Vol. 53 No. 4 1986 - page 515

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
515
lization, was an immediate result of this flowering of commercial and
industrial activity, of the opening and consolidation of markets. But
the most crucial consequence of the acceleration of history brought
on by free trade and free production is the appearance of man in the
singular, as a unique individual.
Weare quite accustomed to saying and hearing that men are
born equal, possessing inalienable rights; and that each man, as a
moral and legal entity and a subject of history, is no less than the
center of the world . So accustomed are we, that we frequently forget
that this notion of the sovereign individual is, in truth, so recent as to
be almost exotic, and rather forced upon a civilization throughout
whose history there always predominated a collectivist vision, al–
though voiced in different ways and with different concepts. This
vision saw man as a herd, an undifferentiated mass, an anonymous
group, given distinguishing features by the task - that is, the servi–
tude - assigned him in the social mechanism, and to which he was
generally bound from birth to death, like a donkey tethered to a
water wheel.
The individual is as much a product of freedom as the
Iliad
or
Hamlet, or the great scientific discoveries of the modern age . Only
in modern times does man distinguish and free himself from the ser–
vile placenta which had gripped him since the remote prehistoric
days of the herd. Only then did he acquire an individual face and a
sphere of his own, when the proliferation of uncontrolled economic,
social, and artistic activities and functions which allow and indeed
require the exercise of the individual's spontaneity and fantasy, stim–
ulated the evolution of philosophical and political thought, until that
notion which breaks with the entire historical tradition of mankind
was established: that of the sovereign individual. Ideas of social jus–
tice, egalitarian utopias, the rights of man, and of course, the theory
and practice of democracy, are the most fertile blossomings of the
doctrine which made the individual, that invisible speck, the center
of the universe.
To have reached the point of claiming the individual as an entity
possessing rights and duties, around and in service to whom the life
of the community should be organized: that is, without doubt, the
culmination of our human history which Benedetto Croce defined,
in an evocative metaphor, as an heroic exploit of freedom.
This lovely metaphor, however, only properly embraces the
culture in which we Latin Americans have been born and have moved
since Columbus's three caravels, in their voyage to the land of spices,
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