Wellsprings.

• Author: Cole, Julio H.
• Position: Book review

Wellsprings

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Pp. 202. $17.95 cloth.

Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the world's greatest living writers, is also well known, especially in Spain and Latin America, as a great defender of the ideals of a free society. In the Spanish-speaking world, he is therefore more than a great writer; he is also a public intellectual in the real sense of that much abused expression, and his regularly aired opinions on political events (as well as on literature, culture, and the arts) are a fixture of the intellectual life of these regions. His writing is always intelligent and urbane. Moreover, it is always informed by a definite classical-liberal point of view. Indeed, he may well be the most prominent expositor of this point of view in the Spanish language today.

The first three chapters of Wellsprings constitute the author's "Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature," delivered at Emory University in 2006. These lectures deal with "three masters" of Spanish letters: Miguel de Cervantes, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jos6 Ortega y Gasser. The chapters on Cervantes and Borges, perhaps predictably, deal with literary matters for the most part, but in the chapter on Ortega the stress is on political thought. Here Vargas Llosa adds what, to many, might seem an unexpected twist: he argues that this presently much-neglected Spanish philosopher should be regarded as a key figure in the development of the liberal tradition. To be sure, Ortega was not much interested in economic matters, and this omission was a shortcoming in his approach to social problems, but Vargas Llosa himself has often pointed out that classical liberalism includes much more than free-market economics:

Contemporary liberal thought has much to learn from the ideas of Ortega y Gasset. Above all, to rediscover that--contrary to what those people bent on reducing liberalism to an economic recipe for free markets, low tariffs, controlled government spending and the privatization of business, suppose--liberalism is, above all, an attitude toward life and society based on tolerance and coexistence, on respect for the rich history and unique experiences of different cultures, and on a firm defense of liberty.... Economic freedom is a key element of the liberal doctrine, but certainly not the only one. We of course regret that many liberals of Ortega's generation were unaware of it. However, it is a no less serious mistake to reduce...