Fredrick Pike has written a very useful book. Students will find here a literate and engaging introduction to Peruvian history that is noteworthy for its comprehensiveness and coherence. Professional historians of Latin America will find an interpretation of Peru’s history that, if it does not persuade, will at least challenge them. They will also find an excellent bibliographical essay and a wealth of citations to the pertinent Peruvian literature that may make their own future Peruvian researches substantially easier.

Notoriously Peru’s pensadores and scholars have a record of bitter disagreement among themselves about what Peru has been, what it is, and what it ought to become. Peruvian historiography is a cacophony, as hispanistas, indigenistas, positivists, and Marxists shrill their respective verities. Points of view as radically different as those of José de la Riva Agüero, Luis E. Valcárcel, Manuel González Prada, and José Carlos Mariátegui, for example, are simply irreconcilable; and the intellectual “civil war” which has raged in Peru for a century continues today, albeit in forms that shift with changing national circumstances and global ideological currents.

Because ideas have consequences—or at least are assumed to have them—and because this wrangling among Peru’s interpreters has presumably exacerbated tensions between groups, classes, and ethnic components, some Peruvian historians have taken upon themselves the task of redressing the balance in the direction of national community and consensus. Jorge Basadre is preeminent in this latter group. In Basadre’s exegesis, to put the matter much too baldly, whatever serves to divide Peruvian from Peruvian—whether person, force, institution, or event—is bad; whatever serves to bring Peruvians into closer harmony, closer cooperation is good. The purpose of Basadre’s work, explicated in his Meditaciones sobre el destino histórico del Perú (Lima, 1947) and particularly in his essay “Nuestra guerra civil” contained therein, is to help build a civilized Peruvian nation whose inhabitants will feel themselves to be meaningfully participant members. It is a noble lifework to which Basadre has set himself, a work of reconciliation, of interpretation and reinterpretation to encourage understanding and trust across Peru’s social, economic, political, cultural, and ideological gulfs. Not all scholars will agree, however, that good history necessarily accompanies the pursuit of this lofty purpose, although they may approve the purpose itself.

Pike has chosen to cast his lot squarely with that of Basadre, joining him in his effort to help make the Peruvian nation. However, one cannot avoid asking himself as he reads this book whether Pike’s compassionate concern for Peruvians and their national future has not led him to some highly questionable historical judgments and interpretations. One of Pike’s heroes is Ramón Castilla who “succeeded in taming the two wild forces, liberalism and conservatism, that otherwise might have torn Peru asunder, as they did so many other Hispanic American republics” (p. 119). Another is Nicolás de Piérola who “searched for and found much that was worthwhile in the past and used it as a foundation for his constructive ideas on the present . . .”; who, “instead of encouraging disunion . . . effectively exhorted Peruvians to seek a consensus on issues over which they had previously fought” (p. 180).

A third of Pike’s exemplars is Luis M. Sánchez Cerro who “had come to grasp conditions in Peru better than many intellectuals and had determined to play precisely the political role best suited to the times,” who “hoped to accomplish . . . the formation of a political party that would permanently bind together proletariat and aristocratic elements” (p. 251). Also Fernando Belaúnde Terry appeals to Pike, “because he was the first significant reform-minded political leader of the twentieth century who did not insist, in his zeal for change, either on forcing the coastal way of life on the sierra or on imposing the sierra cultural patterns on the coast. He envisioned a genuinely pluralistic country in which the coast could advance with its westernized, capitalist traditions while the sierra progressed through its at least semi-socialistic Inca customs” (p. 307).

Pike’s villains, on the other hand, include Manuel González Prada who “had tried to set the sierra against the coast, the Indian against the white and the cholo, the poor against the rich, the free-thinker and atheist against the believer, the young against the old, the civilian against the soldier, and the citizen against the policeman” (p. 180); and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre who, with his lieutenants in APRA, are mercilessly lambasted as dangerously divisive agents, rank opportunists, and persons who employ “the jargon of Marxism-Leninism” (p. 255).

Categorizations like these do justice neither to the persons categorized nor to the historical situations within which they play their roles. That Pike wants to have a hand in the building of Peru is laudable, but he is after all a foreigner in Peru, and, as a foreigner, he should above all be careful and scrupulously fair. Regrettably he is not. González Prada does not fit Pike’s characterization as a wholly destructive influence, either in terms of his long-range impact upon Peru or in his own writings, as any reader of his 1885 essay on Almirante Grau must immediately conclude. Haya de la Torre and the APRA simply cannot be adequately classified through the use of criteria rather like those of a Grade B western movie. On the other side, Castilla, Piérola, and Sánchez Cerro are only dubiously entitled to the splendid accolades Pike bestows upon them. And without for a moment disparaging the accomplishments of President Belaúnde one must also record that after the election of 1962, which he lost, he took himself off to Arequipa to raise the banner of national revolt. Nowhere does Pike mention this.

The writing of Peruvian history is extraordinarily difficult, but one wishes that Pike had been a bit more temperate and judicious. Instead he is now identified as a partisan in a Peruvian family dispute. Nevertheless, this is an important work, the product of much dedicated research. It deserves and will surely find many readers.