Octavio Paz and the Changing Role of Intellectuals in Mexico

Mexico is the only country in the Americas where intellectuals have had a significant and sustained role in the political arena during the twentieth century. This distinction does not come from a historical tradition of criticism in the country: quite the opposite, claimed Mexican writer and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz (1914–98). A fragment of the Spanish matrix, Mexico never really experienced the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment. This was a common theme for Paz: "Because we did not have the Enlightenment or a bourgeois revolution—neither criticism nor guillotine—we did not experience the passionate and spiritual reaction against Criticism and its components known as romanticism. . . . It could not have been any different: our romantics rebelled against something they never suffered from: the tyranny of reason" ("Es moderna nuestra literatura?" OC 3: 62).²

The uniqueness of the Mexican intelligentsia comes not from an intellectual tradition but from a certain pattern of state-building. Its characteristics are notorious: a concentration and confusion of all powers at the top; the "revolutionary" regime's appetite for ideology (if only as an empty shell); institutionalized patterns of interest representation which turn all sectorial elites (including the cultural elite) into interlocking and interdependent pyramidal groups; and last but not least, the common social background of these elite groups. The official secularism inherited from the Mexican revolution may well be an additional factor: as Tocqueville explains, when politics expels religion, politics emulates religion. One is tempted to add: when politics imitates Mexican Catholicism, it makes for a mostly ceremonious, this-worldly form of official ideology, and for an accommodating clerisy. In other "statist" countries such as France, Poland, or Russia, the intelligentsia emerged as a substitute for declining aristocracies, from whom they salvaged the self-perception of a civilizing stratum of society, worthy of social deference and by extension, of emancipation from (hence disinterest for) material needs. In Mexico, the contemporary intelligentsia has some roots in the prerevolutionary regime, the Porfiriato, but remains largely the product of the Revolution.

The role of intellectuals is no longer as clear as it might have once been, both in Mexico and in other countries where they were once influential. The liberalization and democratization of the past two decades are changing the rules of the political game, fragmenting power and institutionalizing conventional channels of representation and participation. If criticism constitutes the means and ends of the intellectual, what could be the role of an intellectual in a society that democratizes and normalizes criticism? Do free and vigilant citizens need intellectuals to operate as their "critical conscience"? This essay seeks to respond to this question while focusing on Mexico, a country that just celebrated the peaceful transfer of power from a seven-decade-old political dynasty to a new team publically committed to demolishing "all vestiges of authoritarianism." I will refer throughout to the work of Octavio Paz, an ardent advocate of democracy in his own country and beyond, and arguably the most famous Mexican intellectual of the 20th century. Paz was also a prolific essayist on the topic of the adventures and misadventures of intellectuals in his century. As I argue, however, Paz found it difficult to spell out with clarity what the intellectual's specific mission should be in a modernizing and democratizing environment. Indeed, perhaps this lack of clarity on Paz's part is for a good reason: it simply isn't clear that intellectuals do have a specific mission in that environment. Thus, Paz's ambiguity is not his alone, but points to a larger ambiguity of the present time in Mexico and perhaps beyond.

Criticism as Instrument

In his Laberinto de la soledad, Paz calls the Mexican intelligentsia the sector of society that "has made of critical thinking its vital activity" (OC 8: 147). The key word here is "critical." The adjective "vital" is perhaps less precise, for critical thinking may well be the most significant means of intellectual labor without being its primary activity. Intellectuals are always amateurs as intellectuals, and often specialists or professionals in other areas. Intellectuals typically manifest themselves in their...