THE NEW WORLD OF THE GOTHIC FOX
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thoughts in response?
Claudio Veliz:
Yes, I would like to respond to some of the
comments. In a sense, the validity of my thesis has been proved this
morning by the two commentators, as exemplars of the positions of the
Gothic fox and of the Baroque hedgehog. As Professor Scruton stated,
it is important to note that metaphors necessarily are caricatures. Partly
because human beings arc cultural creatures, and partly because of
original sin, over time we have found it very difficult to achieve
precision. Precision escapes us, unless we are the makers of it.
Mathematics is precise because we invented it. But there is a world that
we didn't make, which is beyond our comprehension. History, however,
is made by us, so we can enter into it in ways that are more sympathetic
and in a sense more plausible. The use of metaphor is one of the means
of getting into history. We do it all the time: "the decline and fall" of
the Roman empire; the country which is "booming." The architectural
connotation of my metaphors have to be taken with a grain of salt,
since there are many examples which are not consistent with its
formulation. Yet without pushing the architectural sense too far, I think
it is clear that the Baroque contains within itself an "order of disorder,"
which, however, is in equilibrium.
As to Dr. Arias's observations: the free market is itself an artifact. It is
a manner of going about things, a cultural artifact. We too have a
manner of going about things. In Latin America, for the second time,
we arc proving that we are very good consumers of European things, of
things from elsewhere. We had, give or take a few years, about one
hundred years of liberal free-market economic policies in the second half
of the nineteenth century, until the Great Depression. In a previous
book, I called it "the Liberal Pause." We embraced liberalism because we
admired European free-market liberalism. The zenith of this love affair
with liberalism was reached when France and Britain signed the free
trade agreement in 1863, and by that time all of Latin America came
aboard saying, we must embrace the liberal tenets. But it didn't work...
Latin Americans held that this was one of the reasons why industrial–
ization didn't take off in their countries. At that time we decided to
lower tariff barriers and open ourselves to world trade. Of course we
were overwhelmed with manufactured goods from the industrial world.
So this isn't the first time we have embraced liberalism or free-market
polices; it is the second time. This time it appears in the guise of another
artifact from the workhouse of the Gothic fox. The whole world is em–
bracing free market economics right now. There is virtually no alterna–
tive. Everyone is doing it. But we are doing so with varying degrees of
