Vargas Llosa reveals with enthusiasm and aplomb the political and social beliefs that have found homes in his work.
The celebrated author’s personal take on the evolution of his liberal ideas.
Vargas Llosa describes this thoughtful, reflective book as an autobiographical and intellectual road map to his journey from the “Marxism and Sartrean existentialism of my youth to the liberalism of my mature years.” The author laid his political beliefs on the line when he ran for president of Peru in 1987 and when he prominently spoke of defending liberal democracy in his Nobel speech in 2010. He returns to Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station as inspiration, seeking to do for liberalism what Wilson did for socialism. The map consists of biographies and detailed discussions of thinkers who helped shape Vargas Llosa’s political education. He begins with Adam Smith, the “father of liberalism,” focusing on the “oceanic” The Wealth of Nations, which shows how the free market “brings progress to nations,” fostering the “economic freedom [that] upholds and drives all other freedoms.” Vargas Llosa believes that Spain’s José Ortega y Gasset, the “most intelligent and elegant liberal philosophers of the twentieth century,” has been unjustly overlooked and deserves greater recognition. He admits that Friedrich von Hayek is one of the three modern thinkers to whom he owes the most, and Hayek’s last book, The Fatal Conceit (1988), is “one of the most important works of the twentieth century.” Thanks to The Open Society and Its Enemies, an “absolute masterpiece,” Karl Popper was the “most daring liberal thinker of his age” despite “opaque and meandering prose” and his hatred of TV. Vargas Llosa is also a staunch supporter of the “pragmatic realism and the reformist and liberal ideas” of Raymond Aron. The author concludes with Isaiah Berlin, the “extraordinarily erudite political thinker and social philosopher”; and Jean-François Revel, one of liberal culture’s “most talented and battle-hardened combatants.”
Vargas Llosa reveals with enthusiasm and aplomb the political and social beliefs that have found homes in his work.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-11805-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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