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PARTISAN REVIEW
organization; Ockhamist and Nominalist in mentality ; liberal in ideol–
ogy; naturalist in disposition.
Veliz expresses a grudgingly explicit admiration for the cultural sin–
glemindedness of the Spanish Counter-Reformation. He considers it, to–
gether with the English Industrial Revolution and the Russian
Communist Revolution , as one of the three imperial ventures of the
modern Western world that "have either claimed or attained plausibility
as universal entities." But a nearly Platonic dialectic of " the same" versus
"the other" presides over the dichotomy between the alternative cul–
tural-economic responses to the challenge of modernity, in Veliz's for–
mulation . It leaves no room for analytical or evaluative ambivalence. The
New World, and not just in America, belongs completely to the Gothic
fox. This manichean caricature, stimulating as it is as an intellectual de–
vice, raises many unanswered questions.
Is the New World so un-new as to be simply the orchestration of
two European themes? The uniqueness of the United States, so deeply
felt by its Founding Fathers, is barely suggested in terms of the
"Hellenistic aftermath." The modern skyscrapers of Manhattan and
Chicago are reduced to " the ultimate Gothic statements of our modern
industrial moment."
Veliz himself admits to "minimizing unacceptably the role of the
United States" and does not examine it in depth . The uniqueness of the
"republic of nations" which Bolivar envisaged in Latin America is mostly
seen through the prism of the Indies invented by the Castilian monarchy.
Its multi-ethnic
mes tizaj e
is not analyzed at all, either in terms of its
original components - Indians of various ethnic groups, Spaniards of
various regions and blacks of various African peoples - or in terms of
succeeding immigrations from Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.
Neither are the tensions and conflicts, dating from colonial times , be–
tween the formal structures, political, economic or cultural, and the in–
formal, vital social realities acknowledged. Nor is the diversity of the
different nations taken into account. Only in the case of Chile is its pur–
ported English-like "insularity with respect to the mainland of Latin
America" given as an explanation of its present economic prowess. Yet,
in fact its political variations from conservative, to liberal, to radical , to
Christian Democrat, to socialist, to military, to democratic
"concertaci6n," summarize almost in textbook manner the historical
Latin American political options in a way which is hardly insular.
In other words, the English Gothic fox and the Spanish Baroque
hedgehog suffered significant mutations upon leaving their original habi–
tat for a new one. These mutations are not really recognized in Veliz's
