Claiming Liberalism - Art. Sobre Krauze PDF

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States
Claiming Liberalism: Enrique Krauze, Vuelta, Letras Libres, and the Reconfigurations of
the Mexican Intellectual Class
Author(s): Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Source: Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Winter 2010), pp. 47-78
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the University of California
Institute for Mexico and the United States and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
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MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 47
Claiming Liberalism: Enrique Krauze,

Vuelta, Letras Libres, and the Reconfigurations
of the Mexican Intellectual Class
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Washington University in St. Louis
This article analyzes the impact that Enrique Krauze, Vuelta and Letras Libres
have had in the reconfiguration of the figure of the public intellectual in Mex-
ico, as well as their role in the formulation of liberalism from Mexico. The arti-
cle traces the different configurations of intellectual practice implicit in both
magazines, as well as the intellectual genealogies traced both by the different
authors published by them, and by the intellectual sources of Krauze’s work.
The text concludes with a reflection on the impact of this intellectual line in the
relationship between culture and the public intellectual in today’s Mexico.
Este artículo analiza el impacto que Enrique Krauze y las revistas Vuelta y Letras
Libres han tenido en la reconfiguración de la figura del intelectual público en
México, así como su rol en la formulación del liberalismo desde México. El
artículo rastrea las distintas configuraciones de la práctica intelectual implícita
en varias revistas, así como las genealogías intelectuales trazadas tanto por las
nóminas de autores publicados por ambas, como por las fuentes intelectuales
del trabajo de Krauze. El texto concluye con una reflexión del impacto de esta
línea intelectual en la relación entre cultura e intelectual público en el México
de hoy.
Key Words: Enrique Krauze, Octavio Paz, Vuelta, Letras Libres, intellectuals,
liberalism, organic intellectual, public intellectual, democracy, public sphere.
Palabras clave: Enrique Krauze, Octavio Paz, Vuelta, Letras Libres, intelectuales,
liberalismo, intelectual orgánico, intelectual público, democracia, esfera pública.
Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 26, Issue 1, Winter 2010, pages 47–78. ISSN 0742-9797
electronic ISSN 1533-8320. ©2010 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the Uni-
versity of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprint
info.asp. DOI: 10.1525/msem.2010.26.1.47
47
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 48
48 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos
The 2006 election in Mexico marked a series of major shifts in the in-
tellectual classes in Mexico. In the middle of the electoral battle, Enrique
Krauze, one of Mexico’s preeminent public intellectuals, authored of one
of the most influential essays written during the campaign period. En-
titled “El Mesías Tropical,” Krauze’s text laid out a scathing critique of
Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the historical claims behind his cam-
paign. Krauze painted López Obrador as an “hombre sin mundo”whose
stated admiration for Lázaro Cárdenas was merely superficial. Accord-
ing to Krauze, while “Lázaro Cárdenas fue un presidente popular pero
no populista [. . . [d]e temple suave, pacífico y moderado,” López
Obrador was a man “[d]e temple rudo, combativo y apasionado[;] su
vía para emular a Cárdenas consistió en ofrecer un abanico de provi-
siones gratuitas.”1 In other words, Krauze based his argument on the
contrast between Cárdenas’s soft-spoken persona and his role in found-
ing the ejido and other structures of the modern Mexican State to López
Obrador’s fiery rhetoric and his policy of giving away money to senior
citizens. Krauze’s conclusion was devastating. After pointedly stating
that “México no es Venezuela” because Mexico’s political system was
constructed to limit presidential power—“la division de poderes, la in-
dependencia del poder judicial, la libertad de opinión en la prensa y en
los medios, el Banco de México, el IFE”—Krauze closed his argument
with a warning:
Costó casi un siglo transitar pacíficamente a la democracia. El mexicano lo sabe
y lo valora. De optar por la movilización interminable, potencialmente revolu-
cionaria, López Obrador jugará con un fuego que acabará por devorarlo. Y de
llegar al poder, el “hombre maná,”que se ha propuesto purificar, de una vez por
todas, la existencia de México, descubrirá más tarde o temprano que los países
no se purifican. En todo caso se mejoran. Descubrirá que el mundo existe fuera
de Tabasco y que México es parte del mundo. Descubrirá que para gobernar
democráticamente a México, no solo tendrá que pasar del trópico al Altiplano,
sino del Altiplano a la aldea global. En uno u otro caso, la desilusión de las ex-
pectativas mesiánicas sobrevendrá inevitablemente. En cambio la democracia y
la fe sobrevivirán, cada una en su esfera propia. Pero en el trance, México habrá
perdido años irrecuperables.2
Krauze’s text is striking for many reasons. His “tropical” metaphor not
only elides the fact that López Obrador was the mayor of Mexico City
for six years, but also is based on the idea that someone who comes from
those regions that have benefited the least from the neoliberal model,
like López Obrador’s home state of Tabasco, is nothing but a man with-
out history, an “hombre maná”who belongs to the lore of the jungle and
1. Enrique Krauze, “El mesías tropical,” Letras Libres ( June 2006), 16.
2. Krauze, “El mesías tropical,” 24.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 49
Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 49
who has no possible role in a globalized Mexico. Krauze’s argument ba-

sically boils down to the idea that any figure who questions the mod-
ernizing path put forth by the neoliberal model is essentially a threat to
Mexico, a claim that made its way to television in the form of a series of
controversial ads paid for by right-wing business organizations.
Furthermore, Krauze uses a revisionist view of Mexican history—
for example, the idea that Cárdenas was not really a populist—to defend
a notion of liberal democracy based on the dictates of the lettered city,
whose role is to defend the country against a populist wave that, in
Krauze’s view, had already reached alarming levels of success in Vene-
zuela. Krauze considers Chávez such a cautionary tale that he devoted
a book, El poder y el delirio,3 to carefully debunking Chávez’s ideolog-
ical claims. His perspective is a force to be reckoned with in contem-
porary Mexico. Ultimately, “El Mesías Tropical” was part of an offensive
that ultimately led to López Obrador’s controversial and even questioned
defeat in the July election. Krauze’s portrayal of the PRD candidate not
only played a part in the outcome, but also became the framework for
subsequent works about him. To be sure, Krauze was not the first per-
son to use the word “Messiah”in reference to Andrés Manuel López Obra-
dor; a recent English-language academic biography of López Obrador,
written by George W. Grayson, is entitled Mexican Messiah.4 However,
Krauze’s article gave the term strong footing in the Mexican political
imagination.
Beyond the ephemeral issues regarding the 2006 election, “El Mesías
Tropical”may also be read as a symptomatic moment in the post-PRI re-
configuration of the Mexican intelligentsia. In the three decades that fol-
lowed the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, most members of the intellectual
class, regardless of political affiliation, were engaged in the project of
constructing a civil sphere outside the hegemonic reach of the PRI, and
as Patricia Cabrera López has argued, “[l]a definición del intelectual y su
papel en México, predominantemente en el campo cultural de los años
setenta, ponía énfasis en la obligada independencia del Estado.”5 In this
landscape, intellectuals from both left and right claimed the 1968 mas-
sacre, as well as the structures of social organization created in the wake
of the 1985 earthquake, as part of their own genealogy. By 2006, how-
ever, this common intellectual position had eroded, mostly as a result of
3. Enrique Krauze, El poder y el delirio (Mexico: Tusquets, 2008).

4. George W. Grayson, Mexican Messiah. Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Univer-
sity Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). I want to thank the peer reviewer
of this article for clarifying that Grayson’s use of the term preceded Krauze’s.
5. Patricia Cabrera López, Una inquietud de amanecer. Literatura y política en
México 1962–1987 (Mexico: Plaza y Valdés / Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
2006), 350.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 50
Vicente Fox’s failure to consolidate his electoral victory into a functional

governing consensus that could cross party lines. Thus, Krauze delin-
eates “El Mesías Tropical”as an intellectual stance that follows a core tra-
dition of liberal intellectual practices in post-revolutionary Mexico. In
what follows, I will dissect this tradition in order to describe the theoreti-
cal and critical consequences of intellectual interventions like Krauze’s.
To this end, I have divided the remaining part of this essay in two sec-
tions. First, I will briefly trace the formative philosophical components
manifested in Krauze’s work by discussing its origins in Plural and Vuelta
and their contributions to a line of a liberal intellectual practice that be-
gan with the work of French thinker Julien Benda. Second, I will discuss
the elements that compose the critical genealogies of Letras Libres, the
journal for which Krauze is editor-in-chief, as well as the ways in which
Krauze and other contributors to Letras Libres articulate intellectual
practices that, in my view, operate in a larger debate on the meaning of
liberalism in contemporary Mexico.
Defining the “intellectual” in any context is a slippery task that re-
quires engaging with critical and theoretical literatures that have pro-
duced notions quite distinct from each other. Part of the problem lies in
the fact that most definitions of the “intellectual” have been created by
thinkers and scholars who identify with their own constructs. Conse-
quently, these definitions tend to respond more to specific horizons of
cultural production than to a theory of the intellectual at large. As Car-
los Altamirano argues, “[e]l concepto de intelectual no tiene un signifi-
cado establecido: es multívoco, polémico y de límites imprecisos como
el conjunto social que se busca identificar con la denominación de int-
electuales.”6 In these terms, understanding the genealogy of an intel-
lectual practice such as the one articulated by Krauze requires a careful
examination of the diverse understandings of the intellectual produced
by critical literature and the constructive history of the operative defi-
nitions of intellectual practice in the specific context of the Mexican cul-
tural field.
In one of the best systematizations of the literature around the fig-
ure of the “intellectual,” sociologists Charles Kurzman and Lynn Owens
propose a taxonomy of these notions based on the work of three foun-
dational authors. First, Kurzman and Owens speak of “intellectuals as
class-in-themselves.” Based on the debates about the Dreyfus Affair in
France and, more particularly, on Julien Benda’s 1927 book La trahison
des clercs, this view contends that intellectuals are defined by an ethics
centered on their autonomy both from political power and from an eco-
6. Carlos Altamirano, Intelectuales.Notas de investigación, Enciclopedia latinoameri-

cana de sociocultura y comunicación 36 (Bogotá: Norma, 2006), 17.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 51
nomic means of production. Second, based mostly on the work of An-

tonio Gramsci, Kurzman and Owens speak of “intellectuals as class-
bound.”Going against the grain of Benda’s argument, Gramsci proposes
that the term “intellectual” encompasses a larger scope of social actors.
Thus, Gramsci contends that these actors are ultimately subject to other
social groups. Finally, the third category proposed by Kurzman and
Owens, based on works by Karl Mannheim, is “intellectuals as class-less.”
In Mannheim’s view, intellectuals are neither a class in themselves nor
the members of a predefined class; instead, they are defined precisely
by their lack of social attachment and their capacity to transcend any
definition by class through their work.7
The most salient point in this taxonomy—which, according to
Kurzman and Owens, remains the basic framework through which most
current theories of the intellectual may be understood—lies precisely
in the fact that Benda, Gramsci, and Mannheim constructed their defi-
nitions as a result of their own intellectual and ideological engagements,
rather than articulating a practice based on preexisting theories. This
point applies even to more recent analyses of the role of the intellectual
in society, from Edward Said’s idea of the intellectual as the one who
“speaks truth to power” to Zygmunt Bauman’s distinction between
“legislators” and “interpreters.”8 Ultimately, cases like the one I analyze
in this essay call for specifying which of these taxonomical elements
apply to Mexico and how the practices of intellectuals within a given
sociohistorical situation emerge into both a notion and a practice of the
intellectual.
The modern idea of the intellectual in Mexico dates back to the early
1930s and, most particularly, to the 1932 controversy around the role
of literature in the formation of a national culture in the wake of the Mex-
ican Revolution. For reasons of space, I will not lay out the controversy
in these pages, since I have done so extensively elsewhere.9 The point
I want to highlight from this foundational moment is the fact that,
through various interventions from intellectuals like Jorge Cuesta and
Alfonso Reyes, the literary figures of the 1930s decidedly adopted the
stance of being a class-in-itself. Benda’s La trahison des clercs, widely
read due to its serialization in the Nouvelle Revue Française and the
7. Charles Kurzman and Lynn Owens, “The Sociology of Intellectuals,” Annual Re-
view of Sociology 28 (2002): 64–67.
8. See Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1994),
and Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters. On Modernity, Post-Modernity and
Intellectuals (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
9. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la mo-
dernidad literaria mexicana (1917–1959), Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 47
( West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), ch. 2.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 52
publication of translated excerpts in Cuesta’s journal Examen, played a

crucial role in the self-fashioning of the intellectual class in Mexico. Benda
attacked both the Marxist intellectuals of his time and the right-wing na-
tionalism of figures such as Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras and
lamented the emergence of an intellectual class complicit with ideo-
logical projects tied to nationalism, communism, and even to racist en-
deavors. Although Benda himself was not entirely innocent of ques-
tionable intellectual pursuits, such as those related to anti-Semitism,10
he was ultimately able to articulate an ethical code for intellectual prac-
tices that far transcended the French context and became a highly in-
fluential model for intellectuals in countries like Mexico and the United
States.11 In a key passage of his book, Benda argues for intellectuals who
act as “les officiantes de la justice abstraite,”by not subjecting themselves
to “aucune passion pour un objet terrestre.”12 Edward Said has thus as-
sessed Benda’s work:
[D]eep in the combative rhetoric of Benda’s basically very conservative work is
to be found this figure of the intellectual as being set apart, someone able to
speak the truth to power, a crusty, eloquent, fantastically courageous and angry
individual for whom no worldly power is too big and too imposing to be criti-
cized and pointedly taken to task.13
In the context of the nationalist and revolutionary imperatives that

loomed large in the works of many intellectuals of the 1930s, Benda pro-
vided figures like Cuesta and the Contemporáneos group with the lan-
guage to articulate a cultural practice that could simultaneously operate
from an institutionalized structure and claim intellectual autonomy.
Thus, the notion of the intellectual put forward by Benda was translated
in Mexico as a self-conception of intellectual work that allowed for the
possibility of direct political participation and created a remarkably open
space for writers and intellectuals to engage and even resist the hege-
monic mechanisms of the Mexican State. The impact of this under-
standing of intellectual practice in Mexico runs so deep that the most
complete sociological study of the relationship between intellectuals and
politics in twentieth-century Mexico, Annick Lempérière’s Intellectuels,
Etat et société au Mexique XXe siècle, invokes Benda’s work by using
10. Louis Menand, American Studies (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2002), 67.
11. See Ray Nichols, Treason, Tradition and the Intellectual. Julien Benda and Po-
litical Discourse (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), and Herbert Read, Julien
Benda and the New Humanism, University of Washington Chapbooks 37 (Seattle: Uni-
versity of Washington, 1930).
12. Julien Benda La trahison des clercs (Paris: Grasset, 1927). 63.
13. Said, Representations, 8.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 53
the term “les clercs de la nation” as a subtitle.14 Furthermore, this his-

torical foundation is particularly important because it helps in under-
standing Cuesta’s most important disciple, and Krauze’s fundamental
precursor, Octavio Paz.
While Cuesta’s reading and publication of Benda constituted the ba-
sis of a theory of the intellectual in Mexico, Paz’s continuous interven-
tions in the cultural field provided its practice. Paz does not quote Benda
directly in most of his political writings, but the paradigm of the intel-
lectual described up to this point looms large even in his early works.
His early departure from Marxist ideology and his adherence to a con-
sistently critical, and sometimes contradictory, version of liberalism as
a political alternative to both Stalinism and fascism have been described
by most of his intellectual biographers.15 Paz’s views were in many ways
congruent with Benda’s own politics. In this context, Paz lamented in
1950 the fact that “la intelligentsia mexicana, en su conjunto, no ha po-
dido o no ha sabido utilizar las armas propias del intelectual: la crítica,
el examen, el juicio.”16 In this particular case, Paz echoed the terminol-
ogy that Cuesta drew from Benda: “examen”was the word used by Cuesta
to name his journal. Paz, however, departed from Cuesta’s reading of
Benda in two fundamental ways. First, Paz took Benda’s work a step fur-
ther by claiming writers as a special category within the intellectual class,
thus heightening the status of the writer as artist: “La historia de la lite-
ratura moderna [. . .] es la historia de una larga pasión desdichada por
la política.”17 By echoing an essentially romantic notion of the writer as
an agent of art who only intervenes in politics due to a “pasión des-
dichada,” Paz paradoxically constructed literature as a privileged plat-
form for the discussion of the political, since “[l]a palabra del escritor
tiene fuerza porque brota de una situación de no-fuerza.”18 As a result
of this idea, Paz advocated a more proactive role for the literary intel-
lectual in society. Roderic Ai Camp has convincingly argued that “Oc-
14. Annick Lempérière, Intellectuels, Etats et société au Mexique XXe siècle. Les
clercs de la nation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992).
15. See Armando González Torres, Las guerras culturales de Octavio Paz (Mexico:
Colibrí / Secretaría de Cultura del Estado de Puebla, 2002), 15–44; Yvon Grenier, Del arte
a la política. Octavio Paz y la búsqueda de la libertad (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2004), 78–115; Leonardo Martínez Carrizales, La gracia pública de las letras.
Tradición y reforma en la institución literaria de México (Mexico: Colibrí / Secretaría
de Cultura del Estado de Puebla, 1999), 87–95; and Dante Salgado, Camino de ecos. In-
troducción a las ideas políticas de Octavio Paz (Mexico: Praxis, 2002), 19–33.
16. Octavio Paz, Sueño en libertad. Escritos politicos (Barcelona. Seix Barral, 2001),
314
17. Paz, Sueño en libertad, 317.
18. Paz, Sueño en libertad, 322.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 54
tavio Paz has persistently advocated the need for the Mexican intellec-
tual to create values.”19 After the Tlatelolco turning point in October
1968, when he recalibrated his position on the relationship between the
writer and the state,20 Paz would then claim Benda’s notion of cultural
autonomy not as a space of isolation, but as a platform from which to
enunciate created values in response to the gradual collapse of the post-
revolutionary state.
This conceptual operation marked the birth of the figure of the in-
tellectual vis-à-vis Mexican public life. In the wake of the revolution, many
intellectuals from Cuesta’s generation, including conservatives like Julio
Jiménez Rueda and socialists like Narciso Bassols, had a very prominent
role in the construction of state institutions. However, as Paz’s genera-
tion gradually took over Mexican intellectual life, intellectuals became
more prone to practices based on the idea of autonomy. According to
Camp, “[t]he contemporary intellectual’s role [in Mexico] has become
identified with political activism because of ideological commitments.”21
Furthermore, this role was solidified across the political spectrum, al-
lowing for the emergence of intellectuals fully engaged with the public
sphere from ideologies such as Marxism (like José Revueltas) and liber-
alism (Paz and other members of his group). While a detailed descrip-
tion of the relationship between intellectuals and the public sphere ex-
ceeds the purposes of this essay,22 it is important to note that by the 1960s
intellectuals were a central part of Mexican public life, both in the promi-
nent roles they occupied in the government (with figures such as Martín
Luis Guzmán, José Gorostiza, Daniel Cosío Villegas, Jaime Torres Bodet,
and Jaime García Terrés in prominent positions in the presidential cab-
inet, the diplomatic body, and the cultural bureaucracy) and in the con-
struction of the most important newspapers and political weeklies.
19. Roderic A. Camp, Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth Century Mexico
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 65.
20. See Claire Brewster, Responding to Crisis in Contemporary Mexico. The Polit-
ical Writings of Paz, Fuentes, Monsiváis and Poniatowska (Tucson: The University of
Arizona Press, 2005), 56–61, and Jorge Volpi, La imaginación y el poder. Una historia
intelectual de 1968 (Mexico: Era, 2008), 369–393.
21. Camp, Intellectuals, 61.
22. Readers interested in this issue may read some of the major studies published
on this question. I consider Roderic Ai Camp’s book Intellectuals and the State in Twen-
tieth Century Mexico the essential source on this matter. Camp not only analyses the in-
fluence of intellectuals in the Mexican public sphere from the standpoint of ideology, but
also builds a very convincing apparatus of sociological and cultural data that shows in ma-
terial terms the penetration of intellectuals, particularly from Octavio Paz on, in Mexican
public life. Other works include Claire Brewster’s excellent study on the role of the intel-
lectual in 1968 and Jorge Volpi’s work on the influence of intellectuals both in 1968 and
in 1994 (See notes 20 and 35).
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 55
This new conception of the intellectual became embodied in Oc-

tavio Paz’s editorial ventures, most particularly in Plural and Vuelta,
which, in turn, would later evolve into Letras Libres. In his recent book
on Plural,23 John King lays out many of the elements that would ulti-
mately define Paz’s role as a public intellectual and the way in which his
publications reflected a fundamental change in the political practices of
the Mexican cultural field. Born in the wake of the Padilla Affair in Cuba
and the 1968 massacre in Mexico City, Plural became a medium that re-
served the right to articulate an open critique of the revolutionary left,
particularly in regard to the Cuban Revolution, and to establish a criti-
cal distance from the Mexican State. Furthermore, as King shows
throughout his analysis, by resisting any identification with a given state
power or partisan entity, Plural ultimately constructed an autonomous
view of intellectual practice. It is quite telling that many critics of the
journal—including a young, more leftist Krauze, Carlos Monsiváis, and
Héctor Aguilar Camín, who would go on to play a central role in Nexos—
chose to articulate “the views of Gramsci’s ‘organic’ intellectual, look-
ing to support the popular struggle against dependency and underde-
velopment.”24 The relevant point here is that Letras Libres is the final
incarnation of a series of publications aimed at upholding the autonomy
of the intellectual as predicated by Benda and Cuesta, as opposed to the
Gramscian conception of the intellectual as organic to social causes,
which was put forward by the post-68 left wing. This stance would be-
come one of the intellectual class’s crucial defining elements in Mexico
because it led to the definition of liberalism as the ultimate battleground
in the literary field.
Plural morphed into Vuelta after the Mexican government took over
Excélsior, its umbrella newspaper, in an act of censorship. At that point,
Paz and his group started a gradual, decisive construction of an intel-
lectual tradition aimed at redefining the role of the liberal intellectual in
Mexico. To achieve this goal, Paz dedicated significant space in Vuelta
to the diffusion of the work of European liberal thinkers who articulated
a vision of contemporary democratic values akin to that which Paz at-
tempted to introduce in Mexico. Amongst these figures, Isaiah Berlin,
Leszek Kolakowski,25 Cornelius Castoriadis, and Edgar Morin have a spe-
cial place. The common denominator among these intellectuals lies in
a peculiar form of left-wing liberalism based on the exaltation of indi-
23. John King, The Role Of Mexico’s Plural in Latin American Literary and Politi-
cal Culture. From Tlatelolco to the “Philantropic Ogre” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007).
24. King, The Role of Mexico’s Plural, 82.
25. Both identified in King, The Role of Mexico’s Plural, 196.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 56
vidual freedoms and constructed in opposition both to right-wing na-

tionalism and to Soviet-style communism. Berlin, for instance, devoted
his career to denouncing the tyrannical potentials of a line of political
thinking that he traced back to Romanticism and whose basic premise
was the critique of French revolutionary ideas. Thus, Berlin authored de-
tailed historical indictments of romantic figures such as J. G. Hamman
and Johann Gottfried Herder, as well as thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, which were compiled in
books with such titles as Three Critics of Enlightenment or Freedom
and Its Betrayal:Six Enemies of Human Liberty.26 Similarly, Kolakowski,
a Polish exile identified with anti-Soviet politics, is well known for his
critique of the relations between modernity and authoritarian politics,
expressed in a series of writings gathered under titles such as Moder-
nity on Endless Trial.27
Among the many examples that may illustrate the intellectual canon
constructed by Vuelta in its two decades of existence, a 1986 article by
Berlin entitled “Decadencia de las ideas utópicas de Occidente” shows
particularly well the sort of politics put forward by the magazine. Trans-
lated by Denise Dresser and published in the March issue of that year,
Berlin’s essay presented a long-running debate between two political po-
sitions that date back to Homeric times:
Nuestros tiempos han visto el conflicto de dos visiones irreconciliables; una es
la visión de aquellos que creen que existen valores eternos, obligatorios para to-
dos los hombres, y que la razón por la cual los hombres no los han, hasta ahora,
reconocido o realizado todos, es por falta de capacidad moral, intelectual o ma-
terial, necesaria para trazar este fin. [. . .] Pero ha ocurrido el progreso suficiente
para permitir a algunas personas ver la verdad; en la plenitud del tiempo la solu-
ción universal será clara a los hombres en general: entonces la prehistoria ter-
minará y la verdadera historia empezará. Así lo creen los marxistas, y quizás otros
profetas socialistas y optimistas. Esto no es aceptado por aquellos que declaren
que los temperamentos de los hombres, dones, perspectivas, deseos, perma-
nentemente difieren unos de otros, que la uniformidad mata; que los hombres
pueden vivir vidas plenas sólo en sociedades con una textura abierta, en la que
la variedad no es meramente tolerada sino aprobada y fomentada; [. . .] que la
sujeción a una sola ideología, no importa qué tan razonable e imaginativa sea,
roba libertad y vitalidad a los hombres.28
26. See Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of Enlightenment. Vico, Hamann, Herder
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Freedom and its Betrayal. Six Enemies
of Human Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
27. Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990).
28. Isaiah Berlin, “Decadencia de las ideas utópicas en Occidente,” Vuelta (March
1986), 27.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 57
Finding another text that so succinctly represents the stakes of the

political vision posed by Paz and Vuelta in the context of the early po-
litical transition in Mexico is difficult. While Benda provided Mexican
intellectuals like Cuesta with a critical language through which to un-
derstand their perceived autonomy vis-à-vis the state, Berlin showed a
way to translate that language into a cogent political stance that recon-
ciled the autonomy claimed by literary intellectuals with the ability to
be politically engaged. Thus, the intellectual group represented in the
pages of Vuelta constructed its public practices upon an imperative of
the defense of the plurality and the individual values claimed by their
own brand of liberalism, thus developing a consistent policy of de-
nouncing anything that resembled “utopian” thought as characterized
by Berlin. This critique of any position that questions a narrowly defined
notion of liberal democracy is the backbone of “El Mesías Tropical” and
many interventions from figures aligned both with Vuelta and Letras Li-
bres. For instance, Mario Vargas Llosa, a regular contributor to both mag-
azines, considered Berlin “A Hero of our Time”29 and used this very same
language in his controversial indictment of José María Arguedas’ La
utopía arcaica,30 a book whose title indirectly quotes Berlin’s article
and whose method of historical and intellectual critique closely resem-
bled Berlin’s critique of anti-enlightenment philosophers.
Vuelta differentiated itself from other publications of its time by con-
sistently defending literature as the central pursuit of the Mexican in-
telligentsia and the labors of the imagination as a privileged space of
enunciation of the political. Whereas their critical genealogy was pop-
ulated by historians, political theorists, and philosophers of modernity,
some of the main Mexican and Latin American figures, like Paz, Vargas
Llosa, and Gabriel Zaid, exercised political critique as a continuation of
literary critique, where the latter laid the foundation for the enunciation
of the ethical and ideological values of the former. In this sense, Maarten
Van Delden argues that the source of Vuelta’s rivalry with Nexos, formed
by figures like Héctor Aguilar Camín and Enrique Florescano in 1978,
lies, at least in part, in the differences between their conceptions of the
intellectual:
Mientras Nexos sitúa la noción de servicio en el centro de su concepción del in-
telectual, Vuelta se inclina hacia la defensa de la libertad e independencia del
pensamiento. No se trata, por supuesto, de una oposición inflexible: los intelec-
tuales de Nexos consideran que el espíritu de servicio brota de su actitud crítica
29. Mario Vargas Llosa, Wellsprings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2008), 133.
30. Mario Vargas Llosa, La utopía arcaica. José María Arguedas y las ficciones del
indigenismo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996).
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 58
hacia la sociedad, mientras que los miembros del grupo Vuelta piensan que ser
independiente es la major forma de servir a la comunidad. Se trata de una dife-
rencia de énfasis. Así pues, en las páginas de Vuelta se observa una mayor preo-
cupación por el tema de la libertad en sí que por el de la igualdad.31
In other words, it is possible to argue that the cultural debates of the

1980s were constructed, once again, around the discussion of whether
the intellectual should be “organic,” à la Gramsci, or autonomous, à la
Benda. Van Delden presents this divide as a mere difference of empha-
sis, but as the PRI regime started to crumble in the late 1980s and early
1990s, the difference between the two sides became particularly mean-
ingful. When the Salinas de Gortari administration took office, Nexos as-
sumed a decisive stance in favor of the neoliberal modernizing project.
In the meantime, Vuelta remained entrenched in its debates on the role
of culture in a democratic society.
These new times required a language of intellectual articulation that
turned the libertarian values adopted from Berlin into a program of po-
litical action, which led to more frequent contributions from Kolakowski
and Castoriadis to Vuelta. A significant text from this period is Castoria-
dis’s essay, “Los intelectuales y la historia,” which was originally read at
a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1937 Congreso de
Intelectuales Antifascistas, an event that had marked a turning point in
young Octavio Paz’s political views. Published in the September 1987
issue, this text offers a clear ethical blueprint for intellectual practice
based on the notion of the intellectual-as-citizen:
El intelectual debe querer ser ciudadano como los demás; quiere ser también
portavoz, por derecho, de la universalidad y de la objetividad. No puede man-
tenerse en este espacio sino reconociendo los límites de lo que su supuesta ob-
jetividad y universalidad le permiten; debe reconocer—y no de dientes afuera—
que lo que intenta hacer entender es una vez más una doxa, una opinión; no
una episteme, una ciencia. Le es preciso sobre todo reconocer que la historia es
el dominio donde se despliega la creatividad de todos, hombres y mujeres, sabios
y analfabetos, de una humanidad en la cual él mismo es sólo un átomo. Lo cual
tampoco ha de volverse pretexto para que él dé el visto bueno, sin crítica, a las
decisiones de la mayoría, para que se incline ante la fuerza por ser ésta la del nú-
mero. Ser demócrata y poder, de juzgarlo así, decirle al pueblo: “os equivocáis”—
he aquí aún lo que debe exigírsele.32
31. Maarten Van Delden, “Conjunciones y disyunciones. La rivalidad entre Vuelta y

Nexos,” El laberinto de la solidaridad. Cultura y política en México (1910–2000), eds.,
Kristen Vanden Berghe and Maarten Van Delden, Foro Hispánico 22 (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2002), 108.
32. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Los intelectuales y la historia,” Vuelta (September
1987), 54.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 59
While vindicating both the classical spirit that underlies Benda’s phi-
losophy and the careful historicist stance of Berlin’s critique, Castoriadis
also deals two additional blows to the idea of the “organic” intellectual.
First, by arguing that an intellectual must recognize that his words are
“opinion” and not “science,” he questions the existence of a science of
history at the base of Marxist thought in order to validate a conception
of the public space that approaches the Habermasian concept of com-
municative action: a notion of liberty based on a space of free delibera-
tion. Second, Castoriadis distinguishes democracy from majority. By ar-
guing that the intellectual’s main duty was to defend democracy from
the mistakes of the majority, Castoriadis provided the intellectuals of the
Vuelta group with an understanding of intellectual ethics directly at odds
with the populist alternatives that were to emerge in the late 1990s and
early 2000s. Ideas such as the ones put forward by Castoriadis’s text
would serve in providing the foundation for “El Mesías Tropical” and
Krauze’s relentless critique of Hugo Chávez.
Because the intellectual was, in this new configuration, a guardian
of democracy, one of the main frames of critical discourse to emerge
both in Vuelta and in Letras Libres was the condemnation of “threats to
democracy.” Of course, this form of thought is not new; indeed, in the
1940s, it forged an influential ideological legacy following the publica-
tion of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies.33 In this book,
the German philosopher criticizes both Hegel and Marx by arguing that
the idea of a predictive science of human history can only lead to au-
thoritarian rule and that historical indeterminism is essential for the pur-
suit of freedom. The rhetoric adopted by Popper and his identification
of “enemies” to an “open society”foreshadow Berlin’s own indictments
and ultimately provide a model of political practice for the intellectuals
associated with Vuelta. One of the most prominent manifestations of this
form of thinking emerged in a 1990 text by Kolakowski, “Incertidum-
bres de una era democrática,”34 in which the Polish thinker identified a
series of “trends”—such as the rising force of nationalism or the strength-
ening of terrorism—as threats to democratic freedom. Kolakowski’s text
is clearly more pertinent to the European situation of the early 1990s
than to Mexico’s, but its presence in the magazine is indicative of the
fact that such a form of thinking was becoming paradigmatic in the po-
litical philosophy of the publication. When Paz passed away in 1998 and
Letras Libres became Vuelta, Enrique Krauze, its new editor-in-chief,
33. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (London: George Rout-
ledge and Sons, 1943).
34. Leszek Kolakowski, “Incertidumbres de una era democrática,” Vuelta ( July
1990), 47–48.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 60
gradually diminished the centrality of literature. In its place, Krauze cre-

ated a platform for political debate that would push the intellectual cur-
rents I have described up to this point to a more radical place.
The Salinas de Gortari presidency proved to be a time of profound
transformation for the Mexican literary elite. Although Paz remained a
key figure in Mexican intellectual and political life, salinismo’s techno-
cratic bent undermined the notion of cultural practice as exercised by
Vuelta. The rival group organized around Nexos seemed better suited
for the times, considering not only that Aguilar Camín strategically rec-
ognized Salinas’s triumph in 1988 amidst claims of electoral fraud, but
also that its other major figures, like Arturo Warman and José María Pérez
Gay, became part of the Salinas administration.35 Ironically, many mem-
bers of the Nexos group ended up finding a venue in which to act as or-
ganic intellectuals, not in a social movement, but in the very regime that
consolidated the neoliberal model.
The 1990 Nobel Prize confirmed Paz as the leading intellectual in the
country, but Vuelta remained carefully distanced from any celebration of
the Salinas regime. The real jolt in the intellectual world came at the end
of the Salinas administration due to the 1994 Zapatista uprising. As
Maarten Van Delden shows, this event resulted in a further reconfigura-
tion of the literary field, forcing Nexos to distance itself openly from the
government, whereas Vuelta took the opportunity to reassert its intel-
lectual agenda.36 Van Delden points to the fact that Carlos Monsiváis, who
for many years had kept his distance from Paz and his group, actually
ended up contributing to both magazines,37 which may be interpreted
as evidence of a surprising alliance between the two groups in the face
of the unexpected insurgency. It is noteworthy that, although Vuelta and
Nexos responded to the issue in more or less the same terms, both re-
sponses were articulated in the sort of critical language most often asso-
ciated with Vuelta. Most articles on the Zapatista uprising argued for so-
cial consensus and institutional solutions to the conflict and warned that
the “revolutionary way” was, yet again, a threat to democracy. More im-
portantly, the main figures of Vuelta were careful to articulate these ideas
only within the pages of the magazine. While many intellectuals were em-
powered by Marcos, an intellectual himself, to take a more proactive role
in public life,38 Paz’s group stayed out of these pursuits.
It is important to note, however, the platform of democratic insti-
tutions advocated from the pages of Vuelta became a central part of the
35. See Jorge Volpi, La guerra y las palabras. Una historia intelectual de 1994 (Me-
xico: Era, 2004), 192.
36. Van Delden, “Conjunciones y disyunciones,” 114–116.
37. Van Delden, “Conjunciones y disyunciones,” 116.
38. Volpi, La guerra de las palabras, 108.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 61
political discourse in the late 1990s. This discourse was the basis for the
ideology behind the so-called Grupo San Ángel, a gathering of intellec-
tuals and politicians largely identified with liberalism and conservatism,
whose members included Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Jorge Castañeda, Vicente
Fox, and Santiago Creel. This group played a central role in the forma-
tion of an independent electoral authority: José Woldenberg, a member
of the group and a prominent figure of Nexos, would become its presi-
dent and would ultimately become a key player in Vicente Fox’s ad-
ministration; Aguilar Zinser first became National Security Adviser and,
later on, Mexico’s ambassador to the United Nations; Jorge Castañeda
was appointed Secretary of Foreign Affairs; and Santiago Creel became
Secretary of State. That Krauze was involved in the intellectual config-
uration of this group is significant, and even though he never became
part of the post-PRI administrations, he has strongly advocated, both in
Mexico and the United States, a view of electoral democracy close to
the one articulated by the San Ángel intellectuals and politicians.
By this time, it was obvious that Paz’s focus on literary practice had
become somewhat outdated. Marcos gave new currency to the idea of
the organic intellectual, and many figures in the cultural field reinvented
themselves accordingly. Many left-wing intellectuals, like Carlos Monte-
mayor and Luis Villoro, established a close relationship with the Zapa-
tistas, whereas others, like Carlos Monsiváis and Elena Poniatowska,
acquired a renovated presence in the media, mostly as political spokes-
persons of emerging social movements. In the meantime, a considerable
part of the liberal intelligentsia became part of an effort to orchestrate
what they considered a “transition to democracy” by creating social
organizations that aimed to construct new political and media spaces
for the citizenry. The conundrum faced by the Vuelta group in the late
1990s was to find a way to resist an inclination toward direct interven-
tion, something that would contradict the ideological program devel-
oped after Kolakowski and Castoriadis, while remaining relevant to the
ongoing political conversation. When Enrique Krauze took over Edito-
rial Vuelta and founded Letras Libres in late 1998, these factors were
clearly considered when constructing the new project. To be sure, many
of the groups members who would remain regular contributors to the
new magazine—including Guillermo Sheridan, Christopher Domínguez
Michael, and Gabriel Zaid—were literary intellectuals; significantly, how-
ever, Krauze, the new director, was actually a historian.39
39. It is interesting to note, though, that Krauze and Zaid are both trained engineers
and have a longstanding career as businessmen, which may actually have influenced some
of their political positions. I thank the peer reviewer of this manuscript for pointing out
this fact to me.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 62
The first issue of Letras Libres clearly reflected Krauze’s emerging

editorial influence. While the literary contributions were still there—
including major articles by Vargas Llosa, José Emilio Pacheco, and Juan
Villoro, as well as a profile of Salvador Elizondo—the magazine’s cover
and the main dossier were dedicated to an analysis of the situation in
Chiapas; the fifth anniversary of the uprising coincided with the publi-
cation of this issue. Interestingly, one of the contributors to the first is-
sue was Monsiváis, whose intellectual stance was largely at odds with
the main tenets of Krauze’s group. His inclusion may be read, however,
as an increasing willingness to engage in dialogue and debate with in-
tellectuals who were more aligned with the Gramscian conception of
cultural practice. Another noticeable change was in the contributions
by nonliterary intellectuals to the publication. While the first issue still
remained highly literary, the inclusion of Juan Pedro Viqueira, an an-
thropologist, became the first instance of a growing number of nonlit-
erary authors. This was by no means a new bias in Krauze’s editorial
work. In the last years of Vuelta, when Krauze was managing editor, many
nonliterary intellectuals had a more prominent presence in the maga-
zine compared to earlier years. Authors like Roger Bartra, who eventu-
ally became a very important and frequent political contributor to Le-
tras Libres, had his first appearances in Vuelta in 1997 under Krauze’s
supervision.40 By the time “El Mesías Tropical” came out in 2006, the
bulk of the articles in the main section of the magazine were by nonlit-
erary authors.
This issue also featured a first indicator of the political line of the
magazine in relation to the emerging New Latin American Left. In an ar-
ticle on Hugo Chávez, Cristina Marcano expressed a deep level of sus-
picion toward his involvement in a foiled coup d’état earlier in the
decade. Although she granted him the status of “enigma,” Marcano de-
cried the process behind the election: “Y el pueblo, marginado por el
sistema, paradójicamente ha buscado profundizar la democracia pre-
cisamente a través de lo que niega: el autoritarismo.”41 In this quote, the
ethos proposed by Castoriadis, the idea of the intellectual as the one who
questioned the majority when it made a “mistake,” was clearly present
40. Other nonliterary authors who became frequent contributors to Vuelta when
Krauze was managing editor include Luis Villoro, Fernando García Ramírez, Federico Reyes
Heroles, Isabel Turrent, and the aforementioned Bartra. It is interesting to note that, al-
though Bartra’s first contribution came to Vuelta as late as 1997, he became a regular con-
tributor to Letras Libres, whereas Isabel Turrent, an international affairs columnist, be-
came a regular contributor to Vuelta in the mid-1990s and has ended up writing a monthly
column in Letras Libres since its inception.
41. Cristina Marcano, “El enigma de Hugo Chávez,” Letras Libres ( January 1999),
103.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 63
in the first issue of Letras Libres. Thus, Marcano’s text and Krauze’s own
article on Chiapas were precursors of “El Mesías Tropical.” Entitled “El
profeta de los indios,”42 Krauze’s first article in Letras Libres was a long
indictment of Samuel Ruiz, the Chiapas bishop who served as mediator
in the Zapatista conflict and whose ties with liberation theology created
speculation that he may have played a part in the uprising. Krauze in-
terwove an intellectual biography of Ruiz with a historical reflection on
the role of the Catholic Church in the country’s long legacy of indige-
nous struggles. In the first issue of the new magazine, Krauze put for-
ward his main textual strategy: the use of intellectual history in order to
debunk or articulate a critique of a given historical figure. He would
spend the years to come leveling this stratagem against Chávez and other
figures. “El Mesías Tropical,” in this context, is one of Krauze’s most ac-
complished texts in this vein.
In Legislators and Interpreters, Zygmunt Bauman argues for two
categories of intellectual, one whose role is defined by a “typically mod-
ern strategy”—the legislator—and another one whose role is defined by
a “typically post-modern strategy”—the interpreter. The former’s role
“consists of making authoritative statements which arbitrate in contro-
versies of opinions and which select those opinions which, having been
selected, become correct and binding,”whereas the latter’s “consists of
translating statements made within one communally based tradition so
they can be understood within the system of knowledge based on an-
other tradition.”43 If one resists the modern-postmodern divide put for-
ward by Bauman, this scheme helps illustrate Krauze’s stance in Letras
Libres. Paz, ultimately a poet and a cosmopolitan, positioned himself in
the role of interpreter: someone who used Vuelta and other media to
translate a system of values developed in Western liberal democracies
into the burgeoning civil society of post-68 Mexico. This, of course, is
not to say that Paz never exercised the role of legislator, considering the
amount of cultural power he exercised throughout his intellectual ca-
reer. Rather, the point here is that the intellectual labor of Vuelta privi-
leged the role of the interpreter both in the aesthetic and political realms.
In the most memorable issues, the reader could engage both with liter-
ary arguments on the novel from figures like Milan Kundera and with
position essays such as the texts from Castoriadis or Berlin discussed in
the previous section. The magazine was, first and foremost, an attempt
to universalize Mexican culture by providing it with a forum to engage
with other traditions. Thus, a considerable number of the pages pub-
lished by Vuelta over the years were either translations of some of the
42. Enrique Krauze, “El profeta de los indios,” Letras Libres ( January 1999), 10–18.
43. Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters, 5
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 64
salient figures of international liberalism or essays by Mexican intellec-

tuals interpreting the work of such figures alongside national issues of
the day. Conversely, Krauze, a historian and a scholar by and large fo-
cused on national history, placed Letras Libres in the role of legislator.
From the very first issue, the magazine’s most important dossiers, fo-
cusing on Chiapas, Venezuela, Cuba, or electoral politics, have been
groupings of essays from Mexican and Latin American figures attempt-
ing to distinguish “right” from “wrong” in a set of controversial topics.
Without doubt, Letras Libres claimed the autonomous position of the
intellectual similar to the one vindicated by Paz and Vuelta, while re-
sisting an organic role in contemporary political engagements. However,
Krauze’s editorial line clearly understood this autonomy as the privileged
place of enunciation for a liberal political agenda.
Besides his participation in Vuelta, Krauze’s views on the relation-
ship among history, intellectual work, and politics resulted from a very
personal way of exercising historiography, through what he called “bi-
ographies of power”: a series of intensively researched biographical es-
says focused on figures who played a prominent role in the formation
of various power structures. One way of characterizing Krauze’s schol-
arship is to read it as an adaptation to Mexican history of Berlin’s criti-
cal method. Berlin built a critique of antiliberal positions through bi-
ographical studies of prominent figures in the history of such positions.
Equally, Krauze’s project lay in the construction of a critique of power
in post-revolutionary Mexico by crafting profiles of historical figures
involved in the formation and institutionalization of power structures.
A good example of this project may be found in Krauze’s first major
book, Caudillos culturales en la Revolución Mexicana,44 a study of
the institutionalization of the Revolution through a collective biogra-
phy of the group known as “Los Siete Sabios.” This name is used to re-
fer to a group of intellectuals who gathered in 1915 around the figure
of philosopher Antonio Caso. These intellectuals went on to become
central figures in the configuration of the post-revolutionary state and
its institutions. For instance, Manuel Gómez Morín was the creator of
the Mexican federal reserve, the Banco de México, and eventually be-
came the founder of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), the country’s
major opposition party. Another member, Vicente Lombardo Toledano,
was the architect of the unions that would ultimately bring the labor
movement under the wing of the ruling coalition, as well as the founder
of the Partido Popular, one of the landmark left-wing political forces in
the mid-twentieth century. The group also included jurists like Teófilo
44. Enrique Krauze, Caudillos culturales en la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico: Siglo

XXI, 1976).
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 65
Olea y Leyva, a future Supreme Court justice, and literary critics like
Antonio Castro Leal, who played a major role in the formation of Mex-
ico’s cultural institutions. Krauze devotes a considerable number of
pages of this book to the genealogy of the intellectual lines ultimately
developed by “Los Siete Sabios,” as well as a careful description of the
group’s formative years.
At the beginning of his work, Krauze argued that, while biography
was out of favor as a historical method and the biographer was “un ser
anacrónico,” “miope,” and prone to the dangers of “la psicohistoria,” he
followed Edmund Wilson in arguing that there was “un buen trecho que
recorrer todavía hacia la humanización de los biografiados.”45 Interest-
ingly, Krauze’s reference here is the work of the literary critic and au-
thor of To the Finland Station,46 a collection of biographies that en-
compasses historians like Jules Michelet, utopianists like Charles Fourier,
founding figures of socialism and communism like Bakunin and Marx,
as well as the main protagonists of the Russian Revolution, Lenin and
Engels. The shadow Wilson cast upon Krauze’s work is meaningful in a
number of ways. Wilson provided an early example of a critique of so-
cialism from a liberal perspective, not only because it was written in a
historical moment where a critique of Stalinism was yet to be articulated,
but also because it provided a defense of liberalism through a well-
articulated dialogue with a nonliberal tradition. A similar statement is
possible regarding Caudillos culturales de la Revolución Mexicana,
written before the articulation of mainstream attacks on the PRI, most
of which did not emerge until the 1980s. In the book, Krauze constructed
a serious critique of post-revolutionary politics through a dialogue be-
tween liberalism and the intellectual tradition of “Los siete sabios.” Al-
though his latter work would adopt a more combative tone against non-
liberal figures, recalling the approach used by Berlin or Kolakowski, the
Wilsonian tone of his early historical work spoke of an attempt to his-
toricize liberalism vis-à-vis other political alternatives.
Wilson’s influence points to yet another dimension of Krauze’s in-
tellectual work. Wilson exercised historical criticism from a perspective
that considered literature the privileged form of cultural critique. While
Wilson’s most important works (like Axel’s Castle) were compilations
of critical essays on literary figures of his day, To the Finland Station
represented a foray into history legitimated by acts of reading and writ-
ing, the mid-century trademarks of the public intellectual. In his intro-
duction to Wilson’s book, Louis Menand points out two features of Wil-
45. Krauze, Caudillos culturales, 11.

46. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (New York: New York Review Books,
2003).
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 66
son’s work relevant to an understanding of Krauze. First, the biograph-

ical method gave Wilson a way to read Marxism against the grain of Marx-
ism itself, by “representing history as a reciprocal interaction between
individual agency and social change.”47 This approach had deep impli-
cations in relation to the intellectual ethos acquired by Krauze in his
formative years, allowing him to develop most of his affinities with the
literary intellectuals who congregated around Plural and Vuelta. This
understanding of history allowed for the construction of a methodology
that resisted both Marxist determinism and the psychological systems
denounced at the beginning of his book. Furthermore, as an instrument
of intellectual history, Krauze developed Wilson’s work into a form of
highlighting the specific roles of intellectuals like himself in the forma-
tion of public institutions, without denying or underestimating the
structural nature of post-revolutionary history. To put it in the terms pro-
posed earlier, Wilson’s example allowed Krauze to understand the in-
tellectual group of “Los Siete Sabios” in a form close to Benda’s model.
On the one hand, Krauze was able to characterize the group according
to the “class-in-itself” model of intellectual practice. The notion of
“caudillo cultural” allowed for the theorization of a cultural space au-
tonomous to the political space ruled by the traditional “caudillos mi-
litares.” According to Krauze, the intention of this group was “la de pre-
tender instaurar en México el buen poder, la obra de beneficio colectivo,
imponiendo a la realidad cruda y bronca de la Revolución, la sublime y
ordenada de la ética absoluta y la técnica. Todos ellos fueron hombres
con grados universitarios, ideas, libros y conferencias, en su hoja de ser-
vicios, hombres que quisieron embridar culturalmente a la Revolución:
Caudillos Culturales.”48 Thus, Krauze conceived this foundational intel-
lectual group not as organic members of the revolutionary movement,
but as educated men who created the cultural institutions of the state
against the grain of the “realidad cruda y bronca de la Revolución.”This
echoes not only Wilson’s own liberal suspicion of left-wing utopianism,
but also Castoriadis’s previously cited notion of the intellectual who “cor-
rects” the people when they are wrong. In this view of the intellectual
elite as a social class charged with the institutionalization of the exces-
sive nature of social movements, we find the seed of an essential con-
tention behind Krauze’s understanding of Chiapas, López Obrador, and
Chávez: the need of a “buen poder”that regulates the populist excess—
the “realidad cruda y bronca” behind popular protest.
Besides legitimizing the individual as an agent of history and con-
47. Louis Menand, “Foreword. The Historical Romance,” in Wilson, To the Finland
Station, xvii.
48. Krauze, Caudillos culturales, 16.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 67
structing a politics that legitimizes the role of autonomous intellectual

practice, the reference to Wilson has another important implication in
the understanding of Krauze’s work. À propos of Wilson’s book, Louis
Menand argues that “historical research is an empirical enterprise and
history writing is an imaginative one.”49 In these terms, by modeling his
work after a book written by a literary critic, Krauze made a claim to
style, an essential move to legitimize his political viewpoints within the
context of history writing. Liberal critics and intellectual historians like
Wilson or Berlin provided a model in which history could be used proac-
tively for the advancement of a political agenda, without falling into
Gramscian organicism or Marxist historical determinism. The way these
mid-century intellectuals understood biographical criticism allowed
not only for the aforementioned vindication of individual agency vis-à-
vis the social forces of history, but also, and perhaps more crucially, for
the use of style as a mechanism through which the individual perspec-
tive of the historian/critic may emerge as an intervening force in the very
act of enunciating history. More succinctly put, through style the pub-
lic intellectual may follow a political program similar to the one advo-
cated by Benda in La trahison des clercs. Insofar as language and imag-
ination are understood to be the privileged realms of action of the
intellectual class, the exercise of style as a political tool is the very con-
dition of possibility for intellectual agency. Leslie Fiedler, a founding fig-
ure of political literary criticism in the United States, casts this issue in
a way that falls close to the perspective held by Krauze: “The voice of
the critic must be his own voice, idiosyncratic, personal, for without real
style (and true style is never safe, choosing always to court extravagance)
he carries no conviction except what charts and tables accidentally pro-
vide.”50 The idea of style as the precondition of conviction is essential
to understanding the intellectual stance put forward by texts like “El
Mesías Tropical,” because it deploys one of the trademark elements of
Krauze’s critique: the use of historical investigation in the service of po-
litical views. Consequently, Krauze was able to deal one of the most con-
sequential blows to the figure of López Obrador in the Mexican public
sphere by turning his own historical readings and political origins
against him. Furthermore, by mixing the historical with the literary,
Krauze constructed a bridge that connected his work with the agendas
and ideologies of the Vuelta group.
To be sure, this combination of the personal and the ideological was
a particular target for criticism and, in the years preceding Krauze’s tran-
49. Menand, “Foreword,” xi.

50. Leslie Fiedler, The Devil Gets His Due. The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fielder
(Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008), 10–11.
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sition into Letras Libres, he became the subject of many controversies.

The most notable of these was a review of the English edition of Krauze’s
Biografía del poder by Claudio Lomnitz, a Mexican anthropologist, his-
torian, and public intellectual working in the U.S. academy. The review,
entitled “An Intellectual’s Stock in the Factory of Mexico’s Ruins,” had a
long editorial life. It was first published in the American Journal of So-
ciology in 1998 and later translated into Spanish and published in two
parts by Milenio, one of Mexico’s major daily newspapers. The final ver-
sion of this text became part of Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico,51 a collec-
tion of Lomnitz’s writings on Mexican nationalism. Lomnitz’s work ac-
quired wide notoriety not only because of the prominence of the
publications in which the review appeared, but also due to the fact that
Biografía del poder represented a major event in Krauze’s work, given
its editorial success both in Mexico and the United States. The contro-
versy was so widely visible in the Mexican media that Lomnitz was in-
vited to publish a weekly column in another major newspaper, El Uni-
versal. Furthermore, the book represented a major point of articulation
for Krauze’s intellectual project because it gathered two decades of his-
torical reflection on the major figures of revolutionary history, reflect-
ing some of the major political positions that underlined his biographi-
cal method.
In Biografía del poder, Krauze contended that, since in Mexico “la
concentración del poder en una sola persona [. . .] ha representado la
norma histórica a lo largo de los siglos,”52 a true critique of power nec-
essarily rested on a critical reading of the intellectual genealogies and
historical articulations of those individual figures in whom actual polit-
ical power has rested. Thus, the book proposed, from Krauze’s per-
spective, a definitive view of the formation of power structures in the
country by putting forward an individual analysis of each of the major
revolutionary caudillos, from Francisco I. Madero to Lázaro Cárdenas.
Not insignificantly, this book was published on the eve of Octavio Paz’s
death and it preceded the foundation of Letras Libres by only two years.
Biografía del poder was the final point of formation of the historical
method and convictions that Krauze would infuse into his magazine. Ar-
ticles such as “El profeta de los indios”and “El mesías tropical”were, ul-
timately, a continuation of his core ideological and critical principles,
applied to the analysis of current events.
Lomnitz contended that “Krauze’s history can be read in two keys:
51. Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico. An Anthropology of National-

ism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). All quotes are from this edition.
52. Enrique Krauze, Biografía del poder (Mexico: Tusquets, 1997), 20.
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the first key is the saga of democracy into which he wants to shoehorn
Mexican political history, the second is the saga of his own intellectual
genealogy.”53 Consequently, Lomnitz’s most substantial critique was di-
rected at one of the fundamental ideas inherited by Krauze from his lib-
eral readings, namely, the fact that a critique of power in Mexico must
ultimately be geared toward the pursuit of democracy:
The organization of political history around the story of democracy is highly prob-
lematic in a country whose fundamental viability was in question during most
of the nineteenth century. Moreover, although democracy has been a significant
political issue during most of the Mexican history, it has often not been the prin-
cipal political aim or site of contention.54
In these terms, Lomnitz argued that Krauze’s historiography was de-

signed in such a way that the pursuits of the liberal intellectual class were
the culminating point of a teleology of democracy that started with the
Revolution: “The authoritative narration of Mexico’s fate and fortune re-
hearses and reaffirms official history, but with a twist: instead of culmi-
nating with the progress wrought by the Mexican Revolution (which
had been the End of History until recently), it culminates with the democ-
racy that Krauze’s 1968 generation is supposed to have engendered.”55
Without delving into the question of the truth-value of Krauze’s his-
toriography, the most important point brought forward by Lomnitz’s
reading lay in the process of intellectual self-fashioning at play in the work
of the intellectual group surrounding Vuelta and Letras Libres. Lomnitz
raised a fair point when he suggested that Krauze’s status as a champion
of democracy was questionable, considering the fact that the writings
of Biografía del Poder were connected to a major broadcasting contract
with Televisa, the most powerful media company in Mexico. For the pur-
poses of this essay, though, the more relevant issue is that Biografía del
poder set the stage for Krauze’s emergence as a visible public intellec-
tual in the late nineties. Thus, the writings in this book and the ideas set
forward by it achieved an almost unprecedented level of diffusion in the
Mexican public sphere, thanks to weekly national television broadcasts
and the distribution of popular versions of Krauze’s biographies in news-
stands across the country. In other words, the crucial issue lies not in
the veracity of Krauze’s claims on history, but on the impact his views
had in the formation of a political narrative as the PRI mythology eroded.
Lomnitz recognized as much in a later essay, when he argued, à propos
53. Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico, 218.

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of figures like Krauze or Monsiváis: “The intellectual as somatic popular

representative was a recognizable strategy of many of the intellectuals
in the authoritarian period, on the left and the right, and indeed it was
a key of their remarkable prominence. Moreover, this strategy in itself
helps explain the prominence of history as the indispensable supplement
to the intellectuals’interpretation of the “true sentiments”of the people”
(“Narrating” 53). Therefore, if one follows this logic in the context of
the arguments and history I have laid out up to this point, the crucial
discursive displacement between Vuelta and Letras Libres is from lit-
erature to history as the privileged mode of enunciation of public
speech. Krauze’s individual success, as well as the role of Letras Libres
in contemporary Mexican public life, resulted from inserting his own
brand of historical critique into the hegemonic spaces of national nar-
ration. As Krauze undertook the foundation of Letras Libres, he man-
aged to embody successfully a model of the intellectual who claimed
Benda’s proverbial autonomy from the state while also playing a crucial
role in the formation of a public imagination of history that would par-
adoxically align itself with the emergent political project of the PAN, the
party that brought Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón to power.
Still, just as critical philosophy supplemented literature in the for-
mation of Vuelta’s public stance, Letras Libres required a new network
of intellectual interlocutors and models to supplement both the liter-
ary legacy embodied in the remainder of Paz’s group and the historical
imprint developed by Krauze’s work. Just like its precursor, Letras Li-
bres identified and published a series of contemporary intellectuals from
North America and Europe in order to better define its editorial line
and the political agenda shaped by the magazine’s content. Although
the constant appearances of Castoriadis and Berlin in Vuelta helped de-
lineate an intellectual profile for the publication, Letras Libres resorted
to a roster of major figures of contemporary Anglo-Saxon and French
liberalism to define itself along a political line that held democracy as
its transcendental signifier and that opposed any practice identified as
“authoritarian.” Among the major liberal public intellectuals who have
figured prominently in the pages of Letras Libres are Christopher
Hitchens, an earlier supporter of the “diffusion of democracy” for the
War in Iraq and a passionate defender of atheism; Michael Ignatieff, the
current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada; David Rieff, son of Susan
Sontag and a columnist for major liberal publications in the United States;
and Pete Hamill, a prominent journalist and fiction writer from The New
Yorker.
Perhaps the most symptomatic figure in Letras Libres’s intellectual
canon has been Mark Lilla, a professor of social thought whose work fo-
cuses, like Isaiah Berlin’s, on a critique of contestations to the Enlight-
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 71
enment tradition. In a 2004 article à propos of Lilla’s The Reckless Mind,56

Krauze characterized him in a very meaningful way:
Mark Lilla es una rara avis en el confuso panorama intelectual contemporáneo:
un heredero de los enciclopedistas franceses, la Ilustración inglesa y el huma-
nismo alemán—absolutamente versado en las tres culturas—, pero formado en
Harvard, donde fue discípulo distinguido del sociólogo Daniel Bell; un intelec-
tual inmerso en el estrecho mundo de los especialistas académicos, que todavía
cree en la necesaria vinculación entre la filosofía y la vida pública; un pensador
inmune a la pirotecnia verbal del posmodernismo, que busca en los temas politi-
cos la verdad objetiva; un liberal clásico que milita contra el relativismo moral y
reivindica el lugar de las instituciones democráticas, el papel de la tolerancia, la
necesidad del estado de derecho y las libertades cívicas.57
Many elements of this statement may be unpacked into a description of

Letras Libres’s agenda and its use of figures like Lilla in the formation of
its critical and ideological lines. First, Krauze identified in Lilla an intel-
lectual fidelity to the three main traditions of European Enlightenment
in the face of “postmodern” thought. This is as much a description of
Lilla’s work as it is an establishment of Krauze’s own position. It is im-
portant to note, though, that the “postmodern” discourses attacked by
Krauze were not particularly present in the Mexican public sphere, and
even figures who are sometimes identified with so-called postmodernity,
like Monsiváis, ultimately vindicated a liberal-modern project.58 Thus, to
identify oneself with a liberal, enlightened tradition was a form of align-
ing oneself with the hegemonic configuration of Mexican intellectual
practice. Second, even though Lilla, unlike Krauze, is actually a univer-
sity professor, this article highlighted his capacity to transcend the “nar-
row confines” of academia, emphasizing a central point regarding the
role of a publication like Letras Libres in the Mexican cultural milieu:
the fact that being located outside of academia is a way of accruing po-
litical capital. In his controversy with Lomnitz, Krauze attacked first and
foremost the fact that the author of Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico worked
in the United States by referring to him as “Mister”Lomnitz.59 Therefore,
Krauze must emphasize Lilla’s work as a public intellectual in spite of
his academic location and portray the belief in a relationship between
thinking and society as a way to overcome academia itself. Of course,
56. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind. Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Re-
view Books, 2001).
57. Enrique Krauze, “El intelectual filotiránico,” Letras Libres, March 2004, 22.
58. See Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “Carlos Monsiváis. Crónica, nación y liberalismo,”
El arte de la ironía. Carlos Monsiváis ante la crítica, Eds. Mabel Moraña and Ignacio M.
Sánchez Prado (Mexico: Era / Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007), 300–336.
59. See Claudio Lomnitz, “Narrating the Neoliberal Moment: History, Journalism, His-
toricity,” Public Culture 20, 1 (2008): 45.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 72
Krauze strategically overlooked the fact that many public intellectuals

in the United States—like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, or even the late
Isaiah Berlin—work or have worked at least in part within the univer-
sity. The validation of a nonacademic site of intellectual work is, for the
most part, the validation of a privately owned publication like Letras Li-
bres as a privileged space of intellectual articulation. In fact, part of the
appeal of The Reckless Mind is that, much like Krauze’s own books, it
is not a book of scholarly research, but a compilation of articles pub-
lished by The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Sup-
plement, publications that share with Letras Libres an openly liberal at-
tempt to build a bridge between lettered culture and the public sphere.
Even more meaningful was Lilla’s work that Krauze discussed in this
article. In The Reckless Mind, Lilla presented a set of biographies à la
Berlin, focused on intellectuals of the European “radical” left and right,
whose common denominator was, according to Lilla, being seduced by
“tyranny.” The catalog was quite controversial because Lilla’s argument
put intellectuals with an unquestionable record of left-wing political
action, like Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin, alongside figures
who were openly identified with Nazism, like Carl Schmitt or Martin Hei-
degger. Lilla contended that, regardless of their obvious political differ-
ences, these intellectuals were part of a larger twentieth-century attach-
ment to totalitarian narratives, or “philotyranny,” based on the radical
questioning of liberal democracy. In this point Lilla was very close to fig-
ures of the Nouveau Philosophie Française—like Pierre Nora and André
Glucksmann—whose intellectual work rests in defending a notion of lit-
erary republicanism against the 1968 radicalism of Michel Foucault, Gilles
Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, as well as in the conflation of Stalinism
with fascism.60 Importantly, Lilla shared, with his French (and Mexican)
counterparts, the figure of Julien Benda as a model for intellectual self-
fashioning. Lilla concluded his book with an appeal to Benda as a way
to frame the ultimate pursuit of his intellectual project:
The events of the last century merely provided the occasion for extraordinary
displays of intellectual philotyranny whose sources will not disappear in less ex-
treme political circumstances, for they are part of the makeup of our souls. If
our historian really wants to understand the trahison des clercs, that is where
he, too must look, within.61
Interestingly, one could characterize Krauze’s biographies of power in a

similar way, as an attempt to show the pervasiveness of “anti-democratic”
60. See François Cusset, French Theory. How Foucault, Derrda, Deleuze, & Co. Trans-
formed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008),
310–317.
61. Lilla, The Reckless Mind, 226.
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trends in the soul of Mexican political leadership and as a consistent re-

minder of the caudillismo (a uniquely Mexican form of philotyranny)
that lies within. In a similar vein, French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut,
an occasional collaborator both in Vuelta and Letras Libres, started his
book La défaite de la pensée with a reference to Benda:
En 1926, Julien Benda publie La trahison des clercs. Son sujet: “le cataclysme
des notions morales chez ceux qui éduquent le monde.”Benda s’inquiète de l’en-
thousiasme que l’Europe pensante professe depuis quelque temps pour les pro-
fondeurs mystérieuses de l’âme collective. Il denounce l’allégresse avec laquelle
les desservants de la activité intellectuelle, à l’éncontre de leur vocation millé-
naire, flétrissent le sentiment de l’universel et glorifient les particularismes.62
In their different intellectual and cultural locations, Krauze, Benda, and

Finkielkraut conceived their political work based on a return to Benda:
the never-ending task of defending the liberal legacies of the Enlighten-
ment against the philotyrannies of the present. As we can see in Lilla,
this implied in part the reification of liberal ideologems and the subse-
quent erasure of any meaningful difference between the radical left and
right. In this worldview, Letras Libres gradually calibrated its role in the
Mexican public sphere as a publication committed to denouncing any
form of “tyranny” and to defending and promoting the “sentiment de
l’universel,” which Finkielkraut and Benda saw only from the perspec-
tive of a philosophical elegy.
The influence of Lilla’s thought in the political line of Letras Libres
crystallized on the eve of the 2006 election in “El Mesías Tropical.”After
tracing the complex genealogy behind this article, laying out the ideo-
logical and political signifiers at play in this intervention is possible. “El
Mesías Tropical”was a point of confluence of the many intellectual strate-
gies and ideological wagers discussed in the present study. The nucleus
of Krauze’s portrait of López Obrador was, clearly, a “biography of
power,” an attempt to frame him within the tradition of Mexican cau-
dillismo. However, unlike Krauze’s work on the foundational figures of
the post-revolutionary order, which recognized the democratic poten-
tial of some of their interventions, “El Mesias Tropical” opted to follow
Lilla’s model of highlighting alleged philotyrannical trends at the expense
of identifying the social issues that allowed for López Obrador’s emer-
gence in the first place. Of course, just as Lilla claimed the legacy of Ber-
lin’s biographism and managed to refute some of the significant ideo-
logical articulations of his subjects of study, Krauze constructed an attack
ad hominem, by focusing not on the Mexican left’s complex legacies,
but on López Obrador’s specific articulations to the country’s networks
62. Alain Finkielkraut, La Défaite de la Pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 13
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 74
of power. Therefore, by focusing history on an individual figure, rather

than on the sociohistorical processes surrounding the emergence of a
populist left in contemporary Mexico—such as the growing social in-
equality and the disenfranchisement of large sectors of society from the
two-party hegemony consolidated under the Fox administration—Krauze
was able to successfully delegitimize López Obrador’s candidacy on the
grounds that his caudillista style ultimately threatened Mexico’s hard-
earned democratic and institutional order. In a way, “El Mesías Tropical”
ultimately represented one of the most troubling legacies cast by Benda,
Castoriadis, and Berlin: a militant commitment to a narrow notion of
democracy and politics that existed upon the definition of any non-
liberal articulation of politics as either “philotyrannic” or as a “mistake
of the majority” that the intellectual must, by definition, combat.
In April 2009, as I write these lines, Krauze’s viewpoint has acquired
a transnational audience and shown the potential and perils of its con-
victions. First, in an opinion article in The New York Times entitled “The
Mexican Evolution,”63 Krauze fervently defends Mexico against the me-
dia portrayals surrounding the growing drug-related violence on the bor-
der. Beyond the fact that Krauze is right to point out the exaggerated
perceptions of the problem in the United States, that his defense is cen-
tered on the institutional strength of Mexico is quite meaningful:
Mexico has demonstrated an institutional continuity unique in Latin America.
To be sure, it can be argued that the P.R.I. created a collective monarchy with
the electoral forms of a republic. But since 2000, when the opposition National
Action Party won the presidency, power has been decentralized. There is much
greater independence in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of gov-
ernment. An autonomous Federal Electoral Institute oversees elections and a
transparency law has been passed to combat corruption. We have freedom of
expression, and electoral struggles between parties of the right, center and left.
Our national institutions function. The army is (and long has been) subject to
the civilian control of the president; the church continues to be a cohesive force;
a powerful business class shows no desire to move to Miami. We have strong la-
bor unions, good universities, important public enterprises and social programs
that provide reasonable results.64
This passage, which stands in contrast to Krauze’s constant indictments

of caudillo-like figures, shows the system of ideas upon which his work
rests: an intellectual duty to construct an institutional order in the pub-
lic sphere. Notably, the system of values put forward here falls close to
a liberal agenda not unlike the one sustained by other figures in The New
63. Enrique Krauze, “The Mexican Evolution,”The New York Times, March 24, 2009,
A27
64. Krauze, “The Mexican Evolution,” A27.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 75
York Times opinion pages, such as Paul Krugman or Frank Rich. Indeed,
Krauze’s affinities with figures of the U.S. public sphere, like Mark Lilla,
have allowed for the translation of his critical and intellectual practice
to the English-speaking world. Thus, it is not surprising that Krauze’s
second foray into the U.S. media was a condensed version of his intel-
lectual biography of Hugo Chávez, published in the April 1st issue of The
New Republic under the harsh title of “The Shah of Venezuela. The Ideas
that Keep Hugo Chávez in Power and Their Disastrous Consequences.”65
The fact that Krauze is one of the very few Latin American intellectuals
able to discuss Chávez in such a high-level U.S. publication is notewor-
thy in itself. However, his approach to Chávez, a careful dissection of
the Venezuelan president’s readings with the purpose of questioning
whether he is a “classical fascist,” is far more telling; it falls very close
not only to Lilla’s own method of discrediting radical intellectual prac-
tices, but also to the very editorial line of The New Republic in this re-
gard. Only a few weeks before, Adam Kirsch, one of the publication’s
critics at large, published a scathing critique of Slavoj Žižek, entitled “The
Deadly Jester,”66 in which the Slovenian philosopher, like Lilla’s Foucault
and Krauze’s Chávez, was attacked for his antiliberal stance and identi-
fied with fascism.
Krauze’s growing notoriety in Mexico and abroad raises the ques-
tion about the nature of the intellectual in contemporary Mexico. As I
have shown up to this point, one may claim that Krauze’s work repre-
sents the latest instance in a long tradition of liberal intellectual practice
based on the claim that members of the lettered city play an essential
role in the construction of institutional democracy in Mexico. To be sure,
Krauze is perhaps not the most influential intellectual in Mexico; that
title is currently owned by Carlos Monsiváis, whose political affinities
run to the left of Krauze’s. However different their pursuits in the pub-
lic sphere may be, Monsiváis and Krauze do share an intellectual prem-
ise: that of an incomplete modernity that Mexico must achieve in order
to become a fully democratic society. I have argued this very point else-
where, in light of Monsiváis’s recent books on nineteenth-century lib-
eralism.67 Furthermore, Jürgen Habermas’s famous article on “unfinished
modernity” was made accessible to Mexican audiences in Vuelta. Orig-
inally published in the May 1981 issue, “La modernidad inconclusa”68
lamented a series of “conservatisms” that included the poststructuralist
65. Enrique Krauze, “The Shah of Venezuela. The Ideas that Keep Hugo Chávez in
Power, and their Disastrous Consequences,” The New Republic (April 1, 2009), 29–37.
66. Adam Kirsch, “The Deadly Jester,” The New Republic (December 3, 2008).
67. Sánchez Prado, “Carlos Monsiváis,” 336.
68. Jürgen Habermas, “La modernidad inconclusa,” Vuelta (May 1981), 4–9.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 76
critique of Western reason, neo-Aristotelian right-wing positions like

those of Leo Strauss and the “neo-conservatism”embodied by the resur-
gence of Carl Schmitt. Here we can see, yet again, the familiar equaliza-
tion of right and left antiliberalism within the banner of “conservatism.”
Habermas’s alternative is, just like Krauze’s focus on institutionalism or
Monsiváis’s return to nineteenth-century secularism, a critical return to
modernity based on acknowledging its mistakes but ultimately vindi-
cating its major claims and goals.
The fact of the matter is that the entire spectrum of Mexican intel-
lectual work seems to operate from the platform provided by this mas-
ter narrative. Even the Zapatistas fall into this category, as shown by the
fact that the foundational document of the movement, the “Primera de-
claración de la Selva Lacandona,” claims Article 39 of the Mexican con-
stitution as its departure point. In other words, rather than speaking of
a true “revolutionary” transformation of the Mexican State, the Zapatis-
tas frame their claims in the unfulfilled promise of a constitution that
was meant to embody the values of liberal modernity. The primacy of
liberalism as the guiding ideological principle of all factions of Mexican
intelligentsia and democracy as the transcendental signifier that em-
bodies the future promise of Mexican modernity represents a triumph
of Benda’s model of the intellectual. The gradual disappearance of Mar-
cos from the Mexican public sphere represents the defeat of the last great
attempt to claim a Gramscian practice of the intellectual as organic to a
grassroots social movement.
Claudio Lomnitz has pointed out that one of the defining traits of
the Mexican transition is “a kind of ‘excess of history’ [that] marked
the period as a whole.”69 For Lomnitz, this meant the emergence of a
“succinct and abbreviated moral vocabulary,”as well as “a set of images
that could handily stand in for long-standing arguments or even entire
doctrines.”70 The “excess of history” manifested both in the work of a
right-wing liberal like Krauze and of a left-wing liberal like Monsiváis
shows that, perhaps, there is no such thing as an ideological debate in
the Mexican intellectual field. Rather, a predetermined narrative frame
over-determines all critical discourse. What is at stake in intellectual
work is merely a contest between images and definitions to fill its empty
signifiers. If one puts Krauze’s biographies of power and Monsiváis’s
recent work on the liberal tradition side by side, this becomes quite
clear. Both agree on the fact that a liberal secular state is the most de-
sirable outcome for Mexican democracy, but they differ on their defi-
69. Lomnitz, “Narrating the Neoliberal Moment,” 54.

70. Lomnitz, “Narrating the Neoliberal Moment,” 54.
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 77
nitions of liberalism. Monsiváis locates it in the historical legacies of

Mexican foundational figures, thus vindicating a nationalist version of
modernity. Krauze looks for it in a cosmopolitan tradition of thinkers
like Lilla or Kolakowski, who created their intellectual identity against
the grain of nationalism and populism, thus developing a definition of
liberalism critical of any nationalist allegiance. While one could certainly
point to many differences of opinion emerging from the clashing def-
initions, at the end of the day the two major public intellectuals in Mex-
ico speak the same ideological language. The identity of Mexico’s in-
tellectual class today is, by and large, a self-understanding based on the
paradoxical juxtaposition between autonomy from the state and de-
fense of state institutionalism.
In view of all this, I conclude that underlying the overwhelming pub-
lic presence of Krauze71 and Monsiváis the ideological and political prom-
ise of the liberal intellectual in Mexico has been exhausted. Benda’s
model made sense when Jorge Cuesta decided to publish his work in
Examen. In the middle of the institutionalization process of the Mexi-
can Revolution, a position that held intellectual autonomy vis-à-vis con-
siderable efforts to co-opt intellectual discourse for the benefit of the
emergent state was undoubtedly the appropriate course of action. Sim-
ilarly, the critique of populism and the defense of democratic institu-
tionalism as presented by Berlin, Habermas, or Castoriadis were perti-
nent in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Mexican state hijacked populism
into an undeniably failed model that led to some of the most spectacu-
lar political and economic crises in Mexican history. Both in its right-
wing version, embodied by figures like Krauze, and in its left-wing ver-
sion, championed by Monsiváis, this liberalism played a major role in
the gradual process of undermining the PRI hegemony. As a result, the
political party system that emerged in the late 1990s clearly reflected
the agendas and identities constructed by the intellectual class two
decades earlier. However, in 2009, when many of the institutional goals
defined in the 1980s have been attained with varying degrees of suc-
cess, the question is whether this mode of intellectual practice holds
any remaining potential to face the challenges posed by the conflictive
71. Coincidentally, as I was finishing this article, a tribute to Enrique Krauze appeared
in Mexican bookstores. This book, with the grandiloquent title of El temple liberal, offers
thirty-some interventions by many contributors to Letras Libres and other intellectual ven-
tures connected to Krauze in celebration of his work and political views. While the book
does not offer any substantial scholarly point on Krauze’s work, it is a good example of
his stature in the Mexican intellectual and political class. See Fernando García Ramírez,
comp., El temple liberal. Acercamiento a la obra de Enrique Krauze. (Mexico: Tusquets/
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009).
MSEM2601 2/24/10 9:28 AM Page 78
Mexican public sphere. “Whither the intellectual?” one may ask, echo-
ing Derrida’s interrogation of Marxism. Is liberal modernity still a re-
source for political articulation in Mexico? Not only the future of Letras
Libres and its role in Mexican public life, but also the very possibility of
intellectual articulation in Mexico, rests, I believe, in the answer to this
question.

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Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States

University of California Press, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, University

Claiming Liberalism: Enrique Krauze,

48 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 49

who has no possible role in a globalized Mexico. Krauze’s argument ba-

3. Enrique Krauze, El poder y el delirio (Mexico: Tusquets, 2008).

50 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

Vicente Fox’s failure to consolidate his electoral victory into a functional

6. Carlos Altamirano, Intelectuales.Notas de investigación, Enciclopedia latinoameri-

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 51

nomic means of production. Second, based mostly on the work of An-

52 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

publication of translated excerpts in Cuesta’s journal Examen, played a

In the context of the nationalist and revolutionary imperatives that

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 53

the term “les clercs de la nation” as a subtitle.14 Furthermore, this his-

54 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 55

This new conception of the intellectual became embodied in Oc-

56 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

vidual freedoms and constructed in opposition both to right-wing na-

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 57

Finding another text that so succinctly represents the stakes of the

58 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

In other words, it is possible to argue that the cultural debates of the

31. Maarten Van Delden, “Conjunciones y disyunciones. La rivalidad entre Vuelta y

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 59

60 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

gradually diminished the centrality of literature. In its place, Krauze cre-

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 61

62 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

The first issue of Letras Libres clearly reflected Krauze’s emerging

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 63

64 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

salient figures of international liberalism or essays by Mexican intellec-

44. Enrique Krauze, Caudillos culturales en la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico: Siglo

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 65

45. Krauze, Caudillos culturales, 11.

66 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

son’s work relevant to an understanding of Krauze. First, the biograph-

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 67

structing a politics that legitimizes the role of autonomous intellectual

49. Menand, “Foreword,” xi.

68 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

sition into Letras Libres, he became the subject of many controversies.

51. Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico. An Anthropology of National-

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 69

In these terms, Lomnitz argued that Krauze’s historiography was de-

53. Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico, 218.

70 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

of figures like Krauze or Monsiváis: “The intellectual as somatic popular

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 71

enment tradition. In a 2004 article à propos of Lilla’s The Reckless Mind,56

Many elements of this statement may be unpacked into a description of

72 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

Krauze strategically overlooked the fact that many public intellectuals

Interestingly, one could characterize Krauze’s biographies of power in a

Sánchez Prado, Enrique Krauze and the Mexican Iintellectual Class 73

trends in the soul of Mexican political leadership and as a consistent re-

In their different intellectual and cultural locations, Krauze, Benda, and

62. Alain Finkielkraut, La Défaite de la Pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 13