"The Call of the Tribe"

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Mario Vargas LLosa, "The Call of the Tribe" (스페인어 2018; John King 영역본 2023)

 

'부족의 부름으로부터의 자유'가 책의 내용을 말해주는 더 친절한 제목이겠다.

 

자유주의자(liberalist) Mario Vargas LLosa가 그들의 책이나 칼럼을 읽으면서 가장 많은 영향을 받은, '부족의 부름'(국가주의, 파시즘, 공산주의, 독재, 등)에 저항한, 일곱 자유주의자에 대해 쓴 책이다.

 

"[A]n essay that ... would trace the evolution of liberal ideas through their main exponents and the the historical and social events that caused them to spread throughout the world." (p. 3)

 

 

CONTENTS

 

The Call Of Tribe    3

Adam Smith (1723-1790)    21

José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)    57

Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)    85

Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994)    123

Raymond Aron (1905-1983)    179

Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997)    207

Jean-François Revel (1924-2006)    249

 

Acknowledgements    277

 

 

"Liberalism is not dogmatic; it knows that reality is complex and that often ideas and political programs must adapt to this reality." (p, 16)

 

"The tolerance shown by [Adam] Smith to his opponents is perhaps the most admirable of all the traits of liberal doctrine: accepting that this doctrine might be wrong and its opponent might be right." (p. 17)

 

"... taking on a collective identity, becoming just a 'part of the tribe.' The mass, in Ortega's book [Thr revolt of the Masses], is a group of individuals who have become deindiviualized, who have stopped being freethinking human entities and have dissolved into an amalgam that thinks and acts for them, more through conditioned reflexes -- emotions, instincts, passions -- than through reason." (p. 65)

 

For Hayek, intellectuals have been inate constructivists and, for that reason, great enemies of civilization. (p. 102)

 

"[H]e [Karl Popper] wrote ...: 'I opposed Zionism initially because I was against any form of nationalism, but I never expected the Zionists to become racists. It makes me feel ashamed in my origin. I feel responsible for the deeds of israeli nationalists.'" (p. 125)

 

"It [The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)] offers a hugely detailed description and a strong denunciation of the tradition that he called 'historicist,' which begins with Plato, is revitalizes in the nineteenth century, enriched by the work of Hegel , and reaches its apogee with Marx." (p. 128)

 

"Isaiah Berlin, who loved ideas so much and moved among them with such ease, was always convinced that it is ideas that must give way if they come into contradiction with human reality, since if the reverse occurs, the streets are filled with guillotines and firing-squad walls and the reign of the censors and the police begins." (p. 211)

 

"The genuine humanist tradition, which Revel represented so well, is the only thing that can stop, or at least temper, the harmful effects on the cultural life of a country of these deformations -- lack of science, pseudo-knowledge, artifice that passes itself as creative thought -- that are the unequivocal signs of its decline." (p. 267)

 

 

이 책을 읽으면서 드는 안타까움 하나는, 초중고나 대학 시절에 학생들이 좋은 책을 많이 읽지 않는 게 우리 교육의 가장 모자라는 것들에 들 텐데 우리 학교 교육이 사실상 그걸 강요하고 있는 면이 강하다는 거다.

 

"But the most important thing that happened to him[Adam Smith] in those years in Oxford was that he became acquainted with the work of David Hume ... reading the Treatise of Human Nature.... He praised him ... in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)." (p. 23)

 

"Reading Ortega is always a joy, an aesthetic pleasure." (p. 74) "One of his most famous phrases was 'Clarity is the courtesy of the philosopher,' a maxim that he always adhered to when it came to writing." (p. 76)

 

"Friedrich von Hayek... An apathetic student but voracious reader, a walker and mountain climber from his youth through to old age." (p. 85)

 

"And among liberals, along with Ortega y Gasset, he[Isaiah berlin] was the best writer. His style is as transparent ane readable as that of Stendhal ... and, quite frequently, the richness and vividness of his ideas, his quotations, and his examples, the liveliness and elegance with which he organized his thought, give his essays a novelistic quality, full of infectious humanity." (p. 246)

 

 

Mario Vargas Llosa의 소설 "The Feast of the Goat"도 재밌게 읽었다. 마침 3월 28일이 그의 생일이어서 그날 읽은 Llosa에 대한 Writer's Almanac 글도 흥미로웠다.