Read Online Redeemers by Enrique Krauze - Free Book Online

hierarchies, and clerical content that dominated their instruction. They sought political autonomy for the university, for the first time in Latin America; the condition is now the norm in the public universities of Latin America (though not under dictatorships). Autonomy means among other things that the armed power of the state cannot blithely invade the precincts of the university. The students of Córdoba, powered by the new transnational respect for their status, were fighting for that goal, and they were also demanding the right to participate in the government of the university. They experienced those days of struggle as if they were living through the October Days of revolution in Russia in the previous year. The students of Córdoba were victorious, and their triumph accomplished even more, initiating a movement of university reform throughout the continent, spearheaded by students who were willing to take to the streets.
    There were three major intellectual architects of the reform in Córdoba. The socialist politicians Alfredo Palacios and Manuel Ugarte and the student leader Deodoro Roca, who would later formulate his theory of the “complete man” ( hombre íntegro ), a conception of human improvement and possible perfection. They were all affected by the impulse of arielismo . The countries of Latin America, though technologically backward, would not peacefully accept the role of mere material nourishment for the great powers. At least in this wave of student assertiveness that crossed national borders, the intellectual tide of anti-Yankeeism had succeeded in uniting liberals and conservatives, Catholics and freethinkers, and an incipient left of socialists, anarchists, and Marxists. Latin American nationalism was beginning to set its stakes down on the table of an entire continent. Shared race and culture were the motivating value it drew from Rodó’s brief and thoughtful book. The conception was a hopeful, even glorious one: a brotherhood that could not be denied.
    Â 
    DESPITE THE rhetorical pulse of some of his pages, José Enrique Rodó was certainly not an opponent of democracy. The tone of Ariel is one of lofty, professorial reflection, not invective. Some of its passages can be read as eulogies of American democracy, seen as a form of progress that must be complemented, purified, elevated through culture. Moreover, Rodó, in his later parliamentary career (he was elected three times to the Uruguayan Congress), gave ample evidence of democratic coherence and social sensitivity. But an aristocratic sensibility dominates Ariel . There is no political criticism of democracy. The criticism is more precisely aesthetic:
    Â 
    The opposition between the regime of democracy and the elevated life of the spirit is an unfortunate reality when that regime comes to mean a disregard of legitimate inequalities and the substitution of a mechanical conception of government for the faith in heroism —in the sense meant by Carlyle. Everything that is more than an element of material superiority and economic prosperity takes on, within civilization, a prominence which will not fail to be leveled when moral authority belongs to the spirit of mediocrity.
    Â 
    In his cultural homily Rodó’s inspiration was Renan but in his political ideas it was the Scottish rhetorician of inequality, Thomas Carlyle. The considerable prominence of Carlyle in the history of Latin American thought may seem surprising to those raised in the American (or even English) intellectual tradition. It is a predilection associated with Latin American authoritarianism and especially the cult of the leader. In Rodó’s El mirador de Próspero (Prospero’s Balcony), which he published in 1913, he offers literary portraits of various heroic figures of Spanish America, among them Garibaldi, that “visionary of action” (who took part in the Uruguayan Civil War); Juan Carlos Gómez, the Uruguayan