The Call of the Tribe

In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that haveshaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years.The Nobel Laureate maps out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop anew body of ideas after the great ideological traumas of his disenchantmentwith the Cuban Revolution and departure from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre,the author who most inspired Vargas Llosa in his youth.

Writers like Adam Smith, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlinhelped the author navigate through these uneasy years of intellectual formation.They showed him another school of thought that placed the individualbefore the tribe, nation, class or party, and defended freedom of expression asa fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. The Call of the Tribe documentsVargas Llosa's engagement with their work and charts the evolutionof his personal and philosophical ideology.Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world's greatest living novelists, but, asClive James wrote in Cultural Amnesia, his 'true strength' is 'undoubtedlyin the essay'.