In this career tour de force on the Latin American public man, Glen Caudill Dealy examines social character from the standpoint of the whole. He contends: “from the lowliest cobbler to the caudillo president, a psychology or ‘Spirit’ of caudillaje imbues Latin Americans.” Its origins he finds in classical, binary Catholic and Renaissance Mediterranean culture, which created a two-morality society of private, ethical, and religious life centered on the family and a Homo politicus of self-aggrandizement and Machiavellian method. He contrasts this with North American one-morality society, whose Puritan heritage established a single moral standard for private and public behavior. Its embodiment is a Homo económicus driven by individualist gain. For both cultures Dealy elucidates social, economic, and political manifestations of these characterological and intellectual underpinnings.
The typical Latin American of caudillaje culture Dealy calls the ascendiente, who seeks social power and recognition by personalist means and whose values are rationalized in dignidad, leisure, grandeur, generosity, and manliness. Intimately linked to this social complex are the schools, the military, the bureaucracy, and the city. Leaders take caudillaje society into “public glory and public shame.” The basic attitudes, Dealy avers, of both North and Latin America become duplicitous.
The book presents a limited view of Latin Americans. Dealy’s case for Catholicism as a formative influence on caudillaje is acutely but excessively drawn. The Hispanic public man has been shaped as much by the secular dimension of the reconquest, the culture of power in the empire, the postindependence political vacuum, and nineteenth-century empleomanía as by Catholicism. The book’s subtitle, Spirit and Ethos, is misleading. Not only are the terms partially synonymous, thereby imparting a rhetorical ring, but they connote something larger than a monothematic approach to culture. There is no treatment of nationalism, identity, ethnicity, social justice, cosmopolitanism, modernization, or women as integral to the Latin American spirit; among social characteristics, no inclusion of solitude, fatalism, joy, myriad forms of love, irony, humor, nonreligious spirituality, moral and aesthetic values, universalism, and, yes, thrift and practicality. If caudillaje is central to the Latin American spirit, the people’s attempt to overcome certain of its elements is just as significant.
To lock virtually all life into controlling paradigms is as flawed a construction as Rodó’s theory of the hemisphere. There is plenty of the Other in the Other. Of course, Dealy is merely tracing patterns in the two civilizations, but except for one obscure caveat to this effect, he hammers away with semantic variations of Homo políticus/Homo económicus: “Time is friendship”/“time is money”; “lavishing, self-gratification, and leisure”/“consistent saving, nonindulgence, and work”; and so on.
He concludes, “neither Latin America nor the United States will likely evolve to have it both ways. Each seems destined to play out the best and the worst of its overreaching rationale.” What is this statement? Our lives and careers are worthwhile to the extent that we supersede this situation. True, to do so may require surpassing the normative evolution of both civilizations, but that is one of the supreme challenges of living.
The author posits ideal types to structure his discourse, and draws on firsthand experience with Latin Americans and a wealth of Western literature to reveal and explain his subthemes. The book is well written, clearly argued, highly interesting, and stimulating. Students are hungry for interpretation at this level, and they will appreciate the discussion this book will generate.
