Enrique Krauze
AN INTERVIEW WITH ISAIAH BERLIN
Perhaps the most pertinent and passionate readers
of
Isaiah Berlin 's
books (especially
Russian Thinkers,
which was published recently in
Mexico) are Latin American liberal thinkers. History has already said its last
word about Russia. The wealth
of
intellectual life that Berlin draws on
in his book has been wiped away there. But Stavrogin, his enemies and
demons, are alive and well in Latin America today. Many parallels may
be drawn between ninteenth-century Russia and modern-day Latin America:
a dominant peasant population with a rich and indigenous culture; the
absence oj a Renaissance tradition; social and economic inequality on a
vast scale. There are marry autocratic right-wing regimes in South America
today, not unlike the tsarist regimes oj the mid-nineteenth century,
and at least one lejt-wing autocratic regime, not unlike that oj the
present USSR.
Under these circumstances, our very jew liberal thinkers (people
like Romulo Betancourt, Daniel
COStO
Villegas, Ernesto Sabato,
Octavio Paz, Mario Uzrgas Llosa) have been jacing a growing isolation.
On the one hand there is despair, ignorance, even contempt jor liberal
methods, values, and ideas: a lack oj conjidence in the ability to
overthrow tyrannical regimes that are built on inequality, injustice,
and brute jorce. On the other there is a growing, almost religious,
fanaticism jor a vulgarized jorm oj Marxism. Highly ideological
guerrillas in El Salvador are nowadays acting-or reacting-with an
utter nihilism and contempt jor human life-albeit in the name oj
History and the masses-which only Dostoevsky could envisage.
Berlin's books and ideas are variations on the theme
of
liberty. This is
why to hear him now is important, especially in Mexico, which has
become recently an intellectual melting pot where many Latin American exiles
live. His voice
is
also particularly important in Spain, a country that
has
lately recovered its jreedom and is slowly but surely learning the blessings
This interview is reprinted, in somewhat altered form, from
Vuelta,
Vol. 6, No. 66
(May 1982), the Mexican journal edited by Octavio Paz. Although the initial focus
is on the relation ofIsaiah Berlin's thought to that of Latin American intellectuals,
Berlin's comments always have a large intellectual resonance, which is why we
print this conversation here in English for the first time.
