William H. Katra’s Domingo F. Sarmiento: Public Writer (Between 1839 and 1852) documents the formative years of one of Argentina’s foremost personalities of the nineteenth century. Politician, journalist, educator, historian, philosopher, and diplomat, Sarmiento helped to shape his country’s history through both his writings and his political activity. Katra argues that in order to understand the mature Sarmiento, considerable attention must he paid to his youthful years of exile in Chile, when he furthered his career in journalism and educational reform, and wrote several notable works, including the classic of nineteenth-century Latin American literature, Facundo. It is during this period, according to Katra, that Sarmiento developed both his philosophy and literary esthetics in such a manner to bring about the ultimate freedom from dictatorial rule of his native Argentina.
Katra’s study devotes considerable attention to the philosophy of Sarmiento as revealed in both his journalistic articles and Facundo, in an attempt to provide structure to his author’s thought. While Katra correctly links major currents in Sarmiento’s work to contemporary European and Argentine writers, he unfortunately tends to neglect the fact that Sarmiento was spending his years as a public writer in Chile, which experienced the beginning of its own intellectual renaissance in 1842. The Chilean connection, which also played a role in the formation of Sarmiento’s thought, is virtually absent here. At one point, Katra refers to Andrés Bello, the noted Venezuelan scholar, who ultimately played a major role in the formation of Chile’s intellectual institutions, noting that Sarmiento was “in all probability familiar with” his work (p. 54). Actually, there seems to be no way that Sarmiento could not have been familiar with Bello’s ideas, since he spent considerable effort attacking them in his journal articles. In a later chapter, Katra finally does note Sarmiento’s participation in Chilean debates on historiography, but this brief inclusion does little to correct the fundamental imbalance inherent in this study. This difficulty is perhaps a reflection of the sources used by the author. Most are of Argentine origin, and many are of a secondary nature. As a result, the role of Chile in the formation of Sarmientos thought during this crucial period remains murky throughout the work.
Nonetheless, Katra does manage to place Sarmiento in the context of both Argentine and European thought of the early nineteenth century. It is this fact, and the excellent discussion of Facundo, which give this work considerable value.
