Reflections on the narrative of liberal

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Reflections on the narrative of liberal
Neil Reynolds | Columnist profile | E-mail
From Monday's Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Nov. 01, 2010 5:00AM EDT
Last updated Monday, Nov. 01, 2010 1:08PM EDT


Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has described himself as “the bifurcated man” – celebrated for his literary work but chastised for his essentially 19th-century liberal creed. (“When people pay tribute to my novels or essays,” he says, “they typically add: ‘This does not mean that we accept his opinions.’ ”) The left, after all, must protect the purity of its prejudices – and no authentic collectivist can forgive Mr. Vargas Llosa’s commitment to free markets, an indispensible conviction of the classic liberal mind. Mr. Vargas Llosa repudiates this schizophrenic process, insisting that the world accept him as a unified being, “as a man who writes and thinks.” Now, as winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature, Mr. Vargas Llosa writes a new chapter in what one historian has called “the narrative of liberty.”

In a 2005 speech in Washington titled “Confessions of a Liberal,” Mr. Vargas Llosa argued eloquently that the left and the right should work together for a common understanding of what constitutes a “liberal.” He noted the word’s 19th-century origin – specifically to describe Spanish rebels who fought against the Napoleonic occupation. But the word came to mean different things in different places. In the Anglo-Saxon world, “liberal” became synonymous for a time with socialism. In South America, it became synonymous for a time with loose living. (For Mr. Vargas Llosa’s grandmother, it meant a person who didn’t attend mass and who spoke poorly of priests.)

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