Despite its title this short book is not a biography of Vicente Lombardo Toledano. Instead it is mostly a gloss of his principal writings over a period of nearly forty years, and only the first chapter supplies any formal presentation of his life. The remainder of the book deals mainly with Lombardo’s pronouncements and publications on a variety of matters, as indicated by the following selected chapter headings: “New Orientation, Marxist Philosophy”; “Imperialism and the Mexican Economy”; “The Social and Political Structure of Mexico”; “A People’s Democracy and Socialism: The New Humanism”; “International Affairs.” Two chapters on Lombardo’s role in organized labor and party politics rely more upon other persons’ friendly or unfriendly descriptions than upon his own writings. In no part of the study does Vicente Lombardo Toledano emerge as a real person whose attitudes and actions reflect the environment in which he found himself or the personal experiences he encountered during his life.
This is not a very satisfying book. All too obviously it originated as a doctoral dissertation, with some of the strengths and most of the weaknesses of the genre. On one hand, Millon has carefully collected writings by and materials about Lombardo Toledano, supplemented by comments of Lombardo himself. On the other, he has made the fundamental error of presenting Lombardo and his work as though he were a social and political philosopher with systematic and consistent views based upon isolation from the world environment. In reality, Lombardo usually took far more active roles as a politician and labor leader reacting to the extraordinarily rapidly changing conditions which Mexico has faced from the 1920s to the present. This pragmatic influence shows in practically everything that Lombardo has written.
Considering that Millon is a historian, the almost absolute absence of historical background against which to measure the content of Lombardo’s writings is difficult to comprehend. It is especially unfortunate because of the organization which the author has adopted for most of the chapters. He has chosen to present a synthesis of Lombardo’s ideas in the present indicative, lumping them together under the various chapter headings and ignoring the fact that they emerged over a very long period of time and under stress of circumstances which have changed enormously with the years. This is no service to Lombardo, because some of his pronouncements, made early in the Revolutionary period but presented as though they represent his contemporary thought, make the maestro sound more confused than profound. Similarly Millon has utilized all of Lombardo’s writings, polemical, scholarly, analytical, and even poetical—not to mention Partido Popular election documents—in an attempt to describe his value system. The apparent lack of discrimination leaves the reader confused as to where Lombardo’s politics leave off and his principles begin.
In general, although this book offers the reader some idea of Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s attitudes on a series of points, it does little to explain why he thinks the way he does, or how the real world around him has affected his thought. It does not even explain how a man can follow the Soviet party line for thirty years and still consider himself an independent Marxist, not a Communist.
