washington Street to tell Mariátegui what had happened and show him their scars.132 Larico Yujra also said that he learnt to read and write at Mariátegui’s house.133 Mariátegui came to know most of Peru’s indigenous leaders and on his death there were testimonials in Quechua and Aymara.134

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Mariátegui’s political work in the PSP, the CGTP, and the indigenous movement has been well documented elsewhere,135 and I have only briefly recalled it for the sake of establishing the context to my main theme here, which is the importance of culture in Mariátegui’s strategy for creating a vital form of public space. As early as 1923, he wrote: “The bourgeoisie is strong and oppressive not only because it controls capital but also because it controls culture. Culture is one of its main [ . . . ] instruments of domination. Capital can be expropriated by violence. Culture cannot.”136 These ideas are now almost inevitably seen as echoing Gramsci’s, and—as noted earlier—Mariátegui was familiar with and inspired by the intellectual context in which Gramsci worked, although he had little opportunity to read much of Gramsci’s own writings.137 But it is important to note that Mariátegui was constantly making connections between culture and politics even in his early articles for Lima newspapers.138 The Italian debates may well have helped him to formulate this relationship more explicitly, but the importance of the link was already evident to him before he left Peru in 1919. Identifiable similarities in the historical development of Italy and Peru (which Mariátegui listed as a vastly unequal system of land distribution, with huge estates owned by a few families and many peasants subsisting on tiny plots; industrialization at an early stage of development, with industrial workers forming an aristocracy of labor; acute poverty ameliorated only by charitable works; a parasitic, incestuous ruling class that combined executive and judicial power to make the legislature irrelevant; docile Catholic masses; and a liberalCatholic compromise to preserve elite power)139 led Gramsci and Mariátegui to comparable conclusions about the central role of culture in social change. As is to be expected, Mariátegui saw education as crucial to any revolutionary project. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to Mariátegui’s extensive writings on this subject, which constituted a critique of liberal thinking in three main respects. First, he argued— unusually for a Latin American radical of the 1920s—that the struggle for secular education “had lost its strategic and historic purpose.”140 This position has to be set in the context of how he saw the history of religion in Latin America. In his view, the Catholicism that had taken root in the region was a “Jesuitical and bureaucratic” version, which had lost the “mystical impulse” that it had retained in Spain.141 In consequence, although religion was ubiquitous in Latin American culture, its role was rarely debated by intellectuals, who were either committed to secularism, which he thought “a poor goal in itself,” or content with “the simple, rigid solutions of the basic catechism.”142

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Looking at the history of secular education in Europe, Mariátegui argued that in those countries where the Reformation had been strong, the issue was not significant, because the Protestant Church, imbued with liberalism, concurred with bourgeois hegemony. In Catholic countries, however, the Church, which was bound up with “the medieval economy and aristocratic privilege,” came into conflict with bourgeoisie, so that “the liberalism and Jacobinism of the Latin world acquired [ . . . ] a sharply anti-religious spirit,” which led to bitter battles for secular education in France, Italy. and Spain. Once the Church had taken steps to adapt to modern political and economic conditions, however, the bourgeois secular state proved ready to compromise (as evidence of which he pointed to recent reforms in Italy and France reinstating religious instruction).143 Secular education, then, had come to be linked to the democratic-bourgeois state and to the standardizing, lowest-common-denominator model of modernity, which was precisely what “the new men of our America do not propose [ . . . ] to aspire to as the maximum ideal for these peoples.”144 In Russia and Mexico, he argued, where the people were in the process of material and spiritual transformation, “the renewing, creative power of the school [lay] not in its secular character but in its revolutionary spirit,” which gave schools “their myth, their emotion, their mysticism, their religiosity.”145 Second, for Mariátegui, a liberal education did not represent pluralism and tolerance, but rather an elitist denial of economic opportunity. In the context of Peru, the so-called humanities, which had historically functioned as justifications for oligarchic rule, were anything but humane. Reviewing Peruvian debates over the primary school curriculum, Mariátegui noted that reactionaries who wanted to preserve such elite dominance tended to argue that children needed to be taught only the humanities, not science or economics, justifying their position in the name of an idealism that he dismissed as bogus. “The lawyers and literati emerging from the lecture halls of the humanities, formed by a rhetorical, pseudo-idealist training, have always been far more immoral than the specialists from the science faculties and institutes,” he contended.146 Modern society was a society of producers, he argued, and true educational reformers had taken this into account, according manual work the same status as intellectual work, a degree of equality to which “the rancid humanists” could not resign themselves.147 Third, he argued that any reform implemented by a bourgeoisdemocratic state was likely to be limited in its effects, because if conditions of economic servitude and political exclusion were not changed for the better, then education would be worth little to its recipients.

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That was why the Peruvian reform of 1920 had failed; education still had a “colonial” rather than a “national” spirit, retaining “a literary, rhetorical and legal emphasis” that did little to address the needs of four-fifths of the population.148 Moreover, “Teaching literacy is not the same as education,” he insisted.149 Mariátegui expressed admiration for the early work of the Mexican Ministry of Education in establishing a cultural infrastructure of libraries and state publishing houses,150 and he approved, too, of Mexico’s commitment to popular culture. But he was more impressed by the Chilean reform of 1928— even though in practice it was defeated by the authoritarian-populist regime—for having demonstrated how radical change could become a real possibility through organization and consciousness raising. Genuine educational reform could only come about, he argued, from a change in consciousness among schoolteachers, which he identified as having taken place in Chile as a result of the efforts of the unions, who had organized study groups throughout the country to discuss the teacher’s vocation, and produced a magazine to campaign for reform.151 Ultimately, however, concluded Mariátegui, such a change in consciousness could only be effectively channeled over the longer term if it were sustained by the patient work of building a revolutionary movement, so that teachers would be prepared to take full responsibility for their teaching practice. Public accountability was a major preoccupation of Mariátegui’s. Culture must be made accountable as well as politics, he argued. Culture must subject itself to public scrutiny, venturing out from the closed spaces of the cloister and the academy, putting itself to the test in the public arena. He despised Italian Futurism for having betrayed itself, in his view, by establishing a “new academy,” with its own “liturgy and bureaucracy,” to replace the old.152 During the Peruvian workers’ campaigns for an eight-hour day in 1918–1919, Mariátegui observed how university students who became involved in the struggles took their reading far beyond the literary modernismo that their lecturers, who were still “prisoners of the [. . . scholastic] precepts” of the past, had never even mentioned.153 Their true university was the public arena of working-class action, where they spontaneously acquired “sufficient aesthetic taste and education to notice the backwardness and ineptitude of their lecturers.”154 As a consequence, they began to campaign for curricular reform and greater participation in university governance, drawing on the University Reform Movement that had started in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1918. Mariátegui saw the Reform Movement as a far more promising route to social change than state-led educational reforms, arguing that only reactionaries

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saw it as limited to the university and education.155 It was, he maintained, a consequence of the proletarianization of the middle class as a result of the First World War, the hardships of which induced teachers, journalists, and clerks to organize along working-class lines and to support workers’ struggles. It brought students and workers together and was “one of the elements in a profound process of renewal in Latin America.”156 One of the outcomes of the University Reform Movement in Peru was the González Prada Popular University (UPGP), founded while Mariátegui was away in Europe on the initiative of Haya de la Torre. Behind it lay not only renewed student activism but also a two-decadelong history of workers’ cultural organization.157 Initially operating from the exhibition hall in Lima, starting in January 1921, the popular university was forced by government pressure to move out just over a year later, when it took up a base in Vitarte, a workers’ housing estate on the outskirts of Lima, serving a U.S.-owned textile factory. Attendance at classes on a wide range of subjects, held during the evenings or lunch breaks, was free; the Popular University also organized sports and social events, and even an annual Easter festival, involving sports, speeches, communal singing, a tree-planting ceremony, commemoration of workers killed in political struggles, a theatrical performance, and a prize-giving ceremony.158 It provided a forum for students, intellectuals, workers, and peasants to meet, and Mariátegui sought out Haya de la Torre specifically to ask for an invitation very soon after returning from Europe.159 The resulting lecture series of 1923, entitled “History of the Worldwide Crisis,”160 in which Mariátegui was explicit about his Marxist sympathies, was received by some anarchist worker-students as an unwelcome challenge to the Popular University’s avowedly apolitical approach. Mariátegui did indeed try to politicize the UPGP. After taking over the editorship of the Popular University’s magazine, Claridad (following Haya de la Torre’s deportation in 1924), he shifted the emphasis away from student concerns toward worker and indigenista topics, also introducing more material from Europe. He drew up an ambitious plan to establish a publishing house, a printing works, a bookshop, a library, and a daily newspaper on a cooperative basis, but Claridad proved unable to last beyond the closure of the Popular University in early 1927.161 But Mariátegui’s interest in the role of culture in building a revolutionary movement went far beyond educational reform to an exploration of the importance of the creative imagination. True creativity arose, he argued, not from alienation (the European modernist archetype of the anguished creative individual achieving

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self-expression through revolt against the constraints and inadequacies of bourgeois society), but from interaction between the individual and the collective. Mariátegui represented the truly creative individual as one who was socially integrated. The most vivid painting, sculpture, and poetry in Latin America came from Mexico, he argued, precisely because after the revolution Mexican art had acquired “the vital force of an organic and collective phenomenon.”162 Part of the problem with professional intellectuals (with whom Mariátegui consistently refused to identify) was that they were, virtually by definition, “always in conflict with life, with history.” In peaceful times, it was easy for them to be “iconoclastic and aggressive,” but in a more “convulsive and apocalyptic atmosphere,” intellectuals tended “to turn malleable and tame.”163 It was hard for them to keep in sight the revolutionary potential of thought and to retain a sense of the times, while at the same time preserving a sense of the integrity and autonomy of intellectual work, upon which Mariátegui always insisted.164 Mariátegui’s images of the crowd are telling about his views on the ideal relationship between the intellectual and the masses. His crowds were never menacing or brutish, and he did not set himself apart from them; indeed, he and his young journalist colleagues often went rushing out to find out about “the word on the street.”165 The flâneur was far too purposeless for Mariátegui’s taste: he preferred to scurry about introducing himself to everybody and finding out what they thought. In his early newspaper articles reporting on the street life of Lima, Mariátegui celebrated the collective energy and spirit to be found there, particularly in the context of the highly ritualized, rigid, and enervating social and political life of the Lima elites during the Aristocratic Republic, which he often portrayed as opera buffa.166 He contrasted the manifold elaborate oratorical styles in the Chamber of Deputies—from “apostolic” to “ironical” to “majestic, scientific and solemn”—with the voices on the street with their direct questions: “What’s going to become of us?” and “Why doesn’t the majority unite?”167 He attached great significance to the annual procession of El Señor de los Milagros, which he saw as motivated less by religious fervor than by an instinctive communal respect for the past, a feeling that transcended class barriers.168 The procession was, he wrote, a glorious mingling of aristocracy and riffraff, with the well-heeled rubbing shoulders with the poorest of the poor.169 And it was the masses, in his eyes, who were modern, who complained when official celebrations lacked the splendors of “cordless telegraphy,” “armoured convoys,” or “Zeppelin airships,” and who were becoming “more

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suspicious, more mocking, more restless and more inclined to gossip”—in short, more “revolutionary.”170 Creativity was dependent, in Mariátegui’s view, upon openness, movement, the crossing of borders, and migration. Modern man was necessarily cosmopolitan and, as far as possible, a traveler, he suggested.171 Indeed, he saw travel, particularly adventurous, pioneering journeys into unknown territories, such as the young Rimbaud’s abandonment of Paris for Africa, as definitively modern.172 Asked for his favorite pastime, he replied: “Travel. I am by nature a nomadic, curious and restless person.”173 Ideas, images, and techniques were, to his mind, also revived and refreshed by the process of migration. The Latin American bourgeoisie would always look to Europe for ideas, he argued in an article denouncing what he saw as the emergence of fascism in Chile in 1924, so would-be revolutionaries would be well advised to do the same.174 As José Aricó has pointed out, Mariátegui’s own renewal of Marxism took its inspiration “precisely from the most advanced and modern part of contemporary bourgeois culture,” above all Italian historicism.175 From Mariátegui’s perspective, the creativity necessary to both authenticity and autonomy depended upon sustaining an attitude of receptivity to all contemporary cultures. Peru’s history of colonialism made this more, not less, important. He, therefore, tried hard to counter the widespread assumption—which had been reinforced in Latin America by the rise of cultural nationalism since 1900—that authenticity necessarily entailed looking inward. As indicated earlier, he devoted much of his work to promoting understanding of the indigenous peoples, but he was strongly against the view that indigenismo entailed a rejection of the West and consistently emphasized the need for Peru to look beyond its own borders. The Peruvian masses would have to organize on a national basis in order to defeat the entrenched power of local interests and imperialism,176 but nationalism should be seen as a tactical necessity not a strategic aim. The internationalization of life was inevitable, he argued, insisting that Peru needed “the machines, the methods and the ideas of Europeans, of westerners.”177 Ideally, the country would “assimilate the ideas and the people of other nations, impregnating them with its feeling and its atmosphere, and in this way enrich its national spirit, without deforming it.”178 But Peru had not done this: instead, “we are a people in which indigenous and conquerors live together, without yet merging, still not understanding each other.”179 Mariátegui always sought to situate Peru’s problems in an international context, bringing a comparative perspective to bear. In his view, nationalism was valid as affirmation,

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but not as denial.180 The national and the international were complementary, not contradictory, spheres, he argued, and would evolve together in what Frantz Fanon later called “a two-fold emerging.” Mariátegui’s interest in crossing borders extended to exploring the boundaries of consciousness. Unusually among Marxists of his era, he was receptive to Freudianism, which he saw as latent in the general consciousness, notably in the works of Pirandello and Proust.181 The idea that it was no longer possible to assume the existence of a stable personality was one that particularly resonated with him. He was also intrigued by Freud’s discussion of mechanisms of repression, and saw parallels between psychoanalytical studies of how consciousness was distorted by unrecognized sexual instincts and Marxist theories about the social distortions produced by unacknowledged greed.182 The Marxist concept of ideology as false consciousness could be seen as analogous to the Freudian ideas of rationalization or sublimation.183 More generally, Mariátegui saw sexuality as a key element in social organization, and argued that religious taboos should be overcome and sexuality should be a matter for public discussion. Revolutionaries could not afford to leave all discussion of love to the literati, he said.184 Mariátegui’s interest in expanding consciousness led him to Surrealism, which he saw as by far the most significant of all the European avant-garde movements, most of which, in his view, had not gone beyond aesthetic concerns (Italian Futurism was one obvious exception, but it had been all too easily absorbed by fascism). Surrealism transcended literary or artistic matters, he wrote, to become a spiritual protest against the whole of capitalist civilization.185 Its appeal to Mariátegui, as to other Latin American intellectuals— notably Octavio Paz and Alejo Carpentier—lay in the fact that it was not just a force for destruction, but was also constructive in its attempt to “rehumanize” art (countering the “dehumanization” identified by Ortega y Gasset).186 Surrealism was not “a licence for self-indulgence” but “a difficult, painful discipline,” argued Mariátegui;187 not just a movement restricted to France but a rapidly rising tendency throughout world literature.188 It had arisen because bourgeois realism had proved inadequate to the challenges of the modern world: “Realism has been receding from us in the literature of reality. The realist experience has served only to show us that our sole route to reality is by way of fantasy.”189 There was no greater mistake than to assume that realism implied the renunciation of fantasy, an idea that was based solely on so-called bourgeois realism; instead, reality and fantasy

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worked in complex relation to each other: “Fiction is not free. The more that we discover the marvellous, the more it seems destined to reveal to us the real. Fantasy serves us little when it does not bring us closer to reality. [ . . . ] Fantasy has no value unless it creates something real. This is its limitation. This is its drama.”190 The ultimate incarnation of a surrealist approach to life was Charlie Chaplin, whom Mariátegui saw as crucial to an understanding of the times because “he gets all the votes: those of the majority and those of the minorities. His fame is at once thoroughly aristocratic and thoroughly democratic.”191 Commercial cinema gave Chaplin a reach greater than any previous artist. In the film The Gold Rush, which Mariátegui reviewed, Chaplin played a character, Charlot, who was the incarnation of the hedonistic bohemian—the ultimate modernist; but he was also seduced by one of the great romantic adventures of capitalism, the Californian Gold Rush. Mariátegui described how the myth of rags-to-riches was built up in the course of the film; Charlot was, inevitably, fired up in his quest by being in love, so the dramatic logic made it impossible that he should not find his gold mine, despite all the obstacles—“his pathos [a favorite Mariátegui term] leant him a super-human strength.” Mariátegui claimed that the film confirmed Freud’s theories, and was a descendant of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.192 All the aforementioned evidence about Mariátegui’s interest in subjective experience points the way to one of his key arguments, namely that to bring about historical change requires imagination. He cited a Spanish writer to the effect that conservatism, when it was not founded on pure egoism, was synonymous with a lack of imagination; conversely, progress was dependent on imagination. As an example Mariátegui offered the leaders of Spanish American independence, who needed all the imaginative capacity they could summon to see beyond the realities they confronted, which were in no conventional sense either republican or national.193 But the imagination, like fiction, was less free and less arbitrary than is usually supposed. [ . . . ] Like anything else human, imagination also has its limits. In all men, even the most brilliant, [ . . . ] it is conditioned by circumstances of time and space. The human spirit reacts against contingent reality. But it is precisely when the spirit reacts against reality that it is perhaps most dependent on it. It fights to change what it sees and feels, not what it is ignorant of. Therefore, only those utopias that could be called realistic are valid.194

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Mariátegui’s conception of the role of the imagination in relation to “reality” is perhaps best illustrated by his one foray into fictional writing, “The Novel and Real Life: Siegfried and the Teacher Canella,” an unfinished work that was written early in 1929 and published posthumously.195 Siegfried referred, Mariátegui explained at the beginning, to the central character in a novel by French writer Jean Giraudoux (now remembered mostly for his plays), entitled Siegfried y le limousin (1922). In Giraudoux’s novel, the character of Siegfried von Kleist was a German statesman who bore a startling physical resemblance to a French writer. Giraudoux, who was influenced by psychoanalytic theory and sought to develop an impressionistic literary technique, used the ensuing confusion of identities between his two main characters as the framework for a series of novelistic conceits about modern life. Giulio Canella, on the other hand, was a real person whose story filled the columns of the Italian press for a few months while Mariátegui was in Italy. Canella, a secondary-school teacher from Verona, and Mario Bruneri, a printer from Turin, both fought in the same regiment and at the same battle in the First World War. Bruneri was killed and Canella badly wounded. In hospital Canella was misidentified, by another wounded soldier from the same regiment, as Bruneri, and once he was well again Canella, who had lost his memory and thought he was indeed Bruneri, went to live with Bruneri’s wife and worked as a printer. Twelve years later, however, in a state of undefined anxiety, he found himself being uncharacteristically unfaithful with an attractive stranger. Overcome by an obscure longing to escape from his surroundings and circumstances, he first embarked on a series of casual affairs, then fled to Milan, where he became increasingly distressed, tried to slit his throat, and ended up being taken into a mental hospital, once again suffering from amnesia. His photograph was placed in the newspapers by doctors in the hope of tracing his family, and his original wife, who had remained faithful—indeed, she declared herself “mad with love”— having been told that he was “missing” not dead by the Ministry of War, identified him as Canella. Recognizing her, Canella went back to his original life, but unfortunately for him Signora Bruneri had also seen the photograph and wrote to the mental hospital to claim her husband. The case eventually went to court, where it was declared that Canella was Bruneri, but Canella stayed with his original wife, although as a result of the uncertainty their children were stigmatized as illegitimate, and he himself was regarded as a usurper.

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This extraordinary tale reveals several key points concerning Mariátegui’s ideas about identity. First, suppression of the imagination and its products leads to error. The mystery of the confusion between Bruneri and Canella was more likely to be understood by a sympathetic reader of Giraudoux’s novel than by a disciple of the leading Italian sociologist Enrico Ferri, argued Mariátegui. But the increasingly fascist Italian bureaucracy—“positivist and rationalist in the extreme”—was opposed to any trace of surrealism in a novel, so the judges had no opportunity to read such works.196 Instead, they fell back on physical evidence: the unknown man’s fingerprints were certified to be those of Bruneri, so he was declared to be Bruneri, never mind that those fingerprints had been taken after the war, when he had already been misidentified.197 Second, identity is constituted through action and commitment. It is through politics that Canella’s rediscovery of his identity as Canella is triggered. Bruneri was a socialist, Canella a liberal; when Canella was working as Bruneri, his fellow-workers noticed how his previously socialist attitudes had become more right-wing, and it was during a strike that he first started to feel strong resistance to his surroundings.198 Furthermore, if Canella had ever dared during his first life “to break with any of the habits, ideas and traditions of a secondary school teacher of Verona,” then it was likely that his past would have resisted being so completely erased. But because he had never taken any daring actions, or even had an audacious thought, there was nothing to prevent him from assuming the identity of a printer.199 Indeed, Canella ends up feeling, according to Mariátegui, that “in twelve years he had perhaps lost the right to go back to being the teacher Canella. [ . . . ] He almost felt himself to be Mario Bruneri. It was that part of his past that had left the most marks on the world and on himself.”200 This conclusion touched on Mariátegui’s final point, namely that there was a highly complex dialectic operating between the individual and society in the process of identity creation. In order to sustain the precarious balance between autonomy and authenticity, especially in a neocolonial context, economic and political change was necessary but not sufficient: cultural transformation was also a prerequisite. Throughout his working life, Mariátegui sought to create the “vital forms of public space” that he advocated—as editor of Claridad, in Amauta, and in Labor (a workers’ newspaper published from November 1928 to September 1929).201 It is Amauta (1926–1930) that provides the most compelling evidence of his vision of modernity. It is important to bear in mind that Mariátegui’s journal was

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only one of a number of periodicals that sprung up across Peru during the 1920s as part of a widespread struggle against the old political and cultural structures.202 Amauta was, however, more successful than any other as a crucible of connections and democratization of culture. Through it, Mariátegui hoped to forge links between the intellectual communities of Lima and the regions (the magazine had an impact in Cuzco, Puno, Arequipa, and Trujillo); between generations (some writers from the previous generation, such as the poet José María Eguren, were regularly published); between intellectuals and workers; between genres; between different sectors of the indigenous movement; between different factions of the Peruvian Left; between intellectuals in Peru and in other Latin American countries and further afield. As his correspondence testifies, Mariátegui worked hard and not always successfully to distribute the 4,000 or so copies, a relatively large print-run that was intended to keep the price low.203 The very title, meaning “wise man” in Inca society, was emblematic of his reconciling approach. Although the first editorial stated that Amauta was not “agnostic,” that it had definite views about good ideas and bad ideas, it also invited anyone who shared a commitment to creating “a new Peru within a new world” to contribute, whether they defined themselves as “socialists” or not.204 What Mariátegui specifically banned was rhetoric: “Programmes strike me as absolutely useless. Peru is a country of placards and labels. Let’s do something with content at last.” Amauta’s contents were rich indeed: it was like a lovingly tended display case for all things deemed by its editors to be modern. A great deal of care was taken over the appearance of the magazine: the strikingly beautiful covers printed in elegant colors cannot have been easy to achieve given constraints on resources. For the first year, the cover carried the characteristic head of the Amauta, which recurred every so often later, but a variety of other designs was tried out, including a powerful abstract image. Inside, virtually every page was embellished with an illustration of some kind—a line drawing, woodcut, photograph, or cartoon—even if it was only a small one of a llama or a Peruvian bird, and in most issues there was also a separate insert of monochrome photographs, usually of works by Latin American artists, on glossy paper. The range of articles was equally impressive. The first issue contained a translated extract from Freud on “Resistances to psychoanalysis.” Parts of one of the classic texts of radical indigenismo, Tempestad en los Andes (Storm in the Andes), by Luis Valcárcel, were first published in Amauta. Each issue contained a majority of Peruvian authors, usually complemented by one or two from elsewhere

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in Latin America and a few others from further afield. Mariátegui included Trotsky’s portrait of Lenin, poems by Shelley, and articles by José Ortega y Gasset, Filippo Marinetti, Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Tolstoy, Rosa Luxemburg, Marx, Lenin, Bukharin, and Stalin. Eminent Latin Americans included the poets Vallejo, Neruda, and Gabriela Mistral, and the essayists José Vasconcelos, José Ingenieros, and Manuel Ugarte. Issues were never less than 30 pages long, and after the magazine went into smaller format in 1928 it went to 108 pages. Articles, essays, polemics, book extracts, letters, stories, and poems were complemented by book and exhibition reviews, surveys of other periodicals, interviews, manifestos, documents, sheet music of Peruvian popular songs, a “bulletin” on the indigenous movement, and obituaries. Topics covered included art, film, theater, literature, music, social issues, psychoanalysis, women’s issues, history, archaeology, politics, economics, current affairs, workers’ festivals, and sport. Notwithstanding the variety of materials, Amauta was widely recognized among its readers to have achieved a remarkable degree of coherence and to have avoided the risk of going stale. It was not, as Mariátegui stipulated on its second anniversary, an intellectual pastime; instead “it professes an idea of history, it confesses to an active collective faith, it arises from a contemporary social movement.”205 This, for him, was what modernity was all about. Conclusion Mariátegui’s writing constituted a sustained attack on the liberal bourgeois ideal of enclosed, regulated, patriarchal, elite-policed public space. Instead, he envisaged an open-ended territory—national, in the first instance, but potentially international in scope, encompassing both urban and rural areas—in which both reason and imagination had a place. Workers and peasants, including the conventionally marginalized indigenous peoples, would be the main participants in a radically democratic and revolutionary modernity. As noted in the introduction, there were limits to the inclusiveness of this model: it is unclear to what extent he included Afro-Peruvians and Chinese. The fundamental choice for Peru, as far as Mariátegui was concerned, was “to opt for the gamonal or for the Indian,”206 which was his way of inscribing the opposition between exploiter and exploited (rather as the term “indigenous” has recently become a rallying point for all those Latin Americans who feel excluded from neoliberalism, whether or not they identify themselves as “Indian”). Mariátegui’s work also

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says relatively little about gender exclusion, seeming to take it for granted that women would become more involved in public life, but apparently unwilling to engage in serious discussion about the obstacles that still prevented them from doing so.207 Class remained the fundamental category for him, 208 and he took the view that a genuinely revolutionary society would automatically resolve any outstanding issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Even so, he went further than most of his contemporaries in promoting discussion of them. Moreover, in insisting on the importance of subjectivity, spontaneity, and heterogeneity in modern public space, Mariátegui went a long way toward making it a place where people who were conventionally excluded by the patriarchal model would at least potentially like to be. Finally, although Mariátegui wanted public space to be open and accessible, he also maintained that it needed to have boundaries, even if they were “borders of mystery,”209 constantly shifting and subject to negotiation. The idea of public space was, for him, a means of avoiding the dangers not only of the nihilistic void but also of the utopian dream. Criticizing Vasconcelos for disregarding present conditions in his concern for the future, Mariátegui argued: “[T]he utopian does not recognise limits of either time or space. The centuries count as no more than moments in his ideal construct. The work of the critic, of the historiographer, of the politician, is of another kind. It has to confine itself to immediate results and content itself with close prospects.”210 He promoted no illusions about what creating socialism would entail: there had been no revolution in history that had been achieved without tragedy, he noted, and a socialist one would be no exception, only possible “through a difficult and painful process in which pain and pleasure would be equal in their intensity.”211 Thus Mariátegui sought to break out of the utopian trap and to focus on actual opportunities to create a Latin American revolution in modernity.

Chapter 6

Conclusion: A Distinctively Latin American Modernity

We have to look forward. It is just that “forward” does not mean European and Yankee forms of being. Carlos Fuentes, Where the Air Is Clear

I

t is not easy to make sustainable claims about the distinctiveness of Latin America’s modernity, as I have become all too aware through co-teaching a course designed to compare modernity and modernism in Europe and Latin America. As Habermas has argued, modernity has always generated its own critique, not only from within the arts (modernism) but also from within the philosophical discourse that coined the term,1 and it is a moot point whether postmodernism is different in kind or only in degree from these earlier expressions of disaffection. Likewise, all modernisms display tensions: between celebration of the fragment and longing for the whole; between exhilaration and apprehension, and between radical form and reactionary content, all of which are manifestations of the uncertainties inherent in modern consciousness. What Latin Americanists tend to lump together as “European” experience was in itself far from monolithic: nearly all European tendencies produced their own countertendencies, not least because many of those subjects who were excluded from the hegemonic model of instrumental reason (the female, the poor, the foreign) sought to resist the objectification it entailed.2 By the late nineteenth century, there was a widespread sense among European intellectuals that too much had been sacrificed upon the altar of rationalism and science; many and varied were their corresponding attempts to reinstate imagination, intuition, emotion, will, spirituality, or empathy. In discussions with my Europeanist colleague, there

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were several times when I tried to argue that a particular idea was distinctively Latin American, only for him to rejoin that it could be found in the works of such and such a European intellectual. Indeed, it does seem to be the case that virtually any element of an alternative model or strategy, artistic or political, developed in Latin America can also be found somewhere in the vast European output on modernity, particularly if work from the more “peripheral” countries of Europe is taken into account. What, then, can be said to be distinctive about the alternative conception of modernity which, I have claimed, was given form and coherence by Latin American intellectuals during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and which has continued to shape debates in the region about the potential of the modern condition? My argument is that a series of differences emerged out of writing from the specific vantage point of Latin America’s non-hegemonic position, after colonialism, in full consciousness of being both different from yet partly constituted by Europe. These differences lie in (1) epistemology; (2) agency; (3) history; and (4) ethics. Together, they constitute a distinctively Latin American approach to modernity, which provides compelling evidence for the need to rethink some widely accepted general claims about what it means to be modern. Epistemology It is difficult to know how to know. Mário de Andrade3

The Enlightenment’s optimistic conception of reason as a route to liberation continued to have far greater purchase in twentieth-century Latin America than it did in Europe. Recent critics of modernity tend to conflate the ideas of the Enlightenment with the utilitarianism and positivism that came afterward,4 but from the vantage point of the early-twentieth-century Latin America many intellectuals who rejected instrumentalism saw no need to discard at the same time that original emancipatory promise of Enlightenment reason which had constituted the founding discourse of their republics. These Latin Americans also preferred not to follow the nineteenth-century bourgeois elites of Europe down the road of restricting the extension of theoretically universal rights. Much of the recent sociological literature on modernity has invoked terms such as ambivalence or ambiguity to convey its dual capacity to liberate and to constrain. By the start of the twentieth century, Latin American intellectuals were only too

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familiar with this paradox, given that rationalization was already being aggressively promoted in their region by an imperial power and collaborative local elites. They were becoming ever more conscious of what it meant to be “other,” and issues of agency, autonomy, and subjectivity were correspondingly high in their minds. Their experiences of colonialism and postcolonial dependency made them critical of the sovereign rational subject, but also chary of the unrestrained subjectivity that could lead to impotence and chaos. The concerns behind Hegel’s famous question were acutely felt in early-twentiethcentury Latin America: if “the final end of the state and the social life of men is that all human capacities and all individual powers be developed and given expression in every way and in every direction,” then “into what unity are these manifold formations to be brought together?”5 In other words, how was it possible to reconcile modernity’s promise of individual self-fulfillment with its guarantee of social peace? My four intellectuals were all convinced that reason was “the best option that we humans have.”6 Seeking to avoid the two polar positions of relentlessly pursuing the logic of modernity or seeking its destruction, these advocates of an alternative modernity tried to shift the emphasis away from instrumentalism without abandoning rationalism altogether. In order to do so, they reconceptualized reason as less monolithic and less isolated in lofty imperial splendor than the positivists would have it. They represented it instead as first among equals, as a guiding principle for orienting a range of knowledges drawn also from imagination, intuition, and empathy. Through a critique of critical method, they sought to neutralize reason’s authoritarian tendencies, arguing that its capacity to differentiate (analysis) should be balanced by an impetus to connect (synthesis). Latin American intellectuals agreed with their European counterparts that maintaining critical distance was necessary to lend perspective, but they also emphasized the role of critical closeness (empathy) in making any such judgments meaningful. The issue, for the Latin Americans, was how to sustain a creative equilibrium between critical distance and critical closeness. Similar ideas were later explored in Europe by the Frankfurt School thinkers, but the intellectuals discussed in this book went further in their prospecting for an alternative to what Edouard Glissant has called “theoretician thought,” and deeper in their probing of the potential for a new mode of thinking that was “latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible.”7 Rather than logical thinking, with its rigorous exclusions, they pursued analogical thinking, with its open-ended inclusiveness. Rather

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than compartmentalizing different types of knowledge in utilitarian fashion, they sought to transcend disciplinary boundaries in search of a more holistic approach to understanding. Like Bakhtin (who was writing around the same time), they preferred “novelistic” language— which is celebratory, playful, ironic, indeterminate, dialogic, explicitly representational, and aware of the slippages between language and meaning—to “epic” language, with its emphasis on hierarchy, authority, unity, identification, and seriousness.8 Knowledge was not only propositional, Latin American intellectuals began to argue, but also relational, which allowed scope for the integration of ethics and aesthetics into rational models, so that neither would be abandoned, as it was argued they had been in Europe, to the role of modernity’s alienated critique. One particularly significant outcome of this reconceptualization of reason was a different way of construing difference. In Latin America, thinking about difference in other than binary terms was the necessary condition for any possibility of authenticity. If there was something vital in the local “tradition”—what Mariátegui referred to as the “blithe barbarism that Western civilization has not succeeded in taming” 9 —worth conserving to channel into a distinctive way of being modern, then the whole framework of civilization versus barbarism, the mainstay of technocratic modernity, had to be overturned. The intellectuals discussed in this book were voicing doubts about the hierarchical dualisms of Western thought—modern/ traditional, rational/spiritual, universal/local, and so forth—long before the French post-structuralists did so. They were similarly suspicious of monocausal explanations, and tried to steer a path between universalism and relativism, arguing that all knowledge is necessarily relative and historically conditioned but that a commitment to some form of universalism is nonetheless worth maintaining. To reject ideas from the outside world unthinkingly was to fall into the trap of dependency just as much as to adopt them uncritically. The best way to bypass the postcolonial dilemma was through creative appropriation, synthesis, and dialogue. The kinds of metaphor that echo through the writings of these four intellectuals— architectural, musical, and spatial—are characteristic of their compositional approach (e.g. in Rodó: “Ours is a musical soul, a soul shaped like the substance of music: indeterminate, changeable and incoercible.”)10 If Bauman is right that the “typically modern practice [. . .] is the effort to exterminate ambivalence,”11 then it is also the case that Latin America’s alternative modernity has long tried to suggest ways of living with it. All four intellectuals in this book explored what

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Bauman calls “undecidables,” which “are all neither/nor, which is to say that they militate against the either/or. Their overdetermination is their potency: because they are nothing, they may be all.”12 As has been argued in relation to other sites where similar themes were explored, such as fin-de-siècle Vienna, indeterminacy can be “extremely fruitful, allowing for recombinations of unbelievable variety and richness—so long as no new reaction comes” along to repress its inventiveness.13 Agency For Latin Americans, caught up in neocolonial dependencies that made even describing the world—let alone changing it—highly problematic, the question of agency, that is, under what conditions it is possible to act in the world, acquired an urgency that is not found even in the most disaffected of early-twentieth-century European intellectuals, who retained a sense (even if overshadowed by melancholia or obscured by irony) of their heroic potential to control past, present, and future. Throughout the work of my four thinkers (even, or perhaps especially, in the two socialists) there is a resistance to ideological orthodoxy, on the grounds that the very expectation of any such certainties entailed a homogenizing view of the world that would artificially fix and contain the multiple and protean realities of their postcolonial societies.14 Ideology also tends to make a monolith of oppression, when that oppression may in practice be multiple in form as well as in effect. Instead, these Latin American intellectuals sought to avoid what they saw as the trap of ideology by means of cultural practice, developing a view that the capacity for effective agency was a matter of establishing a balance between autonomy and authenticity. Rodó’s version of “creative evolution” sketched out a model for agency in Latin America, wherein a strategy of continual self-creation and recreation offered one way of evading outside attempts to stamp an identity onto the region. Justo offered a more politicized vision of agency, based on mutual education and solidarity through associational life. Reyes developed and historicized Rodó’s strategy, extending the scope for creative evolution to range more widely both in time and space, thereby making it more inclusive. Mariátegui brought these ideas together, representing a revolution that entailed both political and cultural transformation as the vehicle for Latin Americans to become agents of their own future. For all of them, identity creation was a question of process, not event, the outcome of which was to be seen in terms of an infinitely plastic

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form, not a finished artifact. Identity was not a pre-given state of being but, rather, “a complex history of production of new historical meanings,” derived from various, equally legitimate types of rationality.15 Identity formulated thus did not have to entail defensiveness, exclusion, or essentialism. Cultural production was not in itself a sufficient condition for social agency, but, they suggested, rethinking cultural categories and engaging in cultural strategies of politics might be. Through democratic participation and solidarity, it was claimed, Latin America’s heterogeneity could resist attempts to impose uniformity. History In time, one is only what one is: what one has always been. In space, one can be another person. Susan Sontag, “Introduction” to Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

The conception of identity as process was connected with the idea of history as simultaneous as well as sequential, that is, the view that Latin American societies had evolved through exchanges that were later referred to as transculturation, hybridity, or cultural borrowing. In Latin America, an element of continuity came to be seen as necessary to the creation of an authentic modernity. The attempts by the first postindependence generation to bring about complete rupture, because they regarded the colonial past as the main obstacle to selfrealization, were widely regarded as a mistake as early as the 1830s,16 and my four intellectuals all reiterated this view. If Latin America could not come to terms with its past, they argued, its modernity would be a sham. Thus, the case of Latin America compels us to question whether rupture should be seen as fundamental to the condition of modernity. This emphasis on rupture has already been questioned in relation to early-twentieth-century Britain, where the future was “conceptualized [. . .] within a framework of continuity” based on imperial success.17 Progress had in itself become a tradition in Britain; its main feature was not the changes it brought but the persistence of its capacity to bring about such changes; progress had become a guarantor of continuity in the form of ever more progress. Thus the content of life might change, but not the form (a constant advance into a better world). That is the continuity of confidence: U.S. modernity has demonstrated a similar faith; also, perhaps, Japanese modernity after 1945. A commitment to continuity can also arise, of course, out

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of insecurity. This was its main source in early-twentieth-century Latin America, where widespread fears were aroused at the prospect of the momentous changes needed to bring about a better world, especially after the Mexican Revolution provided ample justification for such anxiety. In this context, advocates of an alternative modernity sought to contend with the past by converting time into space in order to reduce the weight of history and allow for a version of progress that was political and cultural as well as economic. Tradition, for them, was not static, but living continuity or, as Rodó put it, the manifestation of solidarity between generations. Defined in temporal terms, Latin America—“where the traditions have not yet gone and modernity has not yet arrived”—can only be perceived as deficient; 18 but if a more spatialized view of history is adopted, as my four intellectuals all did, new possibilities open up for selected elements of the past to be reconfigured with selected elements of the present to create a better future. If a distinguishing feature of “standard” modernity has been a relentless drive toward analysis, then the Latin American alternative sought a countervailing synthesis. In Latin America, the emphasis has been less on progress than on renewal. It has been argued that in Latin America the critical element necessary to modernity came from hybridity, that is, from recourse to traditionalism and conservatism. The intellectuals discussed in this book, however, all sought to establish a basis for a critical element that did not have recourse to traditionalism, focusing less on elements of the past in themselves and more on the processes of their integration into the present. History thereby became a site of reconciliation, a ground upon which authenticity could be created. Ethics By tradition we [Latin Americans] are Catholic and liberal, and any exclusive vision of humanity, any form of puritanism, repels us. Octavio Paz, The Siren and the Seashell

There was widespread concern among early-twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals about the absence of ethics in postEnlightenment thought. The state of affairs that they resisted was later analyzed more explicitly by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School (with the advantage of greater hindsight): namely, that the application of the industrial division of labor to the realm of the spirit as well as the body had divorced scientific reason from the question of religious truth and from the problems of human existence.19

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It became very difficult, therefore, to establish any basis for a secular theory of values. The two main European responses were both problematic. Individualism, which assumed a correspondence between enlightened self-interest and the general interest, ran the risk that supposedly ethical evaluations could well come down to no more than a mask for personal preferences. Instrumentalism took the view that ideas should be judged not by their truth value but by their success (or their use value), a criterion that is not necessarily affected by moral considerations. For reasons explored in the main chapters, both of these approaches lacked appeal in Latin America. Those Latin American intellectuals who proposed an alternative sought to transcend the divides that, despite Nietzsche’s warnings, had come to characterize European models; they dreamt of a modernity that was “fully and totally human.”20 Their visions were founded on the faith in fellow human beings that had been a feature of many Enlightenment works, but which had been abandoned in despair by later European thinkers.21 My four intellectuals all saw optimism as a moral imperative. They sought to take the ideas of the Enlightenment a stage further by focusing less on what had to be destroyed and more on what had to be created in order for modern societies to function well. Their visions of a modern future affirmed the liberating potential of modern life, the capacity of individuals and societies to develop strategies of communication and solidarity to resist alienation, and the importance of culture as a means of integrating past, present, and future. Opposed to taxonomy and fixity, suspicious of claims to absolute truth, and of dogma in any form, they sought to reconceptualize critique to make room for empathy; universalism to allow for relativism; individualism to bring it into balance with social solidarity; and autonomy to create the conditions for authenticity. In so doing, they developed the basis of an ethics for the modern world, drawing on the values of empathy, solidarity, and hospitality. If what became most evident worldwide in the late twentieth century about modernization was that it brought about a whole range of unintended and undesired consequences, this was apparent far earlier in Latin America, not least because it was the first region to be exposed to the lethal cocktail of messianic belief in its own values and overwhelming military might that constitutes U.S. imperialism. Confronted by such confident instrumental power, and looking at their own divided societies, it is not surprising that some Latin American intellectuals began to explore what are now often thought of as postmodern themes: fragmentation, discontinuity, and difference. But their approach cannot be said to be “postmodern,” because

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they were, as outlined earlier, reluctant to relinquish the achievements of modernity: its potential to effect transformation toward greater freedom, equality, and justice, its energizing capacities, and its ordering potential. Latin America’s distinctive modernity matches Habermas’s emphasis on modernity having produced the concept of participation as well as the practice of exclusion and his claim that public space can be conceived as potentially inclusive and democratic rather than competitive and agonistic, as Hannah Arendt depicted it.22 It also has features in common with Habermas’s proposed model of “communicative action”: critical of the sovereign rational subject, with its latent tendency to become authoritarian, but nonetheless reluctant to relinquish the possibilities of rational critique and selfdetermination. Like Habermas, Latin Americans were searching for a way out of the two aporias of absolute reason (Hegel) and unbounded subjectivity (Nietzsche), and, like him, they identified a possible alternative through emphasizing intersubjectivity (mutual constitution of self and other, founded on authenticity through recognition by others as well as self-consciousness) based on a practice of critical exchange of ideas in democratic public debate. Latin Americans, however, paid more attention than Habermas to the unequal power relations that condition such possibilities. Even so, there were limits to the inclusiveness of their model. In social terms, none of these four intellectuals envisaged participation in the great adventure of becoming modern as equally open to all. Class was the least significant barrier (integration of the masses was seen as a prerequisite for a modern nation-state and strategies of exclusion were mainly directed against the elites). Race was problematic, in different ways, for all four of them. Mariátegui went further than any other Latin American intellectual of his era in imagining a socialist nation-state in which indigenous peoples played a central role, but even he was unclear about whether there was a place for Chinese or blacks. Gender is also a thorny topic: Justo, Reyes, and Mariátegui all raised the question of women’s rights, but their models of modernity were primarily masculine, especially in terms of their attributions of agency. Still, it is important to think about what kind of masculinity was represented. The Latin American emphasis on reconciliation of opposites, on inclusiveness and synthesis, on promoting dialogue, participation, and solidarity—would usually be gendered feminine in a European context and are a long way from the connotations of mastery conventionally associated with modernity. What Latin American evidence compels us to note is that modernity is not necessarily confident and virile, as Marshall Berman found it to be in nineteenth-century

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Europe. It can admit doubts, tolerate uncertainty, celebrate difference. More than one type of modernizing rationality exists: it does not have to be teleological, homogenizing, or instrumental. Manuel Antonio Garretón, surveying Latin America in the 1990s, argued that a new vision of modernity was needed in order to defeat both of the two reductionist models fighting for control in the region: technocratic versus essentialist. To avoid new fundamentalisms, he suggested, it was necessary to develop political projects able to “respect diversity without breaking down society into particularisms; incorporate technological and scientific rationality without suppressing the expressive-communicative dimension or historical memory; generate coalition-building capacity without overlooking societal conflicts; and generate capacity for representation without falling into ideological voluntarisms.”23 As this book has shown, these topics were all the subject of widespread debate across the region during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Latin America’s relatively long history of trying to contend differently with the tensions of modernity gives pause for thought in the context of wider debates about the modern condition.

Notes

Chapter 1 Introduction: Against Fate and Ascription 1. “After all, modernity is a rebellion against fate and ascription,”: Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity, Cambridge, 1991, p. 68. 2. Simón Bolívar, “Discurso de Angostura” [1819], in J. L. SalcedoBastardo, Bolívar, Academica Venezolana, Editorial Arte, Caracas, 1984, pp. 178–203. The original Spanish is particularly telling: “mostrar al mundo antiguo la majestad del mundo moderno,” p. 203. 3. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” [1980], in Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1997, pp. 38–55; Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Verso, London, 1983. 4. See, e.g., Alan Knight, “Democratic and Revolutionary Traditions in Latin America,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 20, no. 2, April 2001, pp. 147–86. 5. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures [1985], trans. Frederick Lawrence, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987; The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Polity, Cambridge, 1984. 6. Aníbal Quijano, Modernidad, identidad y utopía en América Latina, Editorial El Conejo, Quito, 1990, p. 62. 7. Julio Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina. Literatura y política en el siglo XIX, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1989; trans. by John D. Blanco as Divergent Modernities, Duke University Press, Durham, 2001. 8. For the classic statement of modernization theory, see W. W. Rostow, Politics and the Stages of Growth, Cambridge University Press, London, 1971; for Latin American responses, see José Medina Echavarría, Consideraciones sociológicas sobre el desarrollo económico en América Latina, Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Montevideo,

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NOTES

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

1984; and Joseph A. Kahl, Modernization, Exploitation and Dependency in Latin America: Germani, González Casanova and Cardoso, Transaction Books, New Brunswick NJ, 1976. Aníbal Quijano et al., Imágenes desconocidas: La modernidad en la encrucijada posmoderna, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, Buenos Aires, 1988, p. 17 and pp. 175–8. Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, eds., After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003, p. 25. Luis Roniger and Carlos H. Waisman, eds., Globality and Multiple Modernities: Comparative North American and Latin American Perspectives, Sussex University Press, Brighton, 2002; Laurence Whitehead, Latin America: A New Interpretation, Palgrave, New York, 2006. See also Manuel A. Garretón, Incomplete Democracy: Political Democratization in Chile and Latin America, trans. R. Kelly Washbourne with Gregory Horvath, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC, 2003, pp. 14–15. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 2. Reinhart Koselleck, “ ‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1985, pp. 267–88. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” [1978] in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984, pp. 32–50. Peter Wagner has suggested one general caveat about modernity that rings particularly true in relation to Latin America, namely that if it is thought of as “a ‘condition’ or an ‘experience,’ then the qualifications required to show its existence were largely absent in the allegedly modern societies during the nineteenth century, and for a still fairly large number of people during the first half of the twentieth century.” Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 3–4. Victor M. Uribe-Uran, ed., State and Society in Spanish America during the Age of Revolution, Scholarly Resources, Wilmington DE, 2001; see also Anthony McFarlane and Eduardo Posada-Carbó, eds., Independence and Revolution in Spanish America: Perspectives and Problems, Institute of Latin American Studies, London, 1999. Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930, Ediciones Nueva Visión, Buenos Aires, 1988; Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entra y salir de la modernidad, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1992; José Joaquín Brunner, América Latina: cultura y modernidad, Editorial Grijalbo, Mexico, 1992. The term was particularly evident in Mexico, even before the revolution: there was the famous modernista forum Revista Moderna (1898–1911); a new generation of intellectuals (including Alfonso

NOTES

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

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Reyes) founded Savia Moderna in 1906; later came México Moderno (1920–1923) and a publishing house called Moderno (founded in 1919 by Manuel Toussaint). Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2004, p. 23. Ibid., quotations on p. 31, p. 33, and p. 31, respectively. The literature on the modernization of Latin American cities has been growing rapidly. See, in particular, Maurico Tenorio Trillo, “1910 Mexico City: Space and Nation in the City of the Centenario,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, February 1996, pp. 75–104; Gilbert M. Joseph and Mark Szuchman, eds., I Saw a City Invincible: Urban Portraits of Latin America, Scholarly Resources Inc., Washington, 1996; Ronn Pineo and James A. Baer, Cities of Hope: People, Protests, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870–1930, Westview Press, Boulder and Oxford, 1998; and Arturo Almandez, ed., Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850–1950, Routledge, London, 2002. Angel Rama, Las máscaras democráticas del modernismo, Fundación Angel Rama, Montevideo, 1985, pp. 28–33. For a good illustrative account, which brings out the effects of modernization in telling detail, see Karen Remmer, Party Competition in Argentina and Chile, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE, 1984. Rama, Las máscaras, p. 33. The classic analysis of the impact of modernization on cultural life is Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada, Ediciones del Norte, Hanover, NH, 1984. For the Argentine experience, see David Viñas, Apogeo de la oligarquía: Literatura argentina y realidad política, Ediciones Siglo Veinte, Buenos Aires, 1975. For a more personal account, see Manuel Gálvez, Recuerdos de la vida literaria, vol. I. Amigos y maestros de mi juventud [1944], Librería Hachette, Buenos Aires, 1961. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonía de las razas en América [1883], La Cultura Argentina, Buenos Aires, 1915, p. 456; José Martí, “Nuestra América” [1891], in Obras escogidas, Editora Política, La Habana, vol. II, 1979, pp. 519–27, p. 526. Rubén Darío, “Cake-Walk: el baile de moda,” in Revista Moderna de México, I:1, September 1903, pp. 59–61. Krzysztof Pomian, Sur l’histoire, Gallimard, Paris, 1999, p. 180. Roger Chartier, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,” in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1982, pp. 13–46, p. 22. Chartier is here discussing the work of Lucien Febvre, whose use of biography as a way of investigating the articulation between thought and the social world I have drawn upon for this book. However, Febvre’s concept of mental equipment (outillage)

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30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

NOTES

places more emphasis on the outlook of the individual than I wish to do (likewise Lucien Goldmann’s idea, adopted from Lukács, of world vision). Bourdieu’s term habitus—defined as the “set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways” (Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, Polity, Cambridge, 1991, p. 12)—comes closer to capturing the social context of ideas that I wish to emphasize. However, my reservation about habitus is that it implies a more established and consensual situation than existed in early-twentiethcentury Latin America, where cultural producers were obliged to negotiate precarious, atomized, and rapidly shifting conditions. I have, therefore, settled upon Pomian’s less precise, but correspondingly more flexible concept of porteurs of ideas, which leaves open the (undecidable) question of the extent to which the individual outlook is conditioned by society or vice versa. Chartier, “Intellectual History,” p. 34. Rama, Las máscaras, pp. 28–33. Brunner, Cultura y modernidad, p. 169 ff. For a sample of evidence for popular interest in the modern, see, from the discipline of history: Carlos A. Forment, Democracy in Latin America 1760–1900. Vol. I: Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2003; François-Xavier Guerra, Annick Lempérière et al., eds., Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1998; Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994; Thomas O’Brien, The Century of US Capitalism in Latin America, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1999; and Guy Thomson, with David LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenthcentury Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra, Scholarly Resources, Wilmington DE, 1998. From social science, see: Arnold Bauer, Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; and David Nugent, Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes 1885–1935, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1997. For relevant work in Latin American cultural studies, see note 33; and also William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America, Verso, London, 1991. Jesús Martín-Barbero, De los medios a las mediaciones: Comunicación, cultura y hegemonía, Ediciones G. Gili, Barcelona, 1991; García Canclini, Culturas híbridas; Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica. The classic account is E. Bradford Burns and Thomas E. Skidmore, Elites, Masses, and Modernization in Latin America, 1850–1930, University of Texas Press, Austin and London, 1979, esp. pp. 27–8. Carlos Alonso (in his The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural

NOTES

35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

201

Discourse in Latin America, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998) basically agrees, although he sees the elites’ ideology of modernization not as a result of choice but as determined by relations of dependency. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall, Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1984; Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au 16e siècle: La religion de Rabelais, Albin Michel, Paris, 1942; Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” in New Literary History, vol. 2, no. 1, Autumn 1970, pp. 7–37. See also Christophe Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels,” Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1990. The probable exception is that Rodó would have read little, if any, of Mariátegui’s writing, since Mariátegui was only 23 at the time of Rodó’s death and his work up to that point had only appeared in Peruvian newspapers. Rubén Jiménez Ricardez, “Prólogo,” in Mariátegui, Obra política, Ediciones Era, Mexico, 1979, pp. 9–43, pp. 19–20. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “La obra de José Enrique Rodó” [1910], in Ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión, Editorial Raigal, Buenos Aires, 1952, pp. 118–31, p. 119. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, p. 60, original emphasis. Martí is probably best seen as a transitional figure, operating as he did in the very particular historical circumstances of Cuba’s late struggle for independence. As a result, he had opportunities both to play the kind of leading political role more characteristic of his predecessors and—partly because of his exile in the United States—to earn a living as a journalist to an extent that only really became possible two decades or so later elsewhere in Latin America. On Martí’s views about modernity, in which can be identified many elements of the ideas discussed in this book, see Ramos, Divergent Modernities, esp. Part II; and Susana Rotker, The American Chronicles of José Martí: Journalism and Modernity in Latin America, trans. Jennifer French and Katherine Semler, University Press of New England, Hanover NH, 2000. As I argue in chapter 2, however, Rodó wrote in refutation of Martí’s approach and elaborated a fundamentally different strategy for Latin America’s future. It is worth noting that, unlike Rodó, Martí does not seem to have been widely read (at least outside Cuba) until the 1920s, which supports the view that the main source of his authority was political rather than cultural. See the article of 1905 by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, in which he expressed regret that the consecration of Martí as an apostle had “eclipsed his greatness as a writer and made him forgotten as a poet” (Obra crítica, ed. Emma Susana Speratti Piñero, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1960, p. 20). Alfonso Reyes, “No hay tal lugar,” in Obras completas, vol. XI, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1960, p. 373. On macondismo see Brunner, Cultura y modernidad, pp. 37–72; on “baroque modernity” see Pedro Morandé, Cultura y modernización en

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43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

NOTES

América Latina: Ensayo sociológico acerca de la crisis del desarrollismo y de su superación, Encuentro, Madrid, 1987; and Claudio Veliz, The New World of the Gothic Fox, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994. The distinctions between modernism in Europe and Latin America are helpfully summarized in Santiago Castro-Gómez, Crítica de la razón latinoamericana, Puvill Libros, Barcelona, 1996, Ch. 4. He draws mainly on Iris M. Zavala, Colonialism and Culture: Hispanic Modernisms and the Social Imaginary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1992; and Roberto Fernández Retamar, in Para el perfil definitive del hombre, Editorial Letras Cubanas, La Habana, 1981. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Progress Publishers, Moscow, n.d. [1848; trans. 1888], p. 48. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “Palabras en la despedida de un buen americano” [1940], in Plenitud de América, Del Giudice Editores, Buenos Aires, 1952, pp. 115–8, p. 117. Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo. Del romanticismo a la vanguardia, Editorial Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1974, p. 125. Darío, in El Tiempo (Buenos Aires), May 20, 1898, in Estudios inéditos, Instituto de Las Españas, New York, 1938, p. 160. See Darío, “El rey burgués,” in Azul, Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 14th edn., 1966. Cathy L. Jrade, “Socio-Political Concerns in the Poetry of Rubén Darío,” in David William Foster and Daniel Altamira, eds., From Romanticism to Modernismo in Latin America, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 1997, pp. 302–15, esp. p. 303. On imports of consumer items, see Bauer, Goods. Octavio Paz’s ideas on Rubén Darío paved the way for Anglo-American scholarship: see Paz, The Siren and the Seashell by Lysander Kemp and Margaret Sayers Peden, University of Texas Press, Austin and London, 1976. For the revisionist case see Zavala, Colonialism and Culture; Richard A. Cardwell and Bernard McGuirk, eds., ¿Qué es el modernismo? Nueva encuesta, nuevas lecturas, Society of Spanish and SpanishAmerican Studies, Boulder CO, 1993; Gerard Aching, The Politics of Spanish American modernismo, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997; Cathy L. Jrade, Modernismo, Modernity and the Development of Spanish American Literature, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998; Anthony L. Geist and José B. Monleón, eds., Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 1999. For the traditional interpretation see Keith Ellis, Critical Approaches to Rubén Darío, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1974. For work emphasizing modernismo’s contradictory tendencies, see Noé Jitrik, Las contradicciones del modernismo, El Colegio de México, Mexico City, 1978; David William Foster and Daniel Altamira, eds., From Romanticism to Modernismo in Latin America,

NOTES

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

203

Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 1997. Revisionist work has also been done on the vanguardista movements: see Saúl Yurkievich, A través de la trama, Muchnik Editores, Barcelona, 1984. On novels, see Carlos J. Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; and his The Burden of Modernity. Aching, Politics, p. 147. Darío, “El Porvenir” (1885). See Rama, Las máscaras, p. 174 on popular speech. Gordon Brotherston, ed., Spanish American Modernista Poets: A Critical Anthology, Bristol Classical Press, London, 2nd edn., 1995, esp. “Introduction,” pp. vii–xviii. Aníbal González, La crónica modernista hispanoamericana, 1983 and La novela modernista hispanoamericana, 1987; Cristóbal Pera, Modernistas en París: El mito de París en la prosa modernista hispanoamericana, Peter Lang, Bern, 1997. Paz, Los hijos, pp. 130–1. On the emergence of a cultural sphere, see Rama, La ciudad letrada; and Ramos, Desencuentros de la modernidad. See also Vivian Schelling, ed., Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, Verso, London, 2000. Jorge Larraín, Identity and Modernity in Latin America, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000. Carlos Alonso, “The Burden of Modernity,” in Doris Sommer, ed., The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, pp. 94–103, p. 94. Thanks to Charles Jones for this metaphor. Vicente F. López, “Clasicismo y romanticismo” [1842], in Norberto Pinilla, La polémica del romanticismo, Editorial Americalee, Buenos Aires, 1943, pp. 11–32, esp. p. 23. Juan Bautista Alberdi, “Ideas. Para presidir á la confección del curso de filosofía contemporánea. En el Colegio de Humanidades Montevideo, 1842,” in Escritos póstumos, vol. XV, Imprenta Juan Bautista Alberdi, Buenos Aires, 1900, pp. 603–19, esp. 613 and 607. Garretón, Incomplete Democracy, p. 19. Jorge E. Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective, Blackwell, Malden MA and Oxford, 2000, p. 141. Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten, Polity, Cambridge, 1995, translator’s introduction, p. xvii. The relevant essay by Habermas is “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity,” in ibid., pp. 149–204. See the review of debates in Castro-Gómez, Crítica de la razón latinoamericana, esp. Ch. 2. I regret that there is no specific discussion of Brazil in this book, but there is a rich existing literature on Brazilian modernity and it was

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NOTES

68.

69.

70 71.

not easy to see how to add to it. In English, see, especially, Silviano Santiago, The Space In-Between, Duke University Press, Durham, 2001; Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, Verso, London, 1992; and José de Souza Martins, “The Hesitations of the Modern and the Contradictions of Modernity in Brazil,” in Schelling, ed., Through the Kaleidoscope, pp. 248–74. There is plenty of evidence that similar themes are to be found in Brazil, perhaps at an earlier stage than in Spanish America (notably in the work of Machado de Assis). Nevertheless, one important difference is that no explicitly political project of an alternative modernity cohered in Brazil until the Workers’ Party emerged in the 1980s. See Rama, Las máscaras, p. 37 for an argument about the major role played in modernization by letrados, especially the Generation of 1880 in Argentina, the Reforma Generation in Mexico, Tobias Barreto in Brazil, and Eugenio María de Hostos in Puerto Rico. Moreover, stereotypes of Latin America as ineptly and brutally modern are still ubiquitous in popular literature. To take one random but influential example, see Hergé’s Tintin and the Picaros [1976], Egmont UK, London, 2006, in which the Picaros, a guerrilla group dressed in harlequin costumes (carnival), try to overthrow the “cruel and vain” tyrant, General Tapioca (p. 1). The leader of the Picaros is equally bloodthirsty, however, rejecting Tintin’s offer to help in exchange for a promise to enact a revolution without violence with the rejoinder: “A revolution without executions? Without reprisals? [ . . . ] It’s unthinkable! [ . . . ] And anyway, what about tradition? [ . . . ] Tapioca and his ministers are bloody tyrants and villains. They must be shot!” (p. 44). When the Picaros finally triumph, aided by Tintin and the Professor (respectively the incorruptible and the inventive—both civilizing Europeans), they force General Tapioca at gunpoint to declare, in a speech that “we shall, of course, be recording [ . . . ] on tape,” that he is handing over power to their own leader who “will lead our beloved country forward along the road of [ . . . ] progress” (p. 56). There are many other representations throughout the text of Latin American modernity as technocratic and authoritarian. Alain Touraine, Critique of Modernity, trans. David Macey, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995, p. 201. Manifesto of the Argentine periodical Martín Fierro, May 15, 1924, in Oliverio Girondo, Obras completas, ed. Raúl Antelo, Galaxia Gutenberg, Madrid, 1999, pp. lxv–lxvi.

Chapter 2 Mapping Out the Modern: Rodó’s Critique of Pure Reason 1. Quijano, Modernidad, p. 62. 2. Rodó emphasized the phrase “the four winds of the spirit” in “Lema” [1896], Obras completas, ed. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Editorial

NOTES

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

205

Aguilar, Madrid, 1957, p. 145. The same phrase occurs, along with “fully human,” in Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s classic americanista essay, “La Utopía de América” [1925], in his Plenitud de América, pp. 11–19. References in this chapter are to works by Rodó unless otherwise stated; most are cited from the Rodríguez Monegal edition, hereafter OC. The exception is Ariel [1900], for which I have used Gordon Brotherston’s edition, published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1967. Ariel is also in OC, pp. 202–44. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Didier T. Jaén, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1997, p. 48. My translation. See, e.g., Augusto Salazar Bondy, Existe una filosofía en nuestra América?, Siglo XXI, Mexico City, 1968; Enrique Dussel, Filosofía de la liberación, Edicol, Mexico City, 1977. Rubén Darío, “Cabezas: José Enrique Rodó” [1909], in Hugo Barbagelata, ed., Rodó y sus críticos, Biblioteca Latino-Americana, Paris, 1920, pp. 105–7, p. 105. Gonzalo Zaldumbide, José Enrique Rodó, Editorial América, Madrid, 1919, p. 47. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 65. Aníbal Ponce, Humanismo burgués y humanismo proletario [1935], Imprenta Nacional de Cuba, Havana, 1962; Alberto Zum Felde, Proceso intelectual del Uruguay y crítica de su literatura, Editorial Claridad, Montevideo, 1941, esp. pp. 242–3; Luis Alberto Sánchez, Balance y liquidación del novecientos [1939], Editorial Universo, Lima, 4th edn., 1973, pp. 71–89. Revisionist interpretations include Arturo Ardao, ed., Rodó: Su americanismo, Biblioteca de Marcha, Montevideo, 1970; Jorge A. Silva Cencio, Rodó y la legislación social, Biblioteca de Marcha, Montevideo, 1973; Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America, Verso, London, 1999, esp. pp. 108–113; and Ottmar Ette and Titus Heydenreich, eds., José Enrique Rodó y su tiempo, Cien años de Ariel, Vervuert/Iberoamericana, Frankfurt and Madrid, 2000. The stimulating centenary volume edited by Gustavo San Román, This America We Dream Of: Rodó and Ariel One Hundred Years On, Institute of Latin American Studies, London, 2001, contains both revisionist and non-revisionist views. Emilio Frugoni, “La orientación espiritual de Rodó,” in Frugoni, La sensibilidad americana, Editor Maximino García, Montevideo, 1929, pp. 171–85, esp. p. 177. For anthologies of Rodó’s reception by his contemporaries, see Barbagelata, Rodó y sus críticos; Revista Ariel (Montevideo), “Homenaje a José Enrique Rodó,” Centro de Estudiantes “Ariel,” Montevideo, 1920; and Nosotros [Buenos Aires], “Homenaje a Rodó,” vol. XI, no. 97, May 1917.

206

NOTES

12. Eduardo Mendieta, ed., Latin American Philosophy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2003, p. 13; Eduardo Devés Valdés, Del Ariel de Rodó a la CEPAL (1900–1950), vol. I of El pensamiento latinoamericano en el siglo XX: Entre la modernización y la identidad, Editorial Biblos, Argentina, 2000, p. 29. 13. Devés Valdés, Del Ariel, p. 35. 14. José Miguel Oviedo, Breve historia del ensayo hispano-americano, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1990, p. 46. 15. The extravagant welcome extended to Waldo Frank, who went on a lecture tour of Latin America in 1929–1930, is revealing about how few eminent U.S. visitors Latin Americans encountered. See M. J. Benardete, ed., Waldo Frank in America Hispana, Instituto de las Españas, New York, 1930. On ambassadors, see C. Neale Ronning and Albert P. Vannucci, eds., Ambassadors in Foreign Policy: The Influence of Individuals on US-Latin American Policy, Praeger, New York, 1987. 16. Rodó wrote to Alcides Arguedas, author of the classic text of racial pessimism, Pueblo enfermo (Barcelona, no publisher stated, 1909), arguing that Latin Americans had to see their ills as “transitory” and had “to struggle against them animated by the spirit of hope and faith in the future”; he recommended that Arguedas retitle his book Pueblo niño. “Carta a Alcides Arguedas,” 1909, OC, p. 1344. See also Carlos Octavio Bunge’s Nuestra América [1903], Ministerio de Cultura y Educación de la Nación, Fraterna, Buenos Aires, 1994. 17. Gwen Kirkpatrick, “The Aesthetics of the Avant-garde,” in Schelling, Through the Kaleidoscope, pp. 177–98, esp. p. 189. 18. Claudio Lomnitz, “Passion and Banality in Mexican History: The Presidential Persona,” in Luis Roniger and Tamar Herzog, eds., The Collective and the Public in Latin America: Cultural Identities and Political Order, Sussex Academic Press, Brighton UK and Portland OR, 2000, pp. 238–56, esp. p. 252 ff. 19. Veliz, The New World of the Gothic Fox, p. 6. 20. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, pp. 233–4. 21. Alfonso Reyes, “Rodó” [1917], in Reyes, Obras completas, vol. III, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 1956, pp. 134–7, esp. p. 135. 22. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, p. 232. 23. Juan Zorrilla de San Martín [leading Uruguayan poet], “Discurso pronunciado en el pórtico de la Universidad,” in Revista Ariel, “Homenaje,” pp. 151–61, esp. p. 155. 24. Ibid., p. 157. 25. Both the leader of the Uruguayan Socialist Party, Emilio Frugoni, and the Argentine Socialist Alfredo Palacios were staunch defenders of Rodó. See Frugoni, El libro de los elogios, Editorial Afirmación, Montevideo, 1953; and Palacios, Estadistas y poetas, Editorial Claridad, Buenos Aires, 1952. Two famous British left-wing admirers

NOTES

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

207

were Havelock Ellis, who wrote an introduction to The Motives of Proteus, trans. Angel Flores, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1929 and Aneurin Bevan, as discussed in Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan, Paladin, St. Albans, 1975, vol. 1, p. 195. See also Gustavo San Román’s survey of Rodó’s reception in the United Kingdom, in San Román, This America, pp. 68–91. Conservative Latin American critics included Francisco García Calderón, La creación de un continente, Librería Ollendorf, Paris, 1912, p. 98; and José de la Riva Agu¨ero, Carácter de la literatura del Perú independiente, Librería Francesa Científica Galland, Lima, 1905, p. 263. Rodó stated: “I wanted to propose [ . . . ] to the youth of Latin America a ‘profession of faith’ that they could make their own.” Letter to Enrique José Varona, May 7, 1900, OC, p. 1265. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 57. This quotation (actually from Charles Morice, not Rodó himself, although he evidently introduced it in support of his argument) is often cited by those who dismiss Rodó as a reactionary. See, e.g., Mary Kay Vaughan, The State, Education, and Social Class in Mexico, 1880–1928, Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb IL, 1982, p. 245. Gordon Brotherston, “Rodó Views His Continent,” in San Román, This America, pp. 35–49. Rodó did not at any point define explicitly what he meant by the term “culture” or how it differed from “tradition,” which he seemed to use to evoke the wider anthropological meaning of culture. Part of the explanation for this omission must lie in the difficulties of envisaging any kind of homogeneous culture given the social and political realities of Latin America at the beginning of the twentieth century. As González Echevarría has argued, the region’s intellectuals wrote about “culture” as “part of a process of literary self-constitution” (Roberto González Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1985, p. 11). For further discussion of what Latin American intellectuals meant by “culture,” see chapter 4 on Alfonso Reyes. See, e.g., “Maris Stella” [1912], OC, pp. 1132–4. Michael Aronna, “Pueblos enfermos”: The Discourse of Illness in the Turn-of-the-Century Spanish and Latin American Essay, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC, 1999, pp. 87–134, esp. p. 99. “Rubén Darío” [1899], OC, pp. 165–87, esp. p. 187. “Darío,” OC, p. 187. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 62 “Motivos de Proteo,” OC, p. 397. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Progress Publishers, Moscow, n.d. [1848; trans. 1888], p. 49. A Spanish version was published in Madrid in 1886; Rodó could equally well have read the French version, translated by Marx’s daughter, Laura Lafargue, in 1885.

208

NOTES

36. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 70. 37. “Las ‘Moralidades,’ de Barrett” [1910], El Mirador de Próspero, OC, pp. 635–6, p. 636. 38. Motivos de Proteo was not widely reviewed when it first came out, but its reputation steadily grew, and by the time of his death it was mentioned alongside Ariel in many of the eulogies. See Nosotros, “Homenaje a Rodó.” 39. Enrique Mendez Vives, El Uruguay de la modernización, vol. V (1876–1904) of Historia Uruguaya, Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Montevideo, 1975, p. 38. On Uruguay’s modernization, see also M. H. J. Finch, A Political Economy of Uruguay since 1870, The Macmillan Press, London and Basingstoke, 1981; and Fernando López-Alves, “Between the Economy and the Polity in the River Plate: Uruguay, 1811–1890,” Research Paper no. 33, Institute of Latin American Studies, London, 1993. 40. Eduardo de León, “Uruguay ¿en el espejo de Morse?: La generación del 900,” in Felipe Arocena and Eduardo de León, El complejo de Próspero: Ensayos sobre cultura, modernidad y modernización en América Latina, Vintén Editor, Montevideo, 1993, pp. 243–95, esp. p. 256. 41. El libro del centenario del Uruguay 1825–1925, Editores Agencia Publicidad, Montevideo, 1925, p. 615. 42. Josefina Lereda Acevedo de Blixen, Novecientos, Ediciones del Río de la Plata, Montevideo, 3rd edn., 1967, p. 37. 43. Section on “Montevideo hoy” in the lavishly illustrated and officially endorsed El libro del centenario, p. 695. 44. “El ejército y el ciudadano” [1910], OC, p. 1129. 45. De León, “Uruguay,” pp. 248–9. 46. See George Pendle, Uruguay: South America’s First Welfare State, Royal Institute of International Affairs, London and New York, 1952; Milton Vanger, The Model Country: José Batlle y Ordóñez of Uruguay 1907–1915, Brandeis University Press, Hanover NH, and London, 1980; and Francisco Panizza, Uruguay, Batllismo y después, Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Montevideo, 1990. 47. Tulio Halperín Donghi, “Uruguay in the Nineteenth Century,” in Roniger and Herzog, The Collective and the Public in Latin America, pp. 158–73. 48. Alberto Zum Felde, Proceso histórico del Uruguay: Esquema de una sociología nacional, Editor Maximino García, Montevideo, 1919, pp. 224–5. 49. De León, “Uruguay,” p. 251. 50. Ibid., p. 256. 51. The ideas of Karl Christian Krause (1871–1832) were developed by his Spanish student, Julián Sanz del Río (1814–1869), and the concept of “racionalismo armónico” became influential in late-nineteenthcentury Spain and in parts of Latin America.

NOTES

209

52. For details of all these cultural institutions, see Apuntes para una historia de las ideas en el Uruguay, Departamento de Cultura CAUSA-URUGUAY, Montevideo, April 1990. 53. “Una carta anticolegialista” [1916], in OC, pp. 1039–42. 54. Letter to Juan Francisco Piquet, March 6, 1904, OC, p. 1275. 55. Letter to Rafael Altamira, 1900, OC, p. 1286; letter to Unamuno, March 20, 1904, OC, pp. 1317–8. 56. Julio Herrera y Reissig (1899), cited in Pablo Rocca, ed., Montevideo: Altillos, cafés, literatura 1849–1986, Editorial Arca, Montevideo, 1992, p. 15. 57. In Uruguay, El Día was founded by Batlle in 1886; Diario del Plata, which Rodó edited for the first two years, in 1912. In Argentina, the two national dailies were relatively long established: La Prensa (1869) and La Nación (1870). 58. De León, “Uruguay,” p. 253. 59. See Carlos Real de Azúa, “Prólogo a Ariel,” in Rodó, Ariel: Motivos de Proteo, ed. Angel Rama, Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, 1976, pp. ix–xxxi, esp. p. xx. Ariel was evidently well known at least in Mexican student circles by 1908, or the young Alfonso Reyes would not have felt moved to persuade his father to finance the first Mexican edition. Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez remembered it creating a stir in Spain in 1900 (see his Españoles de tres mundos, Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1942, p. 62). By 1911, nine editions had been published in total: four in Montevideo, one in Valencia, one in Santo Domingo, one in Havana, and two in Mexico. In 1910 Pedro Henríquez Ureña noted that even though Rodó’s books were difficult to obtain in many parts of the region, his influence was still detectable everywhere, suggesting that the informal routes had been effective. Henríquez Ureña, Ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión, p. 119 60. Lereda Acevedo de Blixen, Novocientos, p. 67. 61. José Sienra y Carranza, “El el café se vive realmente” [1882], in Rocca, Montevideo, Editorial Arca, Montevideo, 1992, pp. 75–8, esp. p. 76. 62. Lereda Acevedo de Blixen, Novecientos, p. 72. 63. Carlos Real de Azúa, “Ambiente espiritual del novecientos,” in Arturo Ardao et al., La literatura del 900, special issue of Número [Montevideo], Año 2, no. 6–7–8, 1950, pp. 15–36. 64. Emilio Frugoni, “A los obreros,” Pro-Zola. Número Unico, Imprenta La Razón, Montevideo, 1902, pp. 5–7. 65. Revista Nacional de Literatura y Ciencias Sociales, I:1, March 5, 1895, cited in Rodríguez Monegal, “Introducción,” OC, p. 25. 66. Rodríguez Monegal, “Introducción,” OC, p. 25. Rodó’s essays for the Revista Nacional de Literatura y Ciencias Sociales are collected in OC, pp. 738–857. 67. Zum Felde, Proceso intelectual, p. 214.

210

NOTES

68. See Glicerio Albarrán Puente, El pensamiento de José Enrique Rodó, Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, Madrid, 1953, pp. 71–93 and pp. 371– 449; Gordon Brotherston, “Introduction,” Ariel, pp. 1–19; Carlos Real de Azúa, “Prólogo a Motivos de Proteo,” in José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, pp. xxxvii–civ; and Belén Castro Morales, J. E. Rodó modernista: Utopía y regeneración, Univ. de La Laguna, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1992, pp. 25–33. See also Rodó’s own sonnet, “Lecturas” [1896], OC, p. 863, in which he mentioned Perrault, Lamartine, Hugo, Cervantes, and Balzac, and his notes on a university literature course outline, in the appendix to Pablo Rocca, Enseñanza y teoría de la literatura en José Enrique Rodó, Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Montevideo, 2001. 69. These were posthumously published as El Camino de Paros, available in OC. 70. “Cielo y agua,” OC, p. 1185. 71. “En Barcelona,” OC, p. 1191. 72. “Recuerdos de Pisa,” OC, p. 1207. 73. “En Barcelona,” OC, p. 1193. 74. Ibid. 75. “Ciudades con alma,” OC, pp. 1232–4. 76. “Anécdotas de la guerra,” OC, p. 1220. 77. “Una impresión de Roma,” OC, p. 1234. 78. “[Palermo],” OC, p. 1251. 79. “El que vendrá” [1896], OC, p. 150 [last ellipsis in original]. 80. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 51. 81. Ibid., p. 66. See also “Rumbos nuevos,” OC, p. 503. 82. “Rumbos nuevos,” OC, pp. 497–8. 83. Rama, Las máscaras, pp. 18–20. 84. “Rumbos nuevos,” OC, p. 503. His contemporary Carlos Vaz Farreira was well acquainted with the works of John Stuart Mill, so Rodó may well have learnt from discussions with him. 85. “Sobre Harpas en el silencio por Eugenio Díaz Romero” [1900], OC, p. 972. 86. “Motivos,” OC, p. 412. The Wealth of Nations was, as is well known, a treatise in favor of laissez-faire capitalism, but Smith, who is not usually identified as a utilitarian thinker, did not see people only as economic agents. His work overall raised important questions about the relationship between economics and ethics. 87. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, pp. 68–70. 88. For a contemporary account, see Vicente F. López, “Clasicismo y romanticismo” [1842], in Pinilla, La polémica del romanticismo, pp. 11–32. 89. “Nueva Antología Americana” [1907], OC, pp. 614–20, p. 618. Rocca, Enseñanza, p. 11. 90. “Nueva Antología,” OC, p. 618. 91. “La novela nueva. A propósito de ‘Academias,’ de Carlos Reyles” [1896], OC, pp. 151–9, p. 154.

NOTES

211

92. “El que vendrá,” OC, p. 147. 93. “Motivos,” OC, p. 445 and p. 389; “Liberalismo y jacobinismo” [1906], OC, p. 282. 94. “Rumbos nuevos,” OC, p. 505. 95. “El que vendrá,” OC, p. 146 (original emphasis). 96. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “El positivismo de Comte” [1909], in his Obra crítica, ed. Emma Susan Speratti Piñero, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1960, pp. 52–63, both makes a critique and includes an account of the broader context of the attack on positivism in Mexico led by Antonio Caso. Other major philosophers to criticize positivism included Alejandro Korn in Argentina; Alejandro Deustua in Peru; and Carlos Vaz Farreira in Uruguay. 97. See, esp., “Rumbos nuevos,” OC, pp. 504–5. 98. “Rumbos nuevos,” OC, p. 502. 99. “El centenario de Chile” [1910], OC, p. 553. 100. “La novela nueva,” OC, p. 153. 101. Ibid., p. 154. 102. Ibid., p. 154. 103. Ibid., p. 159. 104. There is no firm evidence about exactly what Rodó read of Nietzsche’s work, apart from Thus Spake Zarathustra. Zarathustra is in many ways an atypical Nietzschean text, far less playful in tone than some of his other works, and most readers of Nietzsche have found his more subtle ideas in other works. Ecce homo, in which Nietzsche tried to correct what he saw as misunderstandings of his idea of the übermensch, was translated (from a French version) by the Argentine journal Nosotros in 1909–1910 (see vol. III, nos. 18–19, 20–21, 22–23, 24; and vol. IV, 25 and 26), so it is very likely that Rodó would have seen this. Rodó’s Motivos de Proteo (1909) drew substantially on Henri Bergson, who in turn had drawn upon Nietzsche. When he wrote Ariel, however, Rodó seems to have been mainly concerned to refute a crude version of Nietzsche’s ideas, which he may well have gleaned in part from Max Nordau, who saw Nietzscheanism as the unchaining of the bestial in humanity, and whose writings were easily available in Latin America during the 1890s. 105. Rodó, letter to Ramón Catalá, January 10, 1911, OC, p. 1415. 106. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, p. 264 and p. xxxix. 107. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 103. 108. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1987. 109. Ignacio Zuleta, La polémica modernista: El modernismo de mar a mar (1898–1907), Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Bogotá, 1988, p. 31. 110. Draft letter, cited OC, p. 135. 111. As Jason Wilson has suggested in an article comparing Rodó and Darío, the austere Rodó appeared to experience a frisson of horror in

212

112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122. 123.

124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134 135. 136.

137. 138. 139.

NOTES

the face of so much uninhibited sensuality. Jason Wilson, “Replay of Plato: Rodó, Darío and Poetry,” in San Ramón, Rodó, pp. 23–34. “Prólogo a Juan C. Blanco Acevedo, Narraciones” [1898], OC, p. 963. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, p. 58, and Oviedo, Breve historia del ensayo hispano-americano, p. 46. “Rubén Darío,” OC, p. 168. Ibid., p. 153. “La novela nueva,” OC, pp. 156–7. Letter to Ramón A. Catalá, January 10, 1911, OC, pp. 1414–15. “Rubén Darío,” OC, p. 167. Ibid., p. 187. Rodó in conversation with Victor Pérez Petit, 1900, in Victor Pérez Petit, Rodó—su vida, su obra, Editorial Claudio García, Montevideo, 1967, p. 161. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 73; on Socrates, OC, “Liberalismo,” p. 265 “La novela nueva,” OC, p. 152. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 33. Alfonso Reyes also cited this phrase of Guyau’s in “Homilio por la cultura,” in Universidad, política y pueblo, ed. Jose Emilio Pacheco, UNAM, Mexico, 1967, p. 100. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 34. Ibid., p. 36. Letter to Francisco García Calderón, August 2, 1904, OC, p. 1354 (original emphasis). Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Fontana Press, London, 1985, p. 18. “In a soul that has been the object of harmonious and perfect stimulation, the intimate grace and delicacy of its sense of beauty will be one and the same as the strength and rectitude of its reason.” “Ariel,” OC, p. 216. “El que vendrá,” OC, p. 148. “Darío,” OC, p. 167. Ibid., p. 168. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 45. Williams, Ethics, p. 15. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 44. Ibid., p. 46. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 46. Rodó made frequent references to Schiller: see, esp., “Lema,” OC, p. 146 (the “ideal city”) and Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 43 (“a more extensive and complete culture, in the sense of lending oneself to a stimulation of all the faculties of the soul,” original emphasis). “Liberalismo,” OC, pp. 249–91, p. 275. “Ariel,” OC, pp. 202–3. Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology, C. Kegan Paul & Co., London, 8th edn., 1880, p. 403.

NOTES

140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180.

213

Barbagelata, Rodó y sus críticos, p. 6. Notebooks for Proteo, cited in OC, p. 113. Letter to Sr. D. R. Scafarelli, 1906, OC, p. 289. “Liberalismo y jacobinismo,” OC, p. 255 ff. “Sobre Alberto Nin Frías” [1906], OC, p. 978. “Motivos de Proteo,” OC, p. 456. “Liberalismo y jacobinismo,” OC, p. 290. Ibid., p. 280. “Rumbos nuevos,” OC, p. 506. Ibid., p. 506. “Liberalismo y jacobinismo,” OC, pp. 250–51. Ibid., p. 282. “Motivos de Proteo,” OC, p. 441. “Liberalismo y jacobinismo,” OC, p. 283. Ibid., pp. 283–4. Letter to Alejandro Andrade Coello, January 21, 1910, OC, p. 1367. “Liberalismo y jacobinismo,” OC, p. 255. Ibid., p. 286. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 41. “Motivos de Proteo,” OC, p. 302. Apart from González Echevarría, Voice of the Masters, see Aching, The Politics of Spanish American Modernismo, pp. 80–114. “Motivos de Proteo,” OC, p. 303. Ibid., p. 319. Ibid., p. 330. Ibid., p. 327 and pp. 393–4. Ibid., p. 303. Ibid., p. 304. Ibid., pp. 352–3 and 357. Ibid., p. 371. Ibid., p. 373. Devés Valdés, Del Ariel de Rodó, p. 40. Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice [1907], Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 10th edn., 2003. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “La obra de José Enrique Rodó,” in Siete ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión, pp. 118–31, p. 125. Alvaro Melian Lafinur, in Nosotros, III:22–3, July–August 1909, pp. 351–6, esp. p. 352. “Motivos de Proteo,” OC, pp. 471–2. Barbagelata, Rodó y sus críticos, p. 33. “La vida nueva—Lema,” OC, p. 145 (original emphasis). “Lema,” OC, p. 145. “De mi cartera” [1907], OC, p. 1411. “Obra póstuma—Proteo,” OC, p. 947. Ibid., p. 944.

214

NOTES

181. Pedro Henríquez Ureña argued thus in Siete ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión, p. 120. 182. Walter Benjamin, “Analogy and Relationship,” Selected Writings, vol. I: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1996, pp. 207–9. 183. Darío, “El hierro” [1893], in Obras completas, vol. 4, Afrodisio Aguado, Madrid, 1955, p. 613. See Ramos, Divergent Modernities, p. 165. 184. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981, p. 39. 185. Nicola Miller, “ ‘The Immoral Educator’ ”: Race, Gender and Citizenship in Simón Rodríguez’s Programme for Popular Education,” Hispanic Research Journal, 7:1, March 2006, pp. 11–20. 186. For a short introduction to this topic, on which there is a burgeoning literature, see Catherine Davies, “On Englishmen, Women, Indians and Slaves: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century SpanishAmerican Novel,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, LXXXII: 3–4, 2005, pp. 313–33. 187. On metaphors of knowledge in Martí’s work, see Ramos, Divergent Modernities, pp. 259–60. 188. Rama, Las máscaras, pp. 259–60. 189. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 94. 190. Antonio Gómez Restrepo, “José Enrique Rodó,” Nosotros, II:15, October 1908, pp. 137–47, p. 138. 191. Mario Benedetti, Genio y figura, p. 94. 192. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, p. 232. 193. Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays, Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, CA, 2001, p. 2. 194. Oviedo, Breve historia, p. 53. 195. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 103. 196. González Echevarría, Voice of the Masters, esp. pp. 25–7. 197. John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969. 198. Roy Rappoport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 124. 199. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, pp. 214–5. 200. Hans Kellner, “Triangular Anxieties: The Present State of European Intellectual History,” in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Caplan, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1982, pp. 111–36, esp. pp. 130 and 132. 201. Alfonso Reyes, “Apuntes sobre la ciencia de la literatura” [1940], in Obras completas, vol. XIV, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 1962, p. 356.

NOTES

215

202. Reyes, “El suicida” [1917], in Obras completas, vol. III, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1956, p. 294. 203. “Motivos,” OC, p. 301. 204. Reyes, “Sobre Rodó” [1918], in Obras completas, vol. VII, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 1958, p. 378. 205. “Prólogo a Juan C. Blanco Acevedo,” OC, pp. 968–9. 206. Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” New German Critique, no. 32, Spring–Summer 1984, pp. 151–71. 207. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” p. 151. 208. Barbagelata, Rodó y sus críticos, p. 16. For collections of his parables, most of which were extracts from other works, see Rodó, Parábolas y otras lecturas, Claudio García and Cía, Montevideo, 4th edn., 1943; and Rodó, Parábolas: Cuentos simbólicos, Contribuciones Americanas de Cultura, Montevideo, 1953. 209. Gonzalo Zaldumbide, Parábolas, Editorial Bouret, Paris, 1949, cited in José Pereira Rodríguez, “Prólogo,” in Rodó, Parábolas y otras lecturas, p. ix. 210. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., Literary Guide to the Bible, Collins, London, 1987, p. 199. 211. Alter and Kermode, Literary Guide to the Bible, p. 428. 212. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 39. 213. Ibid. 214. Ibid., p. 40. 215. Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1960. Agathon’s speech in Plato’s Symposium is a parody of Gorgias’s style. 216. Silviano Santiago, The Space In-Between, Duke University Press, Durham, 2001, p. 37. 217. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, Goethe: pp. 24, 29, 76, 92; Renan: pp. 24, 27, 33, 45, 61–2, 88; Carlyle: 56–7, 60, 92. 218. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, pp. 45, 59, 61, and 61, respectively. 219. Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in One Way Street and Other Writings, Verso, London, 1979, pp. 349–86. 220. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 96. The full quotation is as follows: El pasado perteneció todo entero al brazo que combate; el presente pertenece, casi por completo también, al tosco brazo que nivela y construye; el porvenir—un porvenir tanto más cercano cuanto más enérgicos sean la voluntad y el pensamiento de los que le ansían—ofrecerá, para el desenvolvimiento de superiores facultades del alma, la estabilidad, el escenario y el ambiente. 221. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and Others, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2002, esp. “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,” pp. 154–69. 222. Pérez Petit, Rodó, p. 26.

216

NOTES

223. For a recent version of this claim, see Castro Morales, J. E. Rodó modernista. 224. “Rumbos nuevos,” pp. 499–501. 225. “El centenario de Chile,” OC, p. 554. 226. “La tradición en los pueblos hispanoamericanos,” OC, pp. 1149–52, esp. p. 1150. 227. For an early elaboration of this point, see Havelock Ellis, “Introduction” to The Motives of Proteus, p. xi. 228. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 31. 229. Ibid., p. 31. 230. Ibid., p. 55 for Alberdi citation; p. 95 for reference to the Argentine liberals. 231. Ottmar Ette, “ ‘La modernidad hospitalaria’: Santa Teresa, Rubén Darío y las dimensiones del espacio en Ariel de José Enrique Rodó,” in Ette and Heydenreich, José Enrique Rodó y su tiempo, pp. 73–93, p. 91. 232. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, pp. 23–4. 233. Ibid., p. 96. 234. Ibid., p. 103 (my emphasis). 235. Ibid., p. 32. The image of “deep horizons” is a further example of Rodó’s reworking of conventional spatial metaphors. 236. Ibid., p. 65; see also p. 70: “the limits that reason and feeling signal with one accord” (los límites que la razón y el sentimiento señalan de consuno). 237. “La tradición en los pueblos hispanoamericanos,” OC, p. 1150. 238. “Rumbos nuevos,” OC, p. 499. 239. “La tradición en los pueblos hispanoamericanos,” OC, p. 1150. 240. “Rumbos nuevos,” OC, p. 499. 241. “La tradición en los pueblos hispanoamericanos,” OC, pp. 1149–52, quotations pp. 1150–1. 242. “Rumbos nuevos,” OC, p. 499. 243. “Al concluir el año,” OC, p. 1225. 244. Leopoldo Zea, “1898, Latinoamérica y la reconciliación iberoamericana,” Cuadernos Americanos (Nueva época), Year XII, vol. 6, no. 72, pp. 11–25, esp. p. 13. 245. “Ariel,” OC, p. 210. 246. Beatriz González Stephan, “Economías fundacionales: Diseño del campo ciudadano,” in Beatriz González Stephan, ed., Cultura y tercer mundo: Nuevas identidades y ciudadanías, Nueva Sociedad, Caracas, 1996, pp. 17–47. On manuals of conduct in Uruguay, see José Pedro Barrán, Historia de la sensibilidad en el Uruguay. Vol. I: La cultura “bárbara” (1800–1860) and Vol. II: El disciplinamiento (1860–1920), Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Montevideo, 1990, esp. vol. II, pp. 34–6 and p. 53. 247. Ariel, ed. Brotherston, p. 41. 248. Ibid.

NOTES

249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255.

256. 257. 258. 259.

260.

217

“Al concluir el año,” OC, p. 1226. “Letter to Joaquín de Salterain,” June 12, 1911, OC, p. 1267. “Ariel,” OC, p. 32. Carlos Fuentes, “Prologue,” in Ariel, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1988, pp. 13–28. “De la enseñanza constitucional y cívica en los estudios secundarios” [1902], OC, p. 1403. See Silva Cencio, Rodó y la legislación social. See Philip Oxhorn, “From Controlled Inclusion to Coerced Marginalization: The Struggle for Civil Society in Latin America,” in John A. Hall, ed., Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 250–77, esp. p. 256. Hugo Barbagelata, “A manera de Prólogo,” in Rodó y sus críticos, pp. 5–6 and p. 12. See Nosotros, “Homenaje.” Angel de Estrada (hijo), in Nosotros, “Homenaje,” p. 89. As Claudio Veliz has noted (The New World of the Gothic Fox, p. 6), many twentieth-century Latin American political leaders “unknowingly derived nourishment from Rodó’s slim volume.” In 1968, Cuban critic Roberto Fernández Retamar published Calibán (in Calibán y otros ensayos, Arte y Literatura, Havana, 1979), an essay written in reply to Ariel. U.S. historian Richard Morse also picked up Rodó’s themes in New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989. As late as the mid-1990s, with the revival of interest in cultural identity stimulated by being on the receiving end of “capitalist triumphalism,” it was thought worthwhile “to remember Rodó,” for posing the fundamental question of how to become modern while preserving a distinctive identity. Arocena and De León, El complejo de Próspero, p. 11. Works from the early 1990s on Uruguayan identity, which made the well-nigh obligatory reference to Rodó, include Hugo Achugar and Gerardo Caetano, Identidad uruguaya: ¿mito, crisis o afirmación?, Trilce, Montevideo, 1992; Hugo Achugar, La balsa de la medusa: Ensayos sobre identidad, cultura y fin de siglo en Uruguay, Trilce, Montevideo, 1993; and Fernando Andacht, Signos reales del Uruguay imaginario, Trilce, Montevideo, 1993. “La novela nueva,” OC, p. 157.

Chapter 3 Creating a Workers’ Public Sphere: Juan B. Justo’s Analysis of State and Society 1. Garretón, Incomplete Democracy, p. 19. 2. See, especially, Guerra, Lempérière et al., Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica; Hilda Sábato, ed., Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones: Perspectivas históricas de América Latina, Fondo de

218

NOTES

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1999; and Forment, Democracy in Latin America. Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1988, p. 5. Forment, Democracy, p. xv. Statutes of Universidad Popular José Martí, 1923, cited in Ana Núñez Machín, Rubén Martínez Villena, UNEAC, Havana, 1971, p. 163. See also Jeffrey L. Klaiber, “The Popular Universities and the Origins of Aprismo, 1921–1924,” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 55, no. 4, November 1975, pp. 693–715. See, e.g., Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds., Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-Visioning Latin American Social Movements, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1998. For an explicit reply to the criticism that socialism was irrelevant to Argentina, see Juan B. Justo, “El Profesor Ferri y el Partido Socialista Argentino” [1909], in his La realización del socialismo, Obras de Juan B. Justo, vol. VI, Editorial La Vanguardia, Buenos Aires, 1947, pp. 240–9. Henceforth all references in this chapter are to works by Juan B. Justo unless stated otherwise. The main biographies are Dardo Cúneo, Juan Bautista Justo y las luchas sociales en la Argentina, Editorial ALPE, Buenos Aires, 1956, new edn. Editorial Solar, Buenos Aires, 1997; Nicolás Repetto [fellow-socialist], Juan Bautista Justo y el movimiento político social argentino, Ediciones Montserrat, Buenos Aires, 1964; Luis Pan, Juan B. Justo y su tiempo, Editorial Planeta, Buenos Aires, 1991; and Carlos J. Rocca, Juan B. Justo y su entorno, Editorial Universitaria de La Plata, La Plata, 1998. Socialist success in 1932 was partly attributable to the Radicals’ decision to abstain in protest against the military coup of 1930. Key sources include Jacinto Oddone, Historia del socialismo argentino, Editorial La Vanguardia, Buenos Aires, 2 vols., 1934; Richard J. Walter, The Socialist Party of Argentina 1890–1930, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1977; Hernán Camarero and Carlos Miguel Herrera, eds., El Partido Socialista en Argentina: Sociedad, política e ideas a través de un siglo, Prometeo Libros, Buenos Aires, 2005, which contains a review of the historiography of the PSA, pp. 38–73. Américo Ghioldi, Juan B. Justo. Sus ideas históricas, socialistas, filosóficas [1933], Ediciones Monserrat, Buenos Aires, 1964, p. 9. José Aricó, La hipótesis de Justo: Escritos sobre el socialismo en América Latina, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1999, p. 81. Jorge Abelardo Ramos, Revolución y contra-revolución en la Argentina: Historia de la Argentina en el siglo XIX, 3a edición, corregida y ampliada, Editorial Plus Ultra, Buenos Aires, 2 vols., 1965, vol. 2, p. 80; Rodolfo Puiggrós, Historia crítica de los partidos políticos argentinos, Editorial Argumentos, Buenos Aires, 1956; Jorge Spilimbergo, El socialismo en la Argentina, no publisher stated, Buenos Aires, 1969.

NOTES

219

14. Jeremy Adelman, “Socialism and Democracy in Argentina in the Age of the Second International,” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 72, no. 2, May 1992, pp. 211–38; and Adelman, “The Political Economy of Labour in Argentina 1870–1930,” in his edited collection, Essays in Argentine Labour History 1870–1930, Macmillan/St. Antony’s, Basingstoke, 1992, pp. 1–34, esp. p. 24. 15. Aricó, La hipótesis; Juan Carlos Portantiero, “Gramsci en clave latinoamericana: La categoría ‘nacional-popular,’ ” La Ciudad Futura [Buenos Aires], no. 6, Aug. 1987, pp. 12–13; and Juan Carlos Portantiero, Juan B. Justo: Un fundador de la Argentina moderna, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, 1999. On pluralism and authoritarianism, see Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 51. 16. See Waldo Ansaldi and José Luis Moreno, Estado y sociedad en el pensamiento nacional, Cántaro Editores, Buenos Aires, 1989. 17. See Eduardo A. Zimmermann, Los liberales reformistas: La cuestión social en la Argentina, 1890–1916, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1995; and Eduardo A. Zimmerman, “Intellectuals, Universities and the Social Question: Argentina, 1898–1916,” in Adelman, Essays, pp. 199–216. For a discussion of the role of liberalism in Justo’s thought, see Carlos Rodríguez Braun, Orígenes del socialismo liberal: El caso de Juan B. Justo, IUDEM, Documentos de Trabajo 2000–2005, 2000, available at http://www.ucm.es/info/iudem [accessed November 2, 2006]. 18. Zimmerman, “Intellectuals,” p. 207. 19. Ideario de Juan B. Justo, ed. Celso Tíndaro, Editorial La Vanguardia, 2 vols., 1939, vol. I, p. 217. 20. Leandro H. Gutiérrez and Luis Alberto Romero, “Barrio Societies, Libraries and Culture in the Popular Sectors of Buenos Aires in the Inter-War Period,” in Adelman, Essays, pp. 217–34, esp. p. 232, fn. 2, and p. 218. 21. For a summary of views, see the tributes paid at his death, which are collected in Acción Socialista (Buenos Aires), V:15, “Número extraordinario de Homenaje a Juan B. Justo,” February 15, 1928. See also La Vanguardia, January 9, 1928 and “Boletín Extraordinario,” January 13, 1928; La Nación, January 9, 1928, pp. 5–6; La Prensa, January 9, 1928; Claridad [Buenos Aires], vol. 6, no. 150, 1928 and vol. 7, no. 174, 1929, both issues a “Homenaje” to Justo. 22. Dardo Cúneo, El periodismo de la disidencia social (1858–1900), Centro Editor de América Latina, Buenos Aires, 1994; Dardo Cúneo, El primer periodismo obrero y socialista en la Argentina, Editorial La Vanguardia, Buenos Aires, 1945. 23. See, e.g., “Discursos en el homenaje al doctor Justo en Mendoza,” La Vanguardia, January 12, 1929, p. 9; “Rindióse homenaje a Juan B. Justo en Córdoba,” La Vanguardia, January 15, 1935, p. 7; and

220

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

NOTES

“Homenajes populares: Juan B. Justo, figura nacional,” La Vanguardia, February 16, 1936, p. 1. La Nación, January 9, 1928. Repetto, Justo, p. 27. Cited in Dardo Cúneo, ed., Juan B. Justo: La lucha social en el Parlamento, Círculo de Legisladores de la Nación Argentina, Ediciones Los Laureles, Buenos Aires, 1998, p. 6. Cúneo, Justo: La lucha social, p. 7. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 13. José Rodríguez Tarditi, Semblanza de tres lideres: Teoría y Acción en la Política Argentina, Editorial Bases, Buenos Aires, 1960, p. 57; and Repetto, Justo, p. 28. “Valuación Nacional del Suelo,” cited in Cúneo, Justo: La lucha social, pp. 72–93. Cúneo, Justo: La lucha social, p. 19. Repetto, Justo, p. 50. Cited in Juan Antonio Solari, Recordación de Juan B. Justo, Editorial Bases, Buenos Aires, 1965, p. 9. Manuel V. Besasso, “El genio de la síntesis,” Acción Socialista, V:15, February 15, 1928, pp. 493–4. “Como me hice socialista,” in Ideario, vol. II, pp. 7–8; and “El momento actual del socialismo” [1920], in La realización, pp. 303–34, p. 318. For a detailed analysis of Justo’s critique of Marx, see Luis Pan, Justo y Marx, Ediciones Monserrat, Buenos Aires, 1964. “La teoría científica de la Historia y la política argentina” [1898], in La realización, pp. 153–74, p. 153 and p. 174. Pan, Justo, pp. 170 and 203. Ibid., p. 139. “Del método científico” [1894], in La realización, p. 65. Oscar Terán, Positivismo y nación en la Argentina, Puntosur, Buenos Aires, 1987. Alfredo L. Palacios, “Juan B. Justo. El fundador ilustre,” in Palacios, Estadistas y poetas, p. 17. “El momento actual del socialismo,” in La realización, p. 319. Ideario, vol. I, p. 59; see also Teoría y práctica de la historia [1909], Ediciones Libera, Buenos Aires, 2nd edn., 1915, p. 510. “Sobre Alberdi” [1910], in La realización, pp. 270–2, esp. p. 271. “El socialismo y Max Nordau” [1896], in La realización, pp. 141–7, esp. p. 145. “La teoría científica de la historia y la política argentina” [1898], in La realización, pp. 153–74, esp. p. 154. Justo, 1921, cited in Portantiero, Justo, pp. 21–2. “El realismo ingenuo” [1903], cited in Ideario, vol. I., p. 156.

NOTES

221

51. Juan Bautista Alberdi, “Ideas. Para presidir á la confección del curso de filosofía contemporánea. En el Colegio de Humanidades, Montevideo, 1842,” in Escritos póstumos, vol. XV, Imprenta Juan Bautista Alberdi, Buenos Aires, 1900, pp. 603–19, esp. p. 613. 52. El “realismo ingenuo” [1903], Editorial La Vanguardia, Buenos Aires, 1914, esp. p. 20. 53. “Cooperación obrera,” Conferencia, December 30, 1897, Biblioteca La Vanguardia, Buenos Aires, 1906, p. 14. 54. Ideario, vol. I, p. 47. 55. Ibid., vol. II, p. 216. 56. El “realismo ingenuo.” In this essay, which is a comprehensive attack on metaphysics, Justo rejected Engels’s claim that the German labor movement was the heir of German idealist philosophy. 57. El “realismo ingenuo,” p. 20. 58. Teoría y práctica, p. 516. 59. Ibid., p. 58. 60. Ideario, vol. II, p. 162. 61. Alicia Moreau de Justo, Juan B. Justo y el socialismo, Centro Editor de América Latina, Buenos Aires, 1984. 62. “El Socialismo” [1902], in Discursos y escritos políticos, El Ateneo, Buenos Aires, 1933, pp. 90–139, p. 113. 63. Teoría y Práctica, p. 64. 64. Ideario, vol. I, p. 221. 65. “El socialismo y Max Nordau,” in La realización, pp. 141–7, esp. p. 147. 66. Teoría y práctica, p. 516. 67. Ideario, vol. II, p. 196. 68. Ibid., p. 193. 69. Moreau de Justo, Justo, p. 69. 70. On the development of Buenos Aires, see José L. Romero and Luis A. Romero, eds., Buenos Aires: Historia de cuatro siglos, Editorial Altamira, Buenos Aires, 2 vols., 2000, esp. vol. II, Desde la ciudad burguesa hasta la ciudad de masas [1983]; Juan Alvarez, Buenos Aires, Editorial Cooperativa, Buenos Aires, 1918, a translated extract of which is available in, “Buenos Aires in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Joseph and Szuchman, eds., I Saw A City Invincible, pp. 133–47; James Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910, Oxford University Press, New York, 1974; and Jorge E. Hardoy, “Teorías y prácticas urbanísticas en Europa entre 1850 y 1930. Su traslado a América Latina,” in Jorge E. Hardoy and Richard M. Morse, eds., Repensando la ciudad de América Latina, Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires, 1988, pp. 97–126. 71. Pan, Justo, p. 29. 72. Ibid., p. 128. 73. Ibid.

222

NOTES

74. La Vanguardia, April 7, 1894, p. 1. Reproduced in Roberto Reinoso, ed., La Vanguardia: selección de textos (1894–1955), Centro Editor de América Latina, Buenos Aires, 1985, pp. 13–16; and in La realización, pp. 21–5. 75. Roberto J. Payró, extract from Nosotros [novel], cited in Darío, “Introducción a Nosotros por Roberto J. Payró” [1896], in Nosotros [periodical, Buenos Aires], I:1, August 1907, pp. 7–12, pp. 13–14. 76. José L. Romero, “La ciudad burguesa,” in Romero and Romero, Buenos Aires, pp. 9–17, pp. 9–10. 77. Juan Carlos Portantiero, cited in Ansaldi and Moreno, Estado y sociedad, p. 11. 78. Pan, Justo, p. 29; Leandro H. Gutiérrez, “Los trabajadores y sus luchas,” in Romero and Romero, Buenos Aires, pp. 65–81. 79. Pan, Justo, p. 110; Solari, Recordación, p. 40. 80. Romero, “La ciudad burguesa.” See also Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica; and Diego Armus, ed., Mundo urbano y cultura popular: Estudios de historia social argentina, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1990. 81. Romero, “La ciudad burguesa,” p. 16. 82. Darío, “Introducción a Nosotros,” p. 11. 83. Adolfo Dickmann, “Rasgos íntimos de la personalidad del Dr. Juan B. Justo,” Acción Socialista, V:15, pp. 497–8. 84. Repetto, Justo, p. 44; Enrique Dickmann, Recuerdos de un militante socialista, Editorial La Vanguardia, Buenos Aires, 1949, p. 474. 85. Gutiérrez and Romero, “Barrio Societies,” pp. 218–19. 86. Ibid., p. 229. 87. Ibid., p. 219. 88. Beatriz Sarlo, La imaginación técnica: Sueños modernos de la cultura argentina, Ediciones Nueva Visión, Buenos Aires, 1992, p. 70 and p. 16. 89. Justo, Programa de Acción para las Juventudes Socialistas [posthumously published, not known when written, although probably toward the end of his life], Editorial La Vanguardia, Buenos Aires, 1940, pp. 10–14. 90. Ghioldi, Juan B. Justo, pp. 16–17. 91. Justo’s reminiscences about his education are in Programa de Acción, pp. 4–7. 92. Tulio Halperín Donghi, Historia de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, Eudeba, Buenos Aires, 2nd edn., 2002 [1962], pp. 66–8. A campaign led by José Maria Ramos Mejía, while a student in the early 1870s, had resulted in the Faculty of Medicine revising its syllabus earlier than did other sectors of the UBA. 93. Cúneo, Justo: La lucha social, p. 22. 94. Teoría y práctica, p. 339. 95. Cúneo, Justo: La lucha social, p. 10.

NOTES

96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121.

223

La realizacion, p. 170. “El momento actual del socialismo,” p. 317. Programa de Acción, pp. 8–9. The doctors: Enrique Dickmann (a Russian Jew); Nicolás Repetto (second-generation Italian); Angel Jiménez (Argentine); Augusto Bunge (elite Argentine); the lawyers: Mario Bravo (from Tucumán); Enrique del Valle Iberlucea (parents immigrated from Spain); Antonio de Tomaso (second-generation Italian); Alfredo Palacios (Argentine/Uruguayan). Roberto Payró, José Ingenieros, and Leopoldo Lugones. Emilio Frugoni, “Juan B. Justo” [eulogy, February 15, 1928], in El libro de los elogios, Editorial Afirmación, Montevideo, 1953, pp. 147–59, p. 153. Javier Franzé, El concepto de política en Juan B. Justo, Centro Editor de América Latina, Buenos Aires, 2 vols., 1993, vol. II, p. 155. “El socialismo,” in Discursos, p. 129. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid. Justo, speech in the Chamber of Deputies, June 19, 1912, cited in Cúneo, Justo: La lucha social, p. 9. See also Ideario, vol. II, p. 63. Ideario, vol. II, pp. 253–4 Walter, The Socialist Party of Argentina, p. 7. Portantiero, Juan B. Justo, p. 23; Justo, “El socialismo argentino” [1910], in La realización, pp. 208–36, esp. pp. 227–31. En los Estados Unidos: Apuntes escritos en 1895 para un periódico obrero, Imprenta Litografía y Encuadernación de Jacobo Peuser, Buenos Aires, 1898, pp. 77–8. “La Iglesia y el Estado” [1926], Discursos, pp. 190–272, esp. p. 231. Portantiero, Justo, p. 19. Editorial of first edition of short-lived El Diario del Pueblo, October 1, 1899, in La realización, p. 47. Ideario, vol. II, p. 96. See also “¿Por qué los estancieros y agricultores deben ser librecambistas?” [1896] and “Los estancieros y agricultores deben ser librecambistas” [1896], in La realización, pp. 132–5 and pp. 135–7. “Los estancieros,” p. 135. Portantiero, Justo, p. 42. “Rapport du délégué J. B. Justo,” in L’Internationale à Berne et Amsterdam, Edition du Comité Exécutif du Parti Socialiste, Section Argentine, Buenos Aires, 1919, pp. 3–23, esp. p. 6. Ideario, vol. II, pp. 181–2. Ibid., p. 104 (original emphasis). Portantiero, Justo, p. 42. See Adelman, “The Political Economy,” pp. 23–6.

224

NOTES

122. La realización, pp. 172–3. 123. Juan B. Justo, Programa Socialista del Campo, Lecture to the Club Vorwärts, April 21, 1901, Cooperativa Tipográfica, PSA, Buenos Aires, 1901, pp. 5–6. 124. Justo, speech in the Chamber of Deputies, May 15, 1913, cited in Cúneo, Justo: La lucha social, p. 7. 125. Programa Socialista del Campo, pp. 7–8. 126. “La ciudad y el campo,” El Pensamiento Argentino, I:1, August 17, 1918, p. 23. 127. El impuesto sobre el privilegio, Editorial La Vanguardia, Buenos Aires, 2nd edn., 1928. 128. “La ciudad y el campo,” p. 24. 129. Ideario, vol. II, p. 98. 130. Teoría y práctica, p. 435. 131. Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1996, esp. pp. 1–3; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971, esp. pp. 12, 52, 160, 238, and 263. 132. En los Estados Unidos, p. 5. 133. Ibid., p. 15. 134. Ibid., pp. 16–17. 135. Ibid., p. 29. 136. Ibid., p. 45. 137. Ibid., p. 63. 138. Ibid., p. 71. 139. Ideario, vol. I, pp. 266–7. “Self-help” is in English in the original. See also “¿Por qué somos fuertes?” [1897], in La realización, pp. 36–41, esp. p. 39. 140. Portantiero, “Gramsci,” p. 13. 141. “La ciudad y el campo,” p. 20. 142. Teoría y práctica, p. 473. 143. Pan, Justo, p. 17. 144. “El socialismo,” in Discursos, p. 124. 145. Teoría y práctica, p. 473. 146. “Rapport,” p. 19. 147. Ibid., p. 20. 148. Programa Socialista del Campo, pp. 11–28. 149. “La cuestión agraria,” in Discursos, pp. 140–89, p. 155. 150. Programa Socialista del Campo, p. 14. 151. Cúneo, Juan B. Justo y las luchas sociales en la Argentina, 1997 edn., p. 420. 152. “La ciudad y el campo,” p. 4. 153. Ibid., p. 6. 154. Ibid. 155. Ideario, vol. I, p. 225.

NOTES

156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169 170. 171.

172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188.

225

Ibid., vol. II, p. 106. Ibid., p. 180. “Capital y trabajo” [1902], in La realización, pp. 51–3. Día internacional de la cooperación, Sociedad “Luz” (Universidad Popular), Buenos Aires, 1930, pp. 3–4. “Cooperación obrera,” p. 5. Ibid., pp. 6–8. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 13. Ideario, vol. II, p. 20; and “La cooperación libre” [1909], in Discursos, pp. 47–89, esp. p. 47. “La cooperación libre,” in Discursos, pp. 47–8. Ibid., p. 85. Ideario, vol. II, p. 275. Ibid., pp. 46–7. The phrase is Frugoni’s, in “Juan B. Justo,” El libro de los elogios, p. 157. “¿Por qué somos fuertes?” p. 40; Palacios, Justo, p. 21. Jeremy Adelman has compared their attitudes thus: “Like Sarmiento, Justo was unkind to backward criollo elements from the interior,” in his “Socialism and Democracy,” p. 218; see also Walter, The Socialist Party, p. 230. Teoría y práctica, p. 26. Ibid., pp. 24–5. Programme for International Socialist Action [1921], cited in Palacios, “Juan B. Justo,” p. 25. Justo, “Por qué no me gusta escribir para una hoja que se dice israelita,” cited in Pan, Justo, p. 116. Pan, Justo, pp. 113–5. Cúneo, Justo: La lucha social, p. 13. Pan, Justo, p. 16, citing La Vanguardia. “¿Por qué somos fuertes?” p. 39; and “La fiesta del trabajo” [1899], in La realización, p. 456. “El socialismo,” in Discursos, p. 128. Justo, “Proyecto sobre creación de escuelas,” 1915, cited in Palacios, “Juan B. Justo: El fundador ilustre,” pp. 21–2. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Educación popular [1849], Librería de la Facultad de Juan Roldán, 1915. José S. Campobassi, “La preocupación de Justo por la instrucción primaria,” Acción Socialista, V:15, pp. 522–4, esp. p. 524. “El socialismo” [1902], in Discursos, p. 128; see also Teoría y práctica, p. 489. Ideario, vol. I, p. 179. Teoría y práctica, p. 489. Día internacional de la cooperación, p. 3. Ideario, vol. I, p. 277.

226 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210.

211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221.

222. 223. 224.

NOTES

En los Estados Unidos, pp. 58–9 and p. 77. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 61. A frangollo is a stew made of meat and maize. Ideario, vol. I, p. 189. Ibid., vol. I, p. 177. Ibid., vol. II, p. 62. Ibid., vol. I, p. 178. See also El Socialismo, p. 137. Aricó, La hipótesis, p. 76. Ideario, vol. I, p. 154. “Primer editorial de La Vanguardia,” April 7, 1894; reproduced in La realización, pp. 21–5, quotation pp. 24–5. For a selection, see Reinoso, La Vanguardia. Pan, Justo, p. 97. Ibid. First editorial of El Diario del Pueblo, October 1, 1899, cited in Solari, Recordación, p. 46. “Recuerdos de El Diario del Pueblo,” La Vanguardia, March 16, 1909. Germinal (Junín), January–June 1928. Pan, Justo, p. 197. “El individuo y el partido” [1898], in La realización, pp. 43–5, esp. p. 44. Pan, Justo, p. 16. El realismo ingenuo, p. 20. Frugoni, “Juan B. Justo,” El libro de los elogios, p. 159. Besasso, “El genio de la síntesis,” p. 493; Manuel Palacín, “El estilo en la prosa de Juan B. Justo,” Acción Socialista, V:20, April 28, 1928, pp. 674–6. Repetto, Justo, p. 43. Besasso, “El genio,” p. 493. See also Ghioldi, Juan B. Justo. “La teoría científica,” p. 166, citing Vicente F. López, Historia de la Argentina, Carlos Casavalle, Buenos Aires, 1883. “Sobre Alberdi,” p. 270. Cited in Frugoni, El libro de los elogios, p. 159. La realización, esp. pp. 146–7. Cited in Solari, Recordación, p. 21. Teoría y práctica, p. 451. Repetto, Justo, p. 111. Cited in Solari, Recordación, pp. 21–2. Ricardo Rojas, La argentinidad, no publisher stated, Buenos Aires, 1916; Leopoldo Lugones, El payador, no publisher stated, Buenos Aires, 1916. Ideario, vol. I, p. 270. Ibid., p. 271. Ibid., vol. II, p. 78. Modern commentators tend to agree that the law brought about no fundamental change in Argentina’s ruling structure. See, e.g., Ansaldi and Moreno, Estado y sociedad, p. 11.

NOTES

225. 226. 227. 228. 229.

227

“El socialismo,” p. 139. Teoría y práctica, p. 473. Portantiero, “Gramsci en clave latinoamericana,” p. 13. Ibid. Garretón, Incomplete Democracy, p. 20.

Chapter 4 Translating the Past into the Present: The Synthesizing Modernity of Alfonso Reyes 1. Quijano, Modernidad, p. 62. 2. Fidel Castro, “History Will Absolve Me” [1953], in Fidel Castro and Regis Debray, On Trial, Lorrimer Publishing, London, 1968, pp. 62–5. 3. Arnaldo Córdova, Ideología de la Revolución Mexicana, Ediciones Era, Mexico City, 1973, p. 87. 4. Carlos Fuentes, Machado de La Mancha, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 2001, p. 10. 5. Homer, La Iliada. Primera parte: Aquiles agraviada, trans. Alfonso Reyes, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1951. 6. Alberto Gerchunoff, “Prólogo” to Alfonso Reyes, Aquellos días [1938], in Reyes, Obras completas, vol. III, p. 310. References in this chapter are to works by Alfonso Reyes unless otherwise stated. Most are taken from the 26-volume edition of his Obras completas published by Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1956–1993, hereafter OC. 7. José Emilio Pacheco, “Nota preliminar,” in Reyes, Universidad, política y pueblo, 1967, pp. 7–17, p. 8. 8. Rafael Moreno, El humanismo mexicano, líneas y tendencies, UNAM, Mexico, 1999, p. 160. 9. Vocación de América (Antología), ed. Víctor Díaz Arciniega, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1989. A similar collection is Alfonso Reyes, ed. Antonio Lago Carballo, Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, Madrid, 1992. 10. Robert Conn, The Politics of Philology: Alfonso Reyes and the Invention of a Latin American Literary Tradition, Associated University Presses, Cranbury NJ, 2002; Margarita Vera Cuspinera, ed., Alfonso Reyes. Homenaje de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, Mexico, 1981; and Pol Popovic Karic and Fidel Chávez Pérez, eds., Alfonso Reyes: Perspectivas críticas, Tecnológico de Monterrey/Editorial Plaza y Valdés, Mexico, 2004. 11. “Un propósito” [1924], in Universidad, política y pueblo, pp. 21–2. 12. Alfonso Reyes, “Prólogo,” in Jacob Burckhardt, Reflexiones sobre la historia universal, trans. Wenceslao Roces, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1943, pp. 7–39, esp. p. 17. 13. “Un propósito,” pp. 21–2. 14. No hay tal lugar, in OC, vol. XI, 1960, p. 340.

228

NOTES

15. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “Alfonso Reyes” [1927], in Universidad de Nuevo León, Páginas sobre Alfonso Reyes (1911–1945). Edición de Homenaje, Monterrey, 2 vols., 1955, vol. I, pp. 146–55, esp. p. 155. 16. “Ciencia social y deber social,” OC, XI, pp. 106–25, esp. p. 114. 17. Henríquez Ureña, “Alfonso Reyes,” in Universidad de Nuevo León, Páginas sobre Alfonso Reyes, p. 154. Also in Henríquez Ureña, Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión. 18. Adolfo Castañón, Alfonso Reyes: Caballero de la voz errante, Editores Joan Boldó i Climent, Mexico, 1988, p. 17. 19. See Simpatías y diferencias, OC, vol. IV, 1956. 20. “Kant” [1954], OC, vol. XXII, 1989, pp. 456–7. 21. “Ciencia social y deber social,” OC, XI, p. 107. 22. Octavio Paz, “The Rider of the Air” [1960], in The Siren and the Seashell, pp. 113–22, esp. p. 120. 23. Reyes mocked individualism in “Del último individualista” and “Las parábolas del individualista,” Calendario y Tren de Ondas, Edición Tezontle, Mexico, 1945, pp. 64–5 and pp. 65–8, respectively. 24. “El rescate de la persona” [1959], in Marginalia, tercera serie: 1940– 1959, El Cerro de la Silla, Mexico, 1959, pp. 65–9, esp. pp. 66–7. 25. Anecdotario, Ediciones Era, Mexico, 1968, p. 119. 26. Alicia Reyes [granddaughter], Genio y figura de Alfonso Reyes, Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1976, pp. 10–11. 27. Crónica de Monterrey, Albores, Segundo Libro de Recuerdos, El Cerro de la Silla, Mexico, 1960, p. 85. 28. Alicia Reyes, Genio, p. 27. 29. Henríquez Ureña, “Alfonso Reyes,” in Universidad de Nuevo León, Páginas sobre Alfonso Reyes, p. 150. 30. Boyd G. Carter, Las revistas literarias de Hispanoamérica: Breve historia y contenido, Ediciones de Andrea, Mexico City, 1959, p. 19. During the 1920s, there were 12 in the capital and 10 elsewhere (declining to only 10 throughout Mexico during the 1930s). 31. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, cited in Cuspinera, Reyes: Homenaje, p. 16. 32. “Discurso por Virgilio” [1930], in Vocación, pp. 199–216, p. 199. 33. Marginalia, tercera serie, p. 55. 34. “La crítica en la edad ateniense,” in OC, vol. XIII, 1961, pp. 13–345, esp. p. 168. 35. Pasado inmediato y otros ensayos, El Colegio de México, Mexico, 1941, p. 22. 36. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 37. Ibid., p. 46. 38. Ibid., p. 52. 39. Alicia Reyes, Genio, p. 47. 40. Pasado inmediato, pp. 46–60. 41. Ibid., p. 51, citing an article by Lombardo Toledano, “El sentimiento humanista de la Revolución Mexicana,” 1930.

NOTES

229

42. Pasado inmediato, p. 56, citing his own essay El suicida (1917). 43. “Atenea política” [1932], in Universidad, pp. 70–98, esp. p. 97. In his diary he noted that in September 1911, a time when he had to guard his house with firearms, a letter had arrived from the philosopher Boutroux in Paris, asking him when he could go over to discuss his book: “!Si supieran, si supieran los europeos!” (If they only knew . . .). Diario 1911–1930, Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, 1969. 44. Diario, p. 32. 45. This idea was suggested to me by a presentation by Dragana Obradovic, “Chaos and Cosmos: The Structure of War in the Literature of Former Yugoslavia, 1990–95,” given at the “Extreme History” seminar, Centre for Intercultural Studies, University College London, May 11–12, 2006. 46. Francisco Valdés Treviño, Alfonso Reyes, diplomático, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Monterrey, 1997, p. 25. See also Reyes’s letter to Rafael Cabrera, April 22, 1933, in Alfonsadas, Correspondencia entre Alfonso Reyes y Rafael Cabrera 1911–1938, ed. Sergio Zaitzeff, El Colegio Nacional, Mexico, 1994, pp. 122–3. 47. See Valdés Treviño, Alfonso Reyes, diplomático; and Reyes, letter to Martín Luis Guzmán, May 17, 1930, in Martín Luis Guzmán and Alfonso Reyes, Medias palabras: Correspondencia 1913–1959, ed. Fernando Curiel, UNAM, Mexico, 1991, p. 138. 48. Valdés Treviño, Alfonso Reyes, diplomático, pp. 31–2. 49. “París cubista (Film de ‘Avant-Guerre’)” [1914], in OC, III, all quotations in this paragraph, p. 103. 50. Letter to Martín Luis Guzmán, March 12, 1914, Paris, in Guzmán and Reyes, Medias palabras, p. 84. 51. Ibid., p. 83. 52. Letter to Guzmán, May 17, 1930, Rio de Janeiro, in Guzmán and Reyes, Medias palabras, pp. 134–41, p. 137. See also Paulette Patout, Alfonso Reyes et la France, Klincksieck, Paris, 1978, pp. 102–7. 53. Darío, Autobiografía [1912], Ediciones Distribuidora Cultural, Managua, 1986, p. 73 and p. 123. 54. For details, see Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Alfonso Reyes, crítico y erudito,” Marcha [Montevideo], March 30, 1948, reproduced in Universidad de Nuevo León, Páginas, pp. 26–30. 55. Carlos Fuentes, in Presencia de Alfonso Reyes: Homenaje en el X aniversario de su muerte (1959–1969), Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1969, pp. 25–8, esp. p. 26. 56. See discussion in Ultima Tule, relating to G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975, pp. 162–71; and José Ortega y Gasset, “Hegel y América” [1928], in his Obras completas, vol. II, Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1946, pp. 557–70. For discussion of Reyes’s views on Hegel, see Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, “La imagen de América en Alfonso Reyes,” in Vocación, pp. 32–53, esp. pp. 36–8.

230

NOTES

57. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 163 and p. 170. 58. Ultima Tule, Imprenta Universitaria, Mexico, 1942, pp. 90–5. Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber, Continuum, New York, 1995. Mariátegui made the same point: “The discovery of America is the beginning of modernity: the greatest and most fruitful of the crusades. All modern thought is inf luenced by this event” [El descubrimiento de América es el principio de la modernidad: la más grande y fructuosa de las cruzadas. Todo el pensamiento de la modernidad está influída por este acontecimiento]. “El el Día de la Raza” 1928], in José Carlos Mariátegui, La novela y la vida, Obras completas, vol. 4, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1955, p. 163. 59. “El héroe y la historia” [1943], in OC, IX, pp. 349–55. 60. Ibid., p. 351. 61. “La historia y la mente” [1941], OC, IX, pp. 240–46, esp. pp. 244–6. 62. Ibid., p. 244. 63. “El héroe y la historia,” OC, IX, p. 351. 64. “El presagio de América” [1942], in Vocación, pp. 349–92, esp. p. 354. 65. Pasado inmediato, p. 7. 66. Reyes translated three works by Chesterton: a short social history of England, Pequeña historia de Inglaterra, Editorial Calleja, Madrid, 1920; the first collection of Father Brown stories, El candor del Padre Brown, Editorial Calleja, Madrid, 1921; and the novel El hombre que fue jueves, Editorial Calleja, Madrid, 1922. 67. “Mi idea de la historia,” OC, IX, p. 64. 68. “La historia y la mente,” OC, IX, esp. p. 245. 69. Ibid., p. 240. 70. “Prólogo,” in Burckhardt, Reflexiones sobre la historia universal, p. 28. 71. Margarita Vera Cuspinera, “Los ateneístas, críticos de su tiempo,” in Cuspinera, ed., Alfonso Reyes, pp. 11–26, esp. p. 11. 72. Pasado inmediato, p. 6. 73. No hay tal lugar, in OC, XI, pp. 335–89. 74. Marginalia, tercera serie, p. 57. 75. “Prologo” to Burckhardt, Reflexiones sobre la historia universal, p. 28. 76. Anecdotario, p. 85. 77. “En torno a la epopeya de Jerusalén” [?1919], in OC, IV, 1956, pp. 143–6, esp. p. 146. 78. “Mi idea de la historia,” pp. 67–8. 79. “Sobre el escepticismo histórico” [1944], OC, IX, pp. 363–7, esp. p. 367. 80. “Mi idea de la historia,” OC, IX, p. 58. 81. “Sobre el escepticismo,” OC, IX, p. 366. 82. “Mi idea de la historia,” OC, IX, p. 57. 83. Ibid., p. 62. 84. “El héroe y la historia,” OC, IX, p. 353.

NOTES

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94.

95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

231

“Prólogo” to Burckhardt, Reflexiones sobre la historia universal. Ibid., p. 38. “La pasión de Servia” [1919], in OC, IV, pp. 127–38, esp. p. 131. “Atenea política,” in Universidad, pp. 87–8. Quijano, Modernidad, p. 62. “Entrevista en torno a lo mexicano” [1953], Marginalia, segunda serie (1909–1954), Tezontle, Mexico, 1954, pp. 44–5, esp. p. 45. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991, esp. pp. 21–4. Doreen Massey, For Space, Sage, London, 2005, quotations, p. 5. See also Ed Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Verso, London, 1989; and—the inspiration for much of this work—Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon, Longman, Harlow, 1980. Massey, For Space, p. 7 and p. 9. “Una mirada a San Cristobalón” [1943], in OC, IX, pp. 321–3, esp. pp. 321–2. See also “Einstein en Madrid” (n.d., 1918?), OC, IV, p. 296. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” [1940], in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, Fontana, London, 1973, pp. 255–66; Reyes, “La voz solidaria” [1922], in Universidad, p. 23. “Visión de Anáhuac,” Vocación, p. 98. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “Miniaturas mexicanas,” Nosotros [Buenos Aires], April 1922. “Discurso por Virgilio” [1930], OC, XI, p. 174. Diario, November 30, 1929, p. 294. “Valor de la literatura hispanoamericana” [1941], in Vocación, pp. 305–12, esp. p. 312. “Sobre una epidemia retórica” [1919], in Vocación, pp. 132–4, esp. p. 133. “España y América” [1920] and “La ventana abierta hacia América” [1921], in Vocación, pp. 141–5 and pp. 135–6, quotation on p. 135. “La ventana abierta hacia América”; “Entre España y América”; “Un paso de América” [1930], also in Vocación, pp. 275–80. Anecdotario, p. 85. “México en una nuez” [1930], in Vocación, p. 153. Ibid., p. 154. Ultima Tule, p. 95. “Valor de la literatura hispanoamericana,” in Vocación, p. 311. “Posición de América” [1942], in Tentativas y orientaciones, Editorial Nuevo Mundo, Mexico, 1944, pp. 127–46, esp. p. 141. “Posición de América,” Tentativas y orientaciones, p. 144. “Discurso por Virgilio,” OC, XI, pp. 157–77, esp. p. 172. “Posición de América,” Tentativas y orientaciones, p. 146.

232

NOTES

113. Ibid., p. 140. 114. Guy Thomson, “Mid-Nineteenth-Century Modernities in the Hispanic World,” in Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart, eds., When Was Latin America Modern?, Palgrave, New York, 2007, pp. 69–90. 115. There is no work I know of that directly addresses this issue. The following are suggestive, however: Samuel Ramos, El perfil del hombre y de la cultura en México, P. Robredo, Mexico, 2nd edn., 1938; Leopoldo Zea, La cultura y el hombre de nuestros días, UNAM, Mexico, 1959; and his Conciencia y posibilidad del mexicano, Editorial Porrúa, Mexico, 1974. 116. “Homilía por la cultura” [?1935], in Universidad, pp. 99–122, p. 103. 117. Cuestiones estéticas [1911], OC, vol. I, 1955. 118. “Glorieta de Rubén Darío,” Simpatías y diferencias, OC, IV, p. 316. 119. “Cuestiones gongorinas” [1927] and “Tres alcances a Góngora” [1928, 1938 and 1954], in Obras completas, vol. VII, 1958, pp. 10–167 and 171–232. 120. Alicia Reyes, “Prólogo,” in Alfonso Reyes, Anecdotario, pp. 9–14, esp. p. 9. 121. “El índice de un libro” [?1919], OC, IV, pp. 53–7, quotation on p. 56. 122. “Atenea política,” in Universidad, p. 73. 123. “Para inaugurar Los Cuadernos Americanos,” in Ultima Tule, pp. 246–7. 124. Reyes, cited in Jesús Silva Herzog, “Alfonso Reyes: Un gran humanista con preocupaciones económico-sociales,” in Silva Herzog, Antología: Conferencias, ensayos y discursos, UNAM, Mexico City, 1981, p. 276. 125. “Posición de América,” p. 131. 126. Pacheco, “Nota preliminar,” p. 9. 127. “Atenea política,” in Universidad, p. 87. 128. “Hombres del siglo XIX,” in Marginalia, tercera serie, pp. 55–60, esp. p. 55. 129. “Atenea politica,” in Universidad, pp. 88–9. 130. Anecdotario, p. 22. For a short account of his interest in Greek culture, see Ingemar Düring, Alfonso Reyes helenista, Instituto IberoAmericano, Gotemburg/Insula, Madrid, 1955. 131. Anecdotario, p. 19. 132. “La estrategia del ‘gaucho’ Aquiles” [1943], Junta de sombras. Estudios helénicos, Edición de El Colegio Nacional, 1949, pp. 39–44, esp. pp. 40–41. 133. Ibid., p. 44. 134. “Moctezuma y la ‘eneida mexicana’” [1957], Vocación de América, pp. 100–5, esp. p. 102. 135. Prologue to José López Bermúdez, Canto a Cuauhtémoc, Edición de la UNAM, Mexico, 1950, no numbered pages. 136. “Discurso por Virgilio,” OC, XI, p. 158. 137. Ibid.

NOTES

233

138. Ibid., p. 160. 139. Ibid., p. 159. 140. Vaughan, The State, Education, and Social Class in Mexico, pp. 140–1 and p. 252. 141. Alfonso Reyes and Héctor Pérez Martínez, A vuelta de correo: una polémica sobre literatura nacional, ed. Silvia Molina, UNAM and Universidad de Colima, Mexico, 1988, p. 15. 142. “A vuelta de correo” [1932], in Reyes and Pérez Martínez, A vuelta de correo, pp. 21–48, esp. p. 39. 143. Parentalia: Primer capítulo de mis recuerdos, Los Presentes, Mexico, 1954, p. 17. 144. Ibid., p. 26. 145. “Discurso por Virgilio,” OC, XI, pp. 169–70. 146. Ibid., p. 170. 147. “Nación y universidad,” in Universidad, pp. 18–28, esp. pp. 18–19. 148. “A vuelta de correo,” A vuelta de correo, p. 38. 149. He originally intended it to be the first chapter of a planned book on Mexico, which he never completed. “Carta a Antonio MedizBolio” [1922], in OC, vol. IV, 1956, p. 421. 150. Cited in Alicia Reyes, Genio, p. 80. 151. “Visión de Anáhuac” [1917], in Vocación, pp. 82–99. 152. “Discurso por Virgilio,” Vocación, pp. 202–3. 153. “Carta a Max Daireaux” [1930], in Vocación, p. 273. See also “Visión de Anáhuac,” Vocación, p. 98. 154. Parentalia, pp. 16–17. 155. Adolfo Castañón argued that what Reyes taught was “the modest but difficult art of walking in language” [el modesto si difícil arte de caminar en el lenguaje]. Alfonso Reyes, p. 61. 156. Rodríguez Monegal, “Alfonso Reyes,” in Universidad de Nuevo León, Páginas, p. 27. 157. “México en una nuez,” Vocación, p. 156. 158. “Atenea política” [1932], in Universidad, p. 70. 159. “El criticón,” part of El suicida, OC, III, pp. 280–3, quotation on p. 283. 160. Ibid., p. 287. 161. Ibid., p. 289. 162. “La estrategia del ‘gaucho’ Aquiles,” Junta de sombras, p. 40. 163. Castañón, Alfonso Reyes, p. 18. 164. Cited in Alicia Reyes, Genio, p. 82. 165. “Posición de América” [1942], in Tentativas y orientaciones, pp. 127–8. 166. Pasado inmediato, pp. 28–9. See also “Discurso por la lengua” [1943], in OC, XI, pp. 312–26. 167. El plano oblicuo (Cuentos y diálogos), Tipográfica Europa, Madrid, 1920.

234

NOTES

168. “La estrategia del ‘gaucho’ Aquiles,” Junta de sombras, p. 39. 169. Clara Lida, José Antonio Matesanz, and Josefina Zoraida Vásquez, La Casa de España y el Colegio de México. Memoria, 1938–2000, El Colegio de México, Mexico, 2000, p. 305. 170. Henríquez Ureña, “Alfonso Reyes,” in Universidad de Nuevo León, Páginas, p. 154. 171. José Luis Martínez, “La obra de Alfonso Reyes: La empresa de su generación literaria,” in Universidad de Nuevo León, Páginas, pp. 580–606, esp. pp. 589–93. 172. “El presagio de América,” in Vocación, p. 370. 173. OC, IV, p. 359. For many more examples of anecdotes, see Marginalia, 3 vols., Editorial Tezontle, Mexico, 1952, 1954, and 1959. 174. Borges, “Alfonso Reyes,” esp. p. 130. 175. Octavio Paz, “The Rider of the Air” [1960], in The Siren and the Seashell, p. 116. 176. “La Atlántida castigada” [1932], in Vocación, pp. 61–73, esp. p. 61. 177. Massey, For Space, p. 21, drawing on C. V. Boundas, “DeleuzeBergson: An Ontology of the Virtual,” in P. Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader, 1996. 178. Carmen Galindo, “El cazador,” in Presencia de Alfonso Reyes, pp. 29–36, esp. p. 34. 179. “Epílogos de 1953,” in Universidad, p. 28. 180. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 7. 181. Fuentes, in Presencia de Alfonso Reyes, p. 26. 182. “Palabras sobre la nación argentina,” Vocación, pp. 181–91, esp. p. 181. 183. “Ciencia social y deber social,” OC, XI, p. 186. 184. “España y América,” Vocación, p. 144. 185. Fuentes, in Presencia de Alfonso Reyes, p. 27. 186. “El sentido de América,” Vocación, p. 265. 187. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, p. 41. 188. Gutiérrez Girardot, La imagen de América, p. 52. 189. “El sentido de América” [1936], Vocación, p. 265. 190. “Discurso por Virgilo,” OC, XI, p. 176. 191. “Dos viejas discusiones” [1920], OC, IV, pp. 561–71, esp. p. 568. 192. “Alfabeto, pan y jabón” [1944], Universidad, pp. 24–6, esp. p. 26. 193. Ibid., p. 25. 194. “Montaigne y la mujer” [n.d.], OC, III, p. 179. 195. “Moctezuma y la ‘Eneida mexicana,’” Vocación, p. 104. 196. Castañón, Alfonso Reyes, p. 18. Castañón refers to Reyes as a “postmodernist” writer in the sense that he distrusted the idea of the prophetic vanguard. 197. “El rescate de la persona,” Marginalia, tercera serie, pp. 68–9. 198. OC, IV, p. 491 and p. 435. 199. For his elaboration of these ideas, see “Atenea política,” Universidad.

NOTES

235

200. Jiménez, Españoles de tres mundos, p. 91.

Chapter 5 A Vital Form of Public Space: Mariátegui’s Revolution in Modernity 1. Alberto Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui, Editorial Revolución, Madrid, 1991, p. 221. 2. Evelina Dagnino, “Culture, Citizenship, and Democracy: Changing Discourses and Practices of the Latin American Left,” in Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar, Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures, p. 37. 3. The most comprehensive survey is still José Aricó, ed., Mariátegui y los orígenes del marxismo latinoamericano, Siglo XXI, Mexico, 1978. See also Marc Becker, Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory, Ohio University Center for International Studies, Athens, Ohio, 1993. On Argentina, see Horacio Tarcus, Mariátegui en la Argentina o las políticas culturales de Samuel Glusberg, Ediciones El Cielo por Asalto, Buenos Aires, 2001. 4. Oscar Terán, “Mariátegui: el destino sudamericano de un moderno extremista,” Punto de Vista (Buenos Aires), no. 51, April 1995, pp. 25–8, esp. p. 25. On the conference, see Oscar Terán, Discutir Mariátegui, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico, 1985. 5. See, e.g., “¿Quiénes continúan el camino de Mariátegui?” Amauta (new version), no. 193, October 5, 1978, pp. 4–5. 6. José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Editorial Universitaria, Santiago de Chile, 1955; trans. Marjory Urquidi as Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1971. All works cited in this chapter are by Mariátegui unless otherwise stated. Many are from the series of his Obras completas published by Editorial Amauta, Lima, hereafter OC. 7. See, e.g., Université de Pau et des pays de l’Adour, Encuentro Internacional: José Carlos Mariátegui y Europa. El otro aspecto del descubrimiento, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1993; Héctor Béjar, “Vigencia y cambio: ensayando una interpretación de José Carlos Mariátegui,” Socialismo y Participación (Lima), no. 68, December 1994, pp. 19–38; David Sobrevilla, ed., El marxismo de José Carlos Mariátegui [Congreso Nacional de Filosofía, 1994], Universidad de Lima, Lima, 1994; Casa de las Américas, Mariátegui en el pensamiento actual de nuestra América [Colloquium, Havana, July 1994], Editorial Amauta, Lima/Casa de las Américas, Havana, 1996; Mario Alderete et al., Mariátegui. Historia y presente del marxismo en América Latina, Fundación de Investigaciones Sociales y Políticas, Buenos Aires, 1997; Liliana Irene Weinberg and Ricardo Melgar Bao, Mariátegui ante la memoria y el futuro de América Latina [conference in Mexico City, September 1994], UNAM, Mexico City, 2000; Ariel Bignami, “Prólogo,” in

236

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

NOTES

José Carlos Mariátegui, La imaginación subversiva, Selección de textos, Editorial Quipo, Buenos Aires, 2001, pp. 5–9. Cited in Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui, p. 242. Temas de Educación, OC, vol. 14, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1970, p. 19. Berman, All that Is Solid, p. 34. The best account of the Comintern dispute is in Flores Galindo, La agonía; for Haya de la Torre’s views, see his Obras completas, Editorial Juan Mejía Baca, Lima, 1976, esp. vol. V, p. 253; for a survey of both debates, with documentary sources, see Aricó, Mariátegui. Haya de la Torre, El antimperialismo y el Apra, Ediciones Ercilla, Santiago, 1936; Mariátegui, “Punto de vista anti-imperialista” [Thesis presented to the First Latin American Communist Conference, May 1929], in Ideología y política, OC, vol. 13, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1969, pp. 87–95. For an analysis, see Miller, In the Shadow of the State, pp. 191–5. Most of the debates are reproduced in Manuel Aquézolo Castro, ed., La polémica del indigenismo, Mosca Azul Editores, Lima, 1976. See also José Deustua and José Luis Reñique, Intelectuales, indigenismo y descentralismo en el Perú 1897–1931, Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cuzco, 1984; and Mirko Lauer, Andes imaginarios. Discursos del indigenismo-2, Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé de Las Casas, Cuzco/Casa de Estudios del Socialismo, Lima, 1997. For summary and analysis, see Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez, Poética e ideología en José Carlos Mariátegui, Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, Madrid, 1983; and Miller, In the Shadow of the State, pp. 153–7. Sánchez, “ ‘Ismos’ contra ‘ismos’ ”, in Aquézolo Castro, La polémica, p. 100. “Réplica a Luis Alberto Sánchez,” in Aquézolo Castro, La polémica, p. 84. Flores Galindo, La agonía, p. 252. The most thorough biography available in English is Jesús Chavarría, José Carlos Mariátegui and the Rise of Modern Peru 1890–1930, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1979. Jorge Basadre’s introduction to Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality includes a useful short summary of Mariátegui’s life. Editorial Amauta’s Obras completas includes two biographies by people who knew him: María Wiesse, José Carlos Mariátegui, Etapas de su vida, Lima, 1959; and Armando Bazán, Biografía de José Carlos Mariátegui, Lima, 1969. Two good critical studies of his work are Antonio Melis, Leyendo Mariátegui 1967–1998, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1999; and Roland Forgues, Mariátegui. La utopía realizable, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1995. There is a controversy about when and where Mariátegui was born. He himself thought that it was in Lima in 1895, where his birth was registered, but after his death the family revealed another certificate, from 1894 in Moquegua, in the far south. He spent his childhood in Sayán and Huacho, towns a short distance to the north of Lima, and

NOTES

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

237

his adolescence in a modest district of the city itself. See Javier Mariátegui, “Un autodidacto imaginativo,” in Université de Pau, Encuentro Internacional, pp. 23–43, esp. pp. 25–9. Javier Mariátegui, “Un autodidacto imaginativo,” p. 25. Chavarría, Mariátegui, p. 46; Javier Mariátegui, “Un autodidacto imaginativo,” p. 27. Chavarría, Mariátegui, p. 46. Ibid., p. 48. Charles Walker, “Lima de Mariátegui: los intelectuales y la Capital durante el oncenio,” Socialismo y Participación [Lima], no. 35, September 1986, pp. 71–88, esp. pp. 78–9. Flores Galindo, La agonía, p. 63. Temístocles Bejarano I., “Mariátegui en Huancayo,” Anuario Mariáteguiano, II:2 (1990), pp. 89–102, esp. p. 90. The story must be read with caution, because Bejarano is drawing on recollections of a conversation he had in 1962 with Oswaldo Aguirre Morales, senator for Junín, whom Mariátegui visited in Huancayo. Bejarano, “Mariátegui en Huancayo,” p. 93. Ibid., p. 98. “Otra vez,” “Voces” column, El Tiempo, August 15, 1918, in Mariátegui Total, vol. II, Escritos juveniles, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1994, pp. 3194–5. Bazán, Biografía, p. 64. Cartas de Italia, OC, vol. 15, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1969. Peruanicemos al Perú, OC, vol. 11, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1970, p. 146. Bazán, Biografía, p. 71. Cartas de Italia; “Valores de la cultura italiana moderna,” El alma matinal y otras estaciones del hombre de hoy, OC, Vol. 3, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 4th edn., 1970 [1950], pp. 90–2. Ibid. “Roma, polis moderna” [1925], El alma matinal. “El paisaje italiano” [1925], El alma matinal, p. 64 and p. 66. Ibid., p. 68. Bazán, Biografía, p. 85. In September 1924, as he was convalescing, he wrote to his colleagues at the magazine Claridad, of which he was the editor, “It is essential to me that my writing should retain the optimistic note it had before [my illness].” Correspondencia (1915–1930), ed. Antonio Melis, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 2 vols., 1984, vol. I, p. 55. See the inventory of Mariátegui’s library in Harry E. Vanden, National Marxism in Latin America: José Carlos Mariátegui’s Thought and Politics, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO, 1986, pp. 127–52. Further information can be found in Chavarría, Mariátegui; Aricó, Mariátegui; César Miró, Testimonio y recaudo de José Carlos

238

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

NOTES

Mariátegui, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1994; and Estuardo Núñez, La experiencia europea de Mariátegui [1978], Editorial Amauta, Lima, 2nd edn., 1994. From Arequipa, a bookseller friend wrote to tell Mariátegui that he had sold 15 copies of one of his books, but only with great difficulty, and that Mariátegui should not count on selling books by subscription because his customers would not risk even 10 cents on an unseen publication. César Atahualpa Rodríguez to Mariátegui, Arequipa, April 5, 1926, in Mariátegui, Correspondencia, vol. I, p. 145. Most of the relevant articles can be found in Figuras y aspectos de la vida mundial, OC, vols. 16–18, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1970. Signos y obras, OC, vol. 7, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1959, p. 154. Chavarría, Mariátegui, pp. 71–2. El alma matinal, p. 115. There are three articles on Gobetti, all written in 1929, El alma matinal, pp. 110–20. For Gobetti’s own work in translation, see On Liberal Revolution, ed. Nadia Urbinati, trans. William McCuaig, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000. “Piero Gobetti,” El alma matinal, p. 113. Ibid. Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology [1921], George Allen and Unwin Ltd., London, 1926, pp. 126–8, esp. p. 127. Ibid., p. 127. Georg Simmel, “Sociology of the Meal” and “On the Psychology of Money,” in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, Sage Publications, London, 1997, pp. 130–7 and pp. 233–43. Mariátegui mentioned this essay specifically in El artista y la época, p. 68. Simmel, “The Conflict in Modern Culture,” in Simmel on Culture, pp. 75–90, esp. p. 85. Frank Lechner, “Simmel on Social Space,” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 8, no. 3, 1991, pp. 192–202, esp. p. 196. El alma matinal, pp. 98–9. Ibid., p. 102. On Joyce, see El alma matinal, pp. 147–50; on Proust, p. 158. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in Peter Gay, ed., The Freud Reader, Vintage, London, pp. 722–72, esp. p. 723. “Romain Rolland” [1926], El alma matinal, pp. 131–6 for all quotations in the rest of this paragraph. See note 2 earlier. Siete ensayos, p. 236. El alma matinal, p.18. Siete ensayos, p. 142.

NOTES

239

63. “El factor religioso,” Siete ensayos, pp. 120–43, esp. p. 142. The rest of the argument recapitulated in this paragraph can be found in these pages. 64. El alma matinal, p. 22. 65. Siete ensayos, p. 196. 66. Ibid., p. 143. 67. Aníbal Quijano, “El marxismo de Mariátegui: Una propuesta de racionalidad alternativa,” in Alderete, Mariátegui, pp. 43–5. 68. Siete ensayos, p. 16. 69. See Flores Galindo, La agonía, p. 222. 70. Siete ensayos, p. 2. 71. Ibid., p. 1. 72. Ibid., p. 1. Mariátegui cited in German Nietzsche’s epigraph to this effect from The Wanderer and the Shadow. 73. See his reproaches against André Breton for saying that life had to be deciphered like a cryptogram, in Signos y obras, pp. 181–2. 74. Siete ensayos, p. 262. 75. Signos y obras, pp. 143–4. 76. Siete ensayos, pp. 194–5. 77. El alma matinal, p. 27. 78. Temas de nuestra América, OC, vol. 12, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1960, p. 81. 79. El alma matinal, p. 29. 80. Siete ensayos, p. 116. 81. El alma matinal, p. 15. 82. For a discussion of these issues in the specific context of the history of Marxism, see Quijano, “El marxismo de Mariátegui,” pp. 37–45. 83. La escena contemporánea [1925], OC, vol. 1, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 2nd edn., 1959, p. 158. 84. La escena contemporánea, p. 155. 85. John Kraniauskas, “Critical Closeness: The Chronicle-Essays of Carlos Monsiváis,” in Carlos Monsiváis, Mexican Postcards, ed. and trans. John Kraniauskas, Verso, London, 1997, pp. ix–xxii. 86. Temas de nuestra América, p. 103. 87. Ibid., pp. 74–5. 88. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 23. 89. El artista y la época, OC, vol. 6, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1959, p. 65. 90. See Winston Orillo et al., Mariátegui juvenil: el cronista, Editorial San Marcos, Lima, 2003. 91. Flores Galindo, La agonía, p. 243. 92. Estuardo Núñez, “Prólogo: La cultura italiana en el Perú del siglo XX,” in Mariátegui, Cartas de Italia, p. 25. 93. La novela y la vida, p. 144. 94. Letter to Eudocio Ravines, December 31, 1928, in Correspondencia, vol. I, p. 491. 95. Temas de nuestra América, p. 46.

240

NOTES

96. Siete ensayos, p. 252. 97. Ibid. 98. El alma matinal, p. 99. Mariátegui was writing specifically about the Italian Futurist Marinetti, comparing him unfavorably with Pirandello. See also his comments on the Peruvian poet José María Eguren, in Siete ensayos, p. 226. 99. Siete ensayos, p. 6. 100. Ibid., p. 21 and pp. 24–5. 101. Ibid., p. 26. 102. El alma matinal, p. 24. 103. El artista y la época, p. 31. See also El alma matinal, p. 21. 104. El alma matinal, p. 21. 105. Ibid., p. 64. 106. La novela y la vida, pp. 128–9. 107. “Aniversario y balance,” Amauta, Year II, no. 17, September 1928. 108. El alma matinal, p. 122. 109. Ibid. 110. It has been argued, with some justification, that Mariátegui himself had a somewhat idealized view of Inca society. However, he explicitly rejected any attempt to revive the Inca past, approaching it only as a historical topic, not as a guide to the present. In any case, it must be remembered how little information was available to him; at that time, very little archaeological or ethnographic research had been done in Peru. 111. For example, see Antenor Orrego, letter to Mariátegui, Trujillo, December 29, 1925, in Correspondencia, vol. I, p. 116. 112. Siete ensayos, p. 60. 113. “Regionalismo y Centralismo,” Siete ensayos, pp. 144–69. 114. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 259. A passage from Benjamin’s essay reminded me of Mariátegui’s analysis of carnival (discussed earlier, p. 166): “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. [ . . . ] For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (p. 257). There is no evidence that either of these men read each other’s work, but they observed much the same European world during the 1920s and their views of history seem remarkably close. Aníbal Quijano has also identified a similar attitude toward reason in the two writers, both of whom rejected reductionist rationalism. See Quijano’s “Prólogo” to Mariátegui, Textos básicos, ed. Aníbal Quijano, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Lima and Mexico, 1991, pp. vii–xvi, p. x. 115. Peruanicemos al Perú, p. 117. 116. Ibid., p. 118.

NOTES

117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

133.

134. 135.

136.

137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

241

Ibid., p. 118 and p. 155. Ibid., pp. 122–3. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 119. José de la Riva Agüero’s works were typical, and continued to be used as textbooks in Peruvian schools for several decades. See, e.g., his La historia en el Perú, Imprenta Nacional de Federico Barrionueva, Lima, 1910. Siete ensayos, p. 170. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., pp. 201–4 and pp. 231–7, esp. p. 231; Peruanicemos al Perú, p. 79. El artista y la época, p. 29. Jorge Basadre, La vida y la historia. Ensayo sobre personas, lugares y problemas, no publisher given, Lima, 2nd edn., 1981 [1975], p. 162. Flores Galindo, La agonía, p. 234. Chavarría, Mariátegui, p. 175. Recollection of Jorge Basadre, cited in Javier Mariátegui Chiappe, “Preámbulo,” in Miró, Testimonio, pp. 5–9, p. 6. Interview with Eliseo García, “Yo conocí a Mariátegui,” Amauta (Lima), no. 172, April 13, 1978, pp. 4–5. Mariano Larico Yujra, interviewed by José Luis Ayala, “Mariátegui periodista: Ternura de la señora Amalia La Chira [Mariátegui’s mother],” Anuario Mariáteguiano, II:2 (1990), pp. 103–5. Larico Yujra, “Yo fui canillita de José Carlos Mariátegui,” Ibid., pp. 105–8. There is also a book of his testimony: José Luis Ayala, Yo fui canillita de José Carlos Mariátegui (Auto) biografía de Mariano Larico Yujra, Editorial Periodística, Lima, 1990. [No author named], “Mariátegui en lenguas vernaculares,” Anuario Mariáteguiano, I:1 (1989), pp. 187–9. Apart from the biographies and historical studies mentioned earlier, see Wilfredo Kapsoli, Mariátegui y los congresos obreros, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1980, which contains documents from congresses in 1921, 1927, and 1929. Fascismo sudamericano, Los intelectuales y la revolución y otros artículos inéditos (1923–1924), Centro de Trabajo Intelectual Mariátegui, Lima, 1975, p. 29. Flores Galindo, La agonía, pp. 215–6. See Mariátegui total, vol. II, Escritos juveniles. El alma matinal, p. 117 and p. 120. Temas de educación, p. 19. Temas de nuestra América, p. 109. Temas de educación, p. 23 and Temas de nuestra América, p. 110. Temas de educación, pp. 19–20.

242 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158.

159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164.

165. 166.

167.

168.

169. 170.

NOTES

Ibid., pp. 20–1. Ibid., p. 23. Siete ensayos, p. 116. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 118. Temas de educación, p. 104. Ibid., p. 75. El alma matinal, p. 104. Siete ensayos, p. 101. Ibid. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid. Ricardo Portacarrero, “Introducción a Claridad,” in Claridad: Edición en facsímile, Editorial Amauta, Lima 1994, pp. 7–18. Enrique Cornejo Koster, “Crónica del movimiento estudiantil peruano (1919–26),” in Gabriel del Mazo, ed., La Reforma Universitaria, Edición del Centro Estudiantes de Ingeniería, La Plata, 3 vols., 1941, vol. II, pp. 15–31. Portacarrero, “Introducción a Claridad,” p. 11. Historia de la crisis mundial, OC, vol. 8, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1959. “Proyecto de Estatuto de la Editorial Obrera Claridad,” in Claridad: Edición en facsímile, pp. 207–10. Temas de nuestra América, p. 85. El alma matinal, pp. 106–7. On these dilemmas, see his discussion of José Ingenieros, whom he thought resolved them better than most, in Temas de nuestra América, pp. 103–6. “El comentario,” El Tiempo, I:158, December 19, 1916. See, e.g., “Presagios,” El Tiempo, I:13, July 30, 1916; “Antes del preludio,” El Tiempo, I:151, December 12, 1916, for positive images of crowds; on the regime, “El regimen y la opereta,” El Tiempo, I:98, October 23, 1916. See also Flores Galindo, La agonía, pp. 193–6. El Tiempo, “Discursos, discursos, discursos,” I:80, October 5, 1916; “Antes del preludio,” I:151, December 12, 1916; and “Oratoria festiva,” I:142, December 3, 1916. “La procesión tradicional,” La Prensa, October 20, 1914, p. 3; also “La procesión tradicional,” in La Crónica, April 10, 1917, pp. 12–13. Flores Galindo first drew attention to these articles, La agonía, p. 217. See also “Motivos de carnaval” [1928], in La novela y la vida, pp. 120–5. La Crónica, April 10, 1917. El Tiempo, “Marcha triunfal,” I:150, December 11, 1916; and “Duende, para bloque,” III:598, February 28, 1918.

NOTES

171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201.

202.

203.

243

Siete ensayos, p. 215. Ibid., p. 221. La novela y la vida, p. 141 Fascismo sudamericano, p. 61. Aricó, Mariátegui, p. xiv. Siete ensayos, p. 27. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid. El alma matinal, p. 51. See also Peruanicemos al Perú, esp. pp. 25–9 and pp. 72–9. El artista y la época, p. 37. Defensa del marxismo, OC, vol. 5, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1959. Ibid., p. 80. Temas de educación, pp. 134–6. El artista y la época, p. 42. La novela y la vida, p. 159. El artista y la época, p. 48. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. El alma matinal, p. 56. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 38. La novela y la vida, pp. 15–82. Ibid., pp. 19–20. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 86. Labor. Quincenario de información e ideas, nos. 1–10, Facsimile edition, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1974. Although it was intended to appear fortnightly, Labor’s publication was much disrupted, mostly by financial difficulties. It was finally stopped by a government ban. The contents of its articles did not differ greatly from Amauta’s, although there was more material specifically on workers’ struggles. The most striking difference between the two publications is that Labor’s articles were presented as dense text in columns, with far fewer illustrations than in Amauta. María Fernanda Beigel, “Una aproximación al Perú vanguardista: entre la totalidad y la fragmentación,” Anuario Mariáteguiano, 1999, pp. 26–37. Letter to Mario Nerval, January 14, 1927; and letter to Esteban Pavletich, March 8, 1927, in Correspondencia, vol. I, p. 221 and pp. 242–3.

244

NOTES

204. “Presentación de Amauta,” Amauta, I, no. 1, 1926, p. 3. 205. “Aniversario y balance,” Amauta, September 1928, p. 1, Amauta: Edición en facsímile, Editorial Amauta, Lima, 1976. 206. Siete ensayos, p. 215. 207. See his articles “La mujer y la politica” [1924] and “Las reivindicaciones feministas” [1924], in Temas de educación, pp. 123–33. Some of his early articles on women’s issues took a frivolous tone. See, e.g., “La señora Lloyd George, la justicia y la mujer” [1920] and “El divorcio en Italia” [1920], in Cartas de Italia. 208. Temas de educación, p. 130. 209. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols., Hogarth Press, London, 1975–1984, vol. I, p. 438. 210. Siete ensayos, p. 256. 211. Signos y obras, p. 167.

Chapter 6 Conclusion: A Distinctively Latin American Modernity 1. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 302. He illustrates his argument with evidence of a counterdiscourse against modernity’s homogenizing drive in early Hegel, Marx, early Nietzsche, Lukacs, Sartre, and the Frankfurt School. 2. The diversity is abundantly displayed in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, eds., Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1998. For a critical study designed to counter the caricature of “monolithic modernism,” see Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1995. His analysis is highly suggestive overall, but it is regrettable that the only Latin American to be mentioned, Rubén Darío, is described as “Spanish” (p. 70). 3. Cited in Santiago, The Space In-Between, p. 162. 4. For example, Ramos, Divergent Modernities, p. 224. Writing about Rodó, Ramos argues: “The emphasis on rationality betrays Rodó’s attempt to separate any conception of ‘the rational’ from its previous (Enlightenment) identification with bourgeois, utilitarian rationalization [ . . . ].” I agree that Rodó is trying to resist the idea that reason can only be utilitarian, but not that the Enlightenment can be bracketed with utilitarian rationalization. Recent work has begun to revise the conventional European interpretation, which is basically derived from Ernst Cassirer’s work in the 1930s, of the Enlightenment as committed to abstract universalism, individualism, and rationalism. See Norman Geras and Robert Wokler, eds., The Enlightenment and Modernity, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2000, especially chapters by Ursula Vogel (on abstract universalism); Geraint Parry (on instrumental reason and pluralism); and Andrea Baumeister (on subjectivity and

NOTES

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

245

community). Their readings are intriguingly close to those offered by Latin Americans during the early twentieth century. See also Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2003. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. I, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, p. 48. Alfonso Reyes, “Un propósito” [1924], in his Universidad, política y pueblo, p. 21. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1997, p. 32. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in his The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 3–40. Mariátegui, writing about the Argentine surrealist poet Oliverio Girondo, who was well known at the time for his “Veinte poemas para ser leídas en el tranvía” [Twenty Poems to Read on the Tram], cited in Oliverio Girondo, Obras completas, ed. Raúl Antelo, Galaxia Gutenberg, Madrid, 1999, p. 615; also in Mariátegui, Crítica literaria, Editorial Jorge Alvarez, Buenos Aires, 1969. Rodó, Motivos de Proteo, OC, p. 398. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 7. Ibid., pp. 14 and 56, drawing on Derrida. Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris, Polity, Cambridge, 1993, p. 301. See also Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1973; and Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Knopf, New York, 1979. Jonathan Monroe’s work comparing Walter Benjamin and Edouard Glissant was very suggestive here: “Composite Cultures, Chaos World,” paper given at the SOAS/UCL Centre for Asian and African Literatures workshop, What Price the Modern?, London, May 4, 2005. Quijano, Modernidad, p. 69. Zea, Leopoldo, The Latin American Mind [1949], trans. James H. Abbott and Lowell Dunham, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman OH, 1963, p. 18. Bernhard Rieger, “Envisioning the Future: British and German Reactions to the Paris World Fair in 1900,” in Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, eds., Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the LateVictorian Era to World War II, Berg, Oxford and New York, 2001, pp. 145–64, esp. p. 157. Quotation (not claim that Latin America is deficient), García Canclini, Culturas híbridas, p. 13. Max Horkheimer, “Reason against Itself: Some Remarks on Enlightenment,” in James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions,

246

20. 21. 22.

23.

NOTES

University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996, pp. 359–67, esp. pp. 359–60. See also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989. Alfonso Reyes, “Discurso por Virgilio” [1930], in his Vocación de América, p. 212. Berman, All That Is Solid, p. 27. Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1992, pp. 73–98. Garretón, Incomplete Democracy, p. 3.

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Index

accountability, 17, 28, 34, 176 Aching, Gerard, 13 Adorno, Theodor, 57, 170 Aeneid, The, compared to conquest of the Americas, 131 aesthetics, 2, 47, 49, 67, 169, 190 agency, 4, 7, 15, 45, 66, 74, 98, 120, 170, 188, 189, 191–2, 195 Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 16, 18, 57, 62, 76, 78, 105 Alem, Leandro, 86, 87 Alexander the Great, 120 Alonso, Carlos, 15 Amazonia, 152 ambivalence, about modernity, 14–15, 25, 29, 45, 188, 190 Andrade, Mário de, 187 anecdote, as genre, 137–8 anti-imperialism, 25, 26, 146 anti-Semitism, 99 APR A (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), 26, 145 Arendt, Hannah, 195 Argentina, 32, 61, 72, 113, 116, 143, 149 Generation of 1837, 16–17, 18, 37, 42, 58, 68, 74 Generation of 1880, 74 immigration, 82 labor movement in, 87 population, 6 Sáenz Peña Law (1912), 89, 106

Argentine Socialist Party (PSA), 73, 87–8, 92, 95, 102–3 Arguedas, Alcides, 206 n. 16 Aricó, José, 179 Aristocratic Republic (Peru), 148, 150, 178 Aronna, Michael, 28 Artigas, José, 33 associational life, 2, 71–2, 107, 154, 191 Augustine, Saint, 119 Australia, 85, 100 Australian Labor Party, 85–6, 99 authenticity, 1, 9, 18, 46, 68, 69, 133, 144, 165–71, 179, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195 authoritarianism, 6, 17, 19 autodidacticism, 36, 65, 115, 147 autonomy, 7, 9, 14, 45, 67–8, 69, 86, 89, 93, 106, 111, 127, 139, 162, 170–1, 178, 179, 189, 191, 194 avant-garde, 12, 203 n. 50 Bachelet, Michelle, 19 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 55, 138, 163, 190 Balzac, Honoré de, 37 Barbusse, Henri, 151 Barreda, Gabino, 114, 115 Batlle, José Ordóñez, 11, 31, 32, 33–4 Baudelaire, Charles, 4, 12, 13, 37, 48, 49

272

INDEX

Bauman, Zygmunt, 1, 190–1 Belaúnde, Víctor Andrés, 146 Benjamin, Walter, 4, 54, 60, 61, 63, 124, 167, 192, 240 n. 114 Bentham, Jeremy, 41, 42 Bergson, Henri, 37, 53, 123, 138, 154 Berlin, 85, 152 Berman, Marshall, 1, 109, 145, 195 Bernstein, Eduard, 77 Bilbao, Francisco, 41 binary oppositions, 68, 130, 166, 190 Bismarck, Otto von, 82 Bolívar, Simón, 1, 37, 65 Borges, Jorge Luis, 63, 110, 138 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 119 Bourdieu, Pierre, habitus, 200 n. 29 Bravo, Mario, 98 Brazil, 20, 32, 116, 203–4 n. 67 Brazil, Rodó’s impressions of, 37–8 Britain, 97, 101, 148, 192 Brotherston, Gordon, 28 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 119 Buenos Aires, 6, 20, 30, 34, 66, 72, 73, 75, 80, 81–4 Bukharin, Nikolai, 155 Burckhardt, Jacob, Reyes’s admiration for, 122 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 37 café society, in Mexico City, 113 in Montevideo, 35 Camus, Albert, 23 Canada, illiteracy rate, 100 capitalism, 29 Caras y Caretas (Buenos Aires), 37 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 116 Carlyle, Thomas, 37, 51, 60, 119 Carranza, Venustiano, 117 Caruso, Enrico, 81 Caso, Antonio, 113, 115, 211 n. 96 Castro, Fidel, 109

Catholic Church, the, 49–50 Catholic thought, in Uruguay, 33 Catholic traditionalism, 18 Centenary Generation of Mexico, 113–14, 115 Centenary Generation of Peru, 153–4 Cervantes, Miguel de, 36 Chaplin, Charlie, 111 Chartier, Roger, 8 Chávez, Hugo, 19 Chertkoff, Mariana (first wife of Justo), 99 Chesterton, G. K., 119 Chile, 179 civil society, 71, 92, 94 Claridad (Lima), 177 classicism, 43, 64–5, 130 Colegio de México, 110, 116, 136 Columbus, Christopher, 119, 137 communications, 28–9 Communist International, the (Comintern), 143, 145, 151, 157 Communist Manifesto, The, 29, 78 Comte, Auguste, 37, 43, 51, 77, 114, 120 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 51 Congress of Livorno, 151 cosmopolitanism, 14, 65, 125, 129, 150 Crítica (Buenos Aires), 84 critical closeness, 24, 163, 165, 189 criticism, 54, 55, 134–5, 163 Croce, Benedetto, 61, 121, 154, 168 Cuba, 72 Cuban Communist Party, 26 Cuban Revolution, 109, 143–4 cultural nationalism, 65, 106, 125, 132–3, 139, 146, 179 cultural studies, in Latin America, 18 culture, role in modernity, 12, 68, 144, 174, 194

INDEX

273

D’Annunzio, Gabriel, 36, 37 Dante, 37 Darío, Rubén, 12, 13, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 37, 46, 48, 55, 83, 117 Darwin, Charles, 37, 77 Davies, Catherine, 15 De Certeau, Michel, 9 De Staël, Madame Anne Louise Germaine, 37 Deleuze, Gilles, 138 democracy, 2, 17, 27, 28, 33, 69, 71, 80, 84, 88–96, 98, 105, 106, 107, 113, 139, 143, 144, 154, 192 Descartes, René, 51, 57 Deustua, Alejandro, 211 n. 96 Diario del Pueblo, El (Argentina), 103 Díaz, Porfirio, 112, 113, 116, 120, 128 Dickens, Charles, 37 Diderot, Denis, 54 difference, Latin American approach to, 3, 21, 66, 69, 190 dogmatism, 51, 89, 112, 134, 143 Dussel, Enrique, 118

Ette, Ottmar, 62 Eurocentrism, 3, 20–1

education, 32, 67, 79, 174, 175–6 Einstein, Albert, 111, 124 Eliot, George, 37 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 37, 57, 119 empathy, 137, 163, 187, 189, 194 Engels, Friedrich, 37, 78 Enlightenment, the, 11, 15, 28, 40, 47, 67, 79, 111, 112, 167, 188, 194 ephemerality, 4, 48, 116 epistemology, 43, 187–91 Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP), 113, 115 essay, genre of, 57–8, 136–7 essentialism, 2, 15, 17–18, 125 ethics, 2, 14, 46, 53, 67, 79, 190, 193–6

García, Eliseo, 173 García Canclini, Néstor, 21 García Márquez, Gabriel, 11, 124 Garretón, Manuel, 18, 71, 107, 195 Germany, urbanization in, 30 Germinal (Argentina), 103 Glissant, Edouard, 189 Gobetti, Piero, 154–5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 23, 37, 51, 54, 60, 115, 135 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 55 Góngora y Argote, Luis de, 118, 128 González Echevarría, Roberto, 56 González Prada, Manuel, 153–4, 162

Fabian, Johannes, 55 Febvre, Lucien, 9, 199–200 n. 29 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 115 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 120 Flaubert, Gustave, 37, 60 Flores Galindo, Alberto, 143, 147, 163 Forment, Carlos, 72 Foucault, Michel, 4 Fouillée, Alfred, 37 France, Anatole, 76 France, urbanization in, 30 Frank, Waldo, 206 n. 15 Frankfurt School, the, 8, 40–1, 166–7, 189, 193 Franzé, Javier, 88 Fray Bentos, 30 Freire, Paulo, 19, 24 French Revolution, 109 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 53, 156 Frugoni, Emilio, 88, 103 Fuentes, Carlos, 67, 109, 139, 187 Futurism, 166, 176 see also Marinetti

274

INDEX

Gorgias, 59–60 Gramsci, Antonio, 92, 144, 174 guerrilla warfare, 143–4 Guevara, Ernesto “Che”, 24 Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel, 115 Guyau, Jean-Marie, 37, 41 Habermas, Jürgen, 1, 2, 18, 75, 187, 195 Harrods, 81, 83 Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl, 145, 146, 164, 177 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 78, 118, 119, 120, 123, 170, 189, 195 Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 51 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 111, 113, 115, 125, 136 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 42, 120, 170 Hergé (Georges Remi), Tintin and the Picaros [1976], 204 n. 69 heterogeneity, 2, 186, 192 hispanoamericanismo, 126 Horkheimer, Max, 193 hospitality, 9, 19, 58, 64, 67, 124, 171, 194 Hostos, Eugenio María de, 115 Huancayo, 150 Huerta, Victoriano, 116 Hugo, Victor, 37 humanism, 26, 65, 77, 110, 127, 128–9 Husserl, Edmund, 123 hybridity, 192, 193 Ibsen, Henrik, 36, 37, 60 idealism (philosophical), 33, 42–3 identity, 15, 191–2 Iliad, The, 126, 130 imperialism, 18, 146, 179, 194 indigenismo, 146–7, 179 individualism, 2, 74, 194 Ingenieros, José, 242 n. 164 instrumentalism, 194

intellectuals, role of, 6–9, 46, 141, 161, 178 Italy, 20, 38, 49, 66, 101, 151–2, 153, 154, 166, 174, 175, 182 Jacobinism, 51, 64, 175 Japan, as model of modernity, 20, 128, 153, 192 Jaurès, Jean, 75 Jauss, Hans Robert, 9 Jiménez, Juan Ramón, 141 Johnson, Samuel, 129 Joyce, James, 37, 156 Juárez, Benito, 134 justice, 4, 7, 76–8, 80, 106, 107, 120, 121, 124, 139, 140, 144, 155, 164, 195 Justo, Juan Bautista, 8, 9, 20, 111, 112, 141, 145, 147, 191, 195 career, 72, 84–5 experiences of modern life, 80–8 on cooperativism, 96–9 on education, 99–105 on foreign investment, 91 on free trade, 90–1 on property, 94–6 on religion, 101–2 on taxation, 92, 95 on the state, 88–92 political activity, 72–3 rural policies , 91–2, 95, 96 style, 104–5 travel, 8, 93 use of language, 104–5 Kant, Immanuel, 37, 47, 48–9, 60, 67, 78, 111, 119, 120, 141, 170 Klee, Paul, 138 Korn, Alejandro, 76, 211 n. 96 Koselleck, Reinhart, 4, 61, 124, 140 Krausism, in Uruguay, 33 Kühn, Augusto, 102 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 37 Larico Yujra, Mariano, 173

INDEX

Larraín, Jorge, 15 Latin, 131–2 Latinity, 26, 65, 166 Lefebvre, Henri, 123 Leguía, Augusto, 11, 150, 151 Lenin, Vladimir Illich, 153 liberalism, 61, 64, 65, 71, 107, 175 Liberation Theology, 19, 24 Lima, 148, 149, 172, 178 literary “Boom”, 13, 19 London, 77 Lugones, Leopoldo, 55, 106 Lula (Luiz Inácio da Silva), 19 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 37 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 110 macondismo, 11 Madero, Francisco, 116 Madrid, 117, 118 magical realism, 19–20 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 36 manuals of good conduct, 65 Marcuse, Herbert, 49 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 8, 27, 79, 105, 191, 195 connections with indigenous leaders, 173 experiences of modernity, 147–58 formal experimentation, 163 on myth, 159–60, 164–5 politics, 9, 20, 174 response to modernity, 145 Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928), 144, 155, 160–1, 168–70 style, 145 travel, 150–2 use of language, 163–4 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 37, 154, 156 Marquis de Sade, 119 Martí, José, 7, 10, 24, 25, 26, 37, 42, 45, 57, 65, 201 n. 40

275

‘Nuestra América’ (1891), 44, 45, 46, 55, 56 marvellous real, the, 19–20, 24 Marx, Karl, 12, 37, 76, 102, 123, 153, 170 Das Kapital, 72, 78, 119, 162 Marxism, 144 Justo on, 72, 76, 77, 78, 88 Mariátegui on, 165, 172, 179 Rodó on, 29 Massey, Doreen, 123–4 Matto de Turner, Clorinda, 55 Mella, Julio Antonio, 27 mestizaje, 24 Mexican Revolution, 109, 112, 116, 136, 193 Mexico City, 20, 124–5 Mexico, 72, 132, 149, 175, 178 Michelet, Jules, 37 military authoritarianism, and modernity, 17, 19 Mill, John Stuart, 41 Mitre, Bartolomé, 16, 86 modernism, 12, 187 in Europe, 12, 61 in Latin America, 21 modernismo, 12, 13, 14, 46, 83, 115, 176 modernity and discovery of the Americas, 118–9, 230 n. 58 conceptualizations of, 5 in relation to modernism, 12 in relation to modernization, 3–6 promise of, 4 technocratic, 1–2, 13, 15, 68, 146, 148 modernity in Latin America alleged deficiencies of, 2 alternative, 9, 18, 19 baroque, 11 distinctiveness of, 1–3, 9, 16, 195 Latin American useage of term, 5 technocraticica, 16–17

276

INDEX

modernization theory, 3 modernization, 3 as Americanization, 11 definition of, 4 in Argentina, 6, 80–8, 91–2 in Latin America, 6, 8, 21, 194 in Mexico, 112–15 in Peru, 147–50 in Uruguay, 30–4 of intellectual life, 7, 10, 14, 34–6 Monsiváis, Carlos, 24 Montaigne, Michel de, 37, 140 Montalvo, Juan, 37, 57 Montevideo, 30–1, 35, 66, 68 Montevideo, University of, 35, 36 Morales, Evo, 19 Morandé, Pedro, 11 Moreau de Justo, Alicia, 79 Moreno, Manuel, 62 multiple modernities, 3 Mundo ilustrado, El (Mexico), 113 Nación, La, 83, 84 nationalism, 5, 11, 65, 120, 132–3, 170 see also cultural nationalism naturalism, 28, 43 neoliberalism, 17 New Left in Latin America, 2 New York, 30, 151 New Zealand, 86, 92, 95, 100 Nicaraguan Revolution, 109, 143 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 37, 40, 44, 53, 54, 74, 113, 114, 119, 123, 154, 160–1, 194, 195 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 44, 46 nihilism, 11, 40 Nordau, Max, 211 n. 104 Obregón, Alvaro, 116 Olmedo, José Joaquín de, 62 optimism, 11, 26, 68, 79, 89, 99, 150, 162, 194

Organisation of American States, 117 Orosio, Paulo, 119 Ortega y Gasset, José, 112, 118, 126, 159 Owen, Robert, 97 Paine, Thomas, 109 Palacios, Alfredo, 83 Palermo, 39 Pan, Luis (biographer of Justo), 99 parable, as genre, 58 Paris Commune, 82 Paris, 14, 30, 63, 81, 83, 116, 117, 151 Partido Autonomista Nacional (PAN, Argentina), 86 Paz, Octavio, 13, 14, 21, 112, 133, 138, 193 Pellegrini, Carlos, 90 Perón, Juan Domingo, 102, 106 Peronism, 73 Peru, 71, 72 photography, 113 Pirandello, Luigi, 156 Plato, 37, 59, 140 Pomian, Krzysztof, 7 popular universities, 72 populism, 17, 19, 68, 71 positivism, 11, 12, 14, 25, 26, 28, 33, 43, 57, 77, 111, 113, 128, 131, 154, 160, 188 postmodernism, 187, 194–5 postmodernity, 5 Prensa, La (Buenos Aires), 83, 84 Prensa, La (Lima), 149 Prisma (Lima), 149 progress, 9, 11, 15, 28, 63, 64, 67, 79–80, 120, 122, 128, 165, 192, 193 property, 94–6 Proust, Marcel, 37, 156 PSA, see Argentine Socialist Party public libraries, 83–4 public space, in Latin America, 6, 72, 74, 145, 171–85 public sphere, 75

INDEX

Quesada, Ernesto, 74 Quijano, Aníbal, 23, 109, 123 Quispe, Felipe, 18 quotation, as discursive strategy, 60 race, 155, 195 see also indigenismo racial pessimism, 99 Ramos, Julio, 2, 10, 45, 55 rationalism, 158–65, 187, 189 Razón, La (Lima), 162 reason, 2, 15, 23–4, 47–54, 111, 158–65, 188, 189 reception theory, 9 Reformation, the, 175 relativism, 11, 68, 80, 161–2 religion, 10, 159, 174 Renan, Ernest, 37, 41, 44, 46, 51, 60 Republic of Letters, 7, 45, 55 republicanism, 5, 16 Revista de Occidente (Madrid), 118 Revista Nacional de Literatura y Ciencias Sociales (Uruguay), 36 revolution and modernity, 157, 191 in Bolivia, 19 in Cuba, 19 in Mexico, 20 in Nicaragua, 19 Reyes, Alfonso, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 20, 57, 79, 144, 147, 191, 195 attitudes towards modern life, 111–12 challenge to ideology of progress, 122–5 critique of European theories of history, 118–22 experiences of the modern, 112–18 formal experimentation, 136–8 on ancient Greece, 130–1 on criticism, 134–5 on culture, 122–33 on language, 118, 135–9

277

on indigenous peoples, 133 on Romanticism, 11 style, 136 Reyes, General Bernardo (father), 113, 116 rhetoric, 55, 59, 135 Ricardo, David, 77, 102 Rimbaud, Arthur, 37, 179 Riva Agüero, José de la, 169, 241 n. 121 Rivadavia, Bernardino, 62 Rivera, Diego, 115 Rodó, José Enrique, 8, 9, 10, 14, 20, 24–69, 72, 73, 77, 79, 80, 84, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 124, 126, 127, 128, 139, 141, 145, 147, 163, 166, 190, 191, 193, 244 n. 4 Rodó, José Enrique, Ariel (1900), 24, 25, 26, 29, 35, 44, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 67, 153, 209 n. 59, 217 n. 259 critique of European thought, 39–44 education, 36 formal experimentation, 57–60 impressions of Barcelona, 38 impressions of Brazil, 37–8 impressions of Italy, 38–9 language, 27, 55 Motivos de Proteo (1909), 29, 52–4, 57, 59, 135 on indigenous peoples, 28, 133 politics, 9, 33, 34 reading matter, 36–7 reputation, 25, 27 Rodríguez, Simón, 55 Rojas, Ricardo, 106 Rolland, Romain, 152, 156–7, 159 Romanticism, 11, 14, 16, 42, 43, 57, 111, 128, 166, 167 Romero, José Luis, 82 root metaphors, 56, 136 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 42, 60, 109, 170

278

INDEX

rupture and continuity, 2, 109, 192–3 Russia, 82, 175 Soviet Revolution, 94, 101, 103, 109, 143, 152, 153, 158 urbanization in, 30 Sánchez, Luis Alberto, 146 Sand, George, 37 Santiago de Chile, 30, 66 Santos Chocano, José, 169 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 7, 10, 16, 42, 45, 62, 68, 84, 99, 100, 128 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 23 Savia Moderna (Mexico City), 115 Scheler, Max, 127 Schiller, Friedrich, 37, 49, 54 Schoenberg, Arnold, 37 scholasticism, 114, 159 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 37 science, 28, 78, 80, 112, 114, 132, 158, 162, 187 Searle, John, speech acts, 56 Second International, the, 73, 154 secularization, 50 secularization, in Argentina, 89 secularization, in Uruguay, 32, 89 Shakespeare, William, 37, 52 Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, 25 Shaw, George Bernard, 37, 76 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 83 Shining Path, 144 Simmel, Georg, 4, 155–6 skepticism, 11, 26, 45, 80, 134, 159, 161 Smith, Adam, 41, 77, 102 Social Darwinism, 13, 26, 99, 128 social imaginary, 5–6 social movements, 72 socialism, 73, 77, 145 Socialist International, 85, 90 solidarity, 9, 19, 43, 52, 63, 79, 90, 94, 96, 98, 140, 191, 192, 193, 194

Sontag, Susan, 192 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 115 Sorel, Georges, 154, 160 sovereignty, popular, 2, 11, 71 Spain, 64, 65, 126–7 Spain, Generation of 1898, 37, 154 Spanish-Cuban-American War (1898), 7, 25 speech acts, 56 Spencer, Herbert, 37, 49, 51, 77 Spengler, Oswald, 158 spirituality, 9, 10, 19, 49, 51 Strindberg, August, 37 subjectivity, 3, 4, 15, 40, 43, 47, 52, 78–9, 155, 162, 170, 171, 181, 186, 189, 195 surrealism, 4, 12, 63 synthesis, 2, 48, 58, 61, 66, 76, 79, 124, 125–31, 137, 138, 139, 163, 167, 189, 190, 193, 195 Taine, Hippolyte, 37, 51, 119 Taylor, Charles, 5 technology, 79, 96–7 teleology, 3 Thurner, Mark, 3 Tolstoy, Leo, 23, 36, 37, 50 Touraine, Alain, 21 tradition, 2, 5, 13, 14, 16, 17–18, 21, 34, 36, 63–4, 65, 67, 69, 110–11, 124, 129–30, 143, 164–5, 167–8, 190, 192, 193 transculturation, 110, 131, 192 translation, 136 Trotsky, Leon, 153 UCR (Unión Cívica Radical, aka the Radical Party), 11, 73, 87, 89 Ugarte, Manuel, 26 Unamuno, Miguel de, 76 United States as model of modernity, 14, 17, 81, 89, 93, 99, 100, 101, 192 cultural imperialism, 7

INDEX

in Latin America, 6, 7, 25, 116–17, 139, 148, 153 urbanization in, 30 universalism, 9, 20, 111, 127, 132, 190, 194 Universities, Popular, 115, 177 University of Buenos Aires, 74, 84 University of San Marcos, 148 University Reform Movement, 26, 84, 176–7 Uruguay, 24, 31, 32, 34, 35 intellectual life in, 34–6 political history, 31–4 population, 30 see also modernization utilitarianism, 40, 47, 58, 111, 188 Vallejo, César, 110, 169 Vanguardia, La (newspaper of the PSA), 75, 81, 85, 102–3 Varela, José Pedro, 32 Vasconcelos, José, 10, 23–4, 26, 113, 115, 126, 132, 158, 162 Vásquez Acevedo, Alfredo, 32 Vásquez y Vega, Prudencio, 33 Vaz Farreira, Carlos, 210 n. 84, 211 n. 96

279

Verlaine, Paul, 36, 37 Vico, Giambattista, 120 Vienna, 85, 191 Virgil, 131, 140 Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), 120 Wagner, Richard, 23, 37, 39 War of the Desert (Argentina), 86 War of the Pacific (1879–83), 147 War of the Triple Alliance (1865–70), 31, 86 Wars of Independence, ideology of, 1, 5, 15, 61–2, 168 Weber, Max, 37 Whitman, Walt, 37 Wilde, Oscar, 128, 129 women, and modernity, 140, 195 World Social Forum, 20 Yrigoyen, Hipólito, 87, 89, 106 Zapatistas, the (EZLN), 19, 20 Zea, Leopoldo, 65 Zola, Emile, 35, 37 Zorrilla de San Martín, Juan, 33