The Miseducation of Mario Vargas Llosa

In a 1949 paper published in the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, the liberal philosopher Sidney Hook described a certain species of mid-century intellectual who, having long looked to the Soviet Union as a grand experiment in human emancipation, was impelled, for one reason or another, to doubt and ultimately abandon that conviction. The flight of the fellow travelers, including the likes of W.H. Auden, Edmund Wilson, André Gide, and Bertrand Russell, was born not out of mere disappointment or embarrassment but, Hook insisted, something deeper and far more troubling: a kind of religious disenchantment that upset the foundations of a shared political identity. What resulted from this “decay of faith,” as Hook termed it, was a “literature of political disillusionment,” a subgenre in the confessional style in which that failure was put on full display, examined, and ultimately transformed into maturity. The primary language in which this maturity expressed itself was liberalism.