In this book, which is rich in insights and mature scholarly analysis, Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez provides seven chapters that sketch the formative years and detail some of the most important features of the ever-fascinating thought of Peru’s José Carlos Mariátegui. In particular, the author stresses the influence of religion on Mariátegui’s thought and the eclectic, heterodox approach that the crippled journalist-philosopher adopted toward faiths and myths ranging from Catholicism to Marxism, anarchism, and indigenismo.
Unlike some who have studied Mariátegui’s thought, Chang-Rodríguez insists that the influence of religion remained constant and was never supplanted by Marxism. Indeed, the author sees Mariátegui as a forerunner of a subsequent generation of intellectuals convinced of the feasibility of synthesizing Christianity and Marxism. “One of the first Hispanoamericans” to reject the limitations that confined religion to the realm of private conscience, Mariátegui “freed himself from traditional notions of religious salvation” (p. 106). For him, the revolutionary movement arose out of a redemptive doctrine, and, therefore, faith in the envisaged social revolution became a religion. Because Mariátegui saw religion as part and parcel of the social action that would produce the new human in a new world, he must be seen as a precursor of liberation theology. Chang-Rodríguez’s interpretation is largely persuasive. Still, one can wonder if the hubris of many liberation theologians, which leads them to insist that only their version is the true theology, has much in common with Mariátegui’s refreshing suspiciousness of absolutes.
In a concluding chapter that analyzes his protagonist’s poetical and Marxist predilections, Chang-Rodríguez reiterates the importance of romantic antipositivism, Catholicism, Modernism, and mysticism, and the influences of Henri Bergson and Manuel González Prada in shaping Mariátegui’s thought. This reviewer wishes that he had also considered the possible influences of popular religion and various esoteric, occult beliefs that had been in vogue for some years among a variety of Latin American thinkers. To his credit, though, Chang-Rodríguez—even though slighting English-language sources—has provided a brief, well-written, reliable introduction to the published works currently available on a would-be prophet whose acceptance and even welcoming of suffering was matched by visions of secular millennialism.
