The Call of the Tribe. Mario Vargas Llosa

Intellectual autobiography of a Nobel Prize winner in literature.

A cartography of liberal thinkers on the development of ideologies in the 20th century, from the perspective that emerges “when you stand on the shoulders of giants.” The author analyzes his ideological evolution and the fundamental works of prominent scholars who helped him develop a new body of ideas after a major ideological trauma — disillusionment with the Cuban Revolution (and a trip in the 60s to the USSR, where he saw poverty and injustice), and then — a departure from the ideas of Sartre, who inspired the writer in his youth. “If in the 60s, and even later, you wanted to call yourself an intellectual, you could not help but be a Marxist, otherwise you were subjected to devastating obstruction,” — and as a verdict: “Marxism is not an ideology, it is a religion for Western intellectuals.”

The transformation of Llosa's worldview is marked by seven great thinkers with whom he engages in open dialogue. Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel—these giants showed him a tradition of thought that privileges the individual over the tribe, nation, or party, and that upholds freedom of speech as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy.

There is very little similar literature in the world; the causes and consequences of ideological influences on civilization and human thought can only be traced in isolation and from a great distance in time.