The Call of the Tribe

The intellectual autobiography of Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa.

"Since its origins, liberal doctrine has represented the most advanced forms of democratic culture and what has most defended us from the inextinguishable 'call of the tribe.' This book would like to contribute a grain of sand to that indispensable task."

The difference between The Call of the Tribe and other books such as A Fish in the Water is that here the protagonist is not the author's experiences, but rather the readings that shaped his way of thinking and seeing the world over the last fifty years. The Peruvian Nobel laureate has mapped out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop a new body of ideas after the great ideological trauma that, on the one hand, involved disillusionment with the Cuban Revolution and, on the other, a distancing from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author who had most inspired him in his youth.

Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel were of enormous help to the author during those years of unease, showing him another tradition of thought that privileged the individual over the tribe, nation, class, or party, and that defended freedom of expression as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy.

Reviews:
"Having described the process of intellectual maturation and appreciative valuing of democracy, Vargas Llosa enters into dialogue with seven pinnacles of thought and does so with his magnificent prose. [...] The reader, who may already be aware of those who have enlightened him, finds the pleasant surprise of an original treatment."
Bernabé Sarabia, El Cultural

"A more than valuable contribution to the current political debate, in an impoverished intellectual environment where ideas are constantly replaced by whims and opinions by tweets. A thought that loudly demands the recovery of common sense that Vargas Llosa misses and which, as Ortega y Gasset already pointed out, turns out to be generally the least common of senses."
Juan Luis Cebrián, El País

"We are faced with an essay without academic intensity, which reads like a novel and provides an interesting roadmap of readings for all those who are far removed from liberalism."
José Ángel López, Que Leer