The Individual in Philosophy, Art, and Politics

Borges's texts repeatedly remind the reader of the limits and the insignificance of the individual and the complexity of the universe, where the individual dissipates in a “universal mythology,”Footnote ⁸ a situation that is paralleled in his fiction by the “dissolution of characters” incidental to the plot.Footnote ⁹ The dissolution of characters is present in the Borgesian insistence that individuals dissolve in “archetypes,” for example, in his description of the Lombard warrior as a “generic type,” in his view of Argentine gauchos and knife-fighters as embodying the archetypical courageous man, and in his idea of the archetypical hero as he who embarks upon restoring justice to a corrupt world.Footnote ¹⁰ Likewise, in many of his poems individuals do not play an important or independent role, but rather follow a design or a plot (usually in the form of a labyrinth), where they find themselves facing a destiny that most often they do not and cannot understand.Footnote ¹¹

Borges's notion of a mysterious cosmos, unknowable and consequently confusing or deceiving to the human eye,Footnote ¹² is the foundation of his epistemology of fallibility. However, the fact that our cognitive limitations prevent us from knowing or describing reality with certainty or exactitude does not imply that reality itself is disordered or chaotic. In his story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” we read that reality may be ordered “in accordance with divine laws” that we can never “manage to penetrate,” and in “The Library of Babel” we are informed that reality is presented to us under “the same disorder” which, when repeated, “becomes Order,” an Order that is Borges's “elegant hope.”Footnote ¹³

The appearance of a cosmological chaos paves the way to the hope that there is an order and to the resignation that we can only make conjectures about what that order might be. Because of their radical fallibility, human beings should attempt to classify things and enumerate their attributes as long as they remain aware that those mental products are in essence arbitrary and subject to deconstruction. Far from decrying the uselessness of such tasks or of preaching despair, for Borges the cognitive enterprise is justified and merits the effort, in spite of its provisional results. Such is the concluding thought in “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” an ironic piece where Borges deals with the topics of knowledge and language and with the problems of the representation, classification, and expression of reality. He concludes, “The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe can not dissuade us from planning human schemes, even though it is clear they are provisional.”Footnote ¹⁴

The idea of a limited individual is central to Borges's opinions on the role of the individual in art, and to his belief in the lack of individual artistic originality. Borges insisted that most artists just make a comment on the literary tradition, and that they grow out of, and within, the tradition of generations. In the introduction to The Garden of Forking Paths he remarks, “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, Borges's portrayal of the literary world allows us to infer that literature is not an individualistic, “privatized experience, a game of solitaire,”Footnote ¹⁶ but rather a cooperative enterprise gradually unfolding in time, where each individual is able to provide a small personal contribution.

The limits of the individual in the world of art come through also in Borges's opinions on the extent to which the artist knows what she is doing. Art, like the cosmos, is a mystery that cannot be explained: “the rose has no why” or “art happens.”Footnote ¹⁷ By the same token, artistic ends should be apolitical; the artist's intentions need not be committed to a moral, social, or political cause. “To talk of social art is like talking of vegetarian geometry,” Borges wrote in 1933.Footnote ¹⁸ He later criticized those who maintained what for him were two incompatible premises: “all license in art” and “art should prepare the revolution.”Footnote ¹⁹ Beyond the logical incompatibility between the notions of art for art's sake and art in the service of political ends, Borges's implication is that the political use of art would be arrogant from an epistemic view: “The notion of art as compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what he is doing.”Footnote ²⁰

For Borges a politically engaged art is not only oxymoronic and arrogant but may also be misleading and dangerous. For one, it replaces the artistic standard with a political criterion: “Politics is ubiquitous, a writer is judged on the basis of his political opinions and not of his art.”Footnote ²¹ Secondly, politics might look for the imposition of a cultural model, thus threatening the liberty essential to the creative process. Borges's case against nationalistic pretensions is proof of his opposition to artificially imposed cultural models. For him, writers should not be coerced into the substance or the form of their works, but should address any topic “without reverence.”Footnote ²²

Notwithstanding the need to preserve artistic independence from the claws of politics, Borges acknowledged that the political might still have a function with regard to art: “the ends of art have to be distinguished from the excitations that produce it [that can be political].”Footnote ²³ In this sense, the writer operates as a detached spectator who uses human actions and historical events to “entertain and fascinate.”Footnote ²⁴ Borges himself is a testimony of the political excitations, since his tales, poems, and essays abound in references to battles, tyrants, nostalgia for peace and individual freedom, and imaginary sociopolitical organizations. Strong as these excitations were, he declared he had tried to remain uncontaminated by political intentions in his works, as he asserts in 1970: “I have never hidden my opinions, even through the difficult years, but I have never allowed them to intrude upon my literary production, either, save that one time when I praised the Six-Day War.”Footnote ²⁵

One politically inspired theme that animates many of Borges's works is his concern with governmental interference with individuals: “I believe, like the calm anarchist Spencer, that one of our maximum evils, perhaps the maximum, is the preponderance of the State over the individual. … The individual is real, the States are abstractions abused by politicians, with or without uniform.”Footnote ²⁶ This statement expresses the strength of individualism in Borges's vision of the political realm, in contrast to the philosophical condition of individual dissipation and the intergenerational nature of the literary enterprise. Moreover, unlike his philosophical pieces and poems where individuals submit themselves to a destiny, it has been pointed out that in his politically situated stories individuals choose the regime in which they want to live.Footnote ²⁷ In politics, individuals are strong enough to create their own destiny and, equally important, to take responsibility for that decision.

The character of a strong individual who chooses a political situation of his liking and takes responsibility for it is present, among other Borges stories, in “Deutsches Requiem,” “Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden,” “Pedro Salvadores,” “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz 1829–1874,” and “The Etnographer.”Footnote ²⁸ An analysis of the plots of all these stories is impossible in a single article, but they feature characters who have to justify or make a choice of a political identity that will define who they are, or perhaps more tellingly, who they do not want to be. The best example of such a story may be “A Weary Man's Utopia,” which the author characterized as the most honest and most melancholic piece in the book, a sentiment perhaps reflected in the choice of the word “weary” for the title of the story.Footnote ²⁹

“A Weary Man's Utopia” is a time-traveling story in which Eduardo Acevedo—an ordinary, contemporary man—visits the future. There he encounters a man with whom he is only able to talk in Latin—all other languages have spontaneously disappeared—and who informs him of the changes that humanity has gone through. In the future world there are no public recollections of data, no history or literature, there are no books or museums and no more memories. We infer that the absence of linguistic, historical, and artistic differences (which would be registered in books, museums, and memories, had they not disappeared) has erased all motivations for interpersonal conflicts arising from clashing visions, thus turning the world into a peaceful place. As a result, people have no use for government. There is no inheritance either, and each person builds a house and makes the household goods he uses. Life may last at least four hundred years; in this scenario of lonely and self-sufficient individuals who can do without love and friendship, the latter eventually disappear, and individuals even decide when they want to die by walking into a death chamber.

Acevedo listens to his interlocutor, and given that the man has no memories, informs him of the world where he comes from, one still haunted by “spectral collectives” and populated with “crippled” politicians, the triviality of mass-media news, the importance of appearances (“to be is to be portrayed”) and the “frequent occurrence of robbery.” Both the old man and Acevedo express no feelings or surprise for their respective accounts, and they part ways at the door of the death chamber into which the old man walks. Acevedo returns to his office, where he hangs a blank canvas yet to be painted.

Two comments are in order. First, it is intriguing that an author who had previously emphasized the cooperative nature of literary, cultural, and social pursuits wrote a story devoid of any social interaction, literary, emotional, or political. If we take into account Borges's insistence on human fallibility, however, the characterization of such a setting as utopian makes sense. Only in such a setting are individuals relieved of the burdens of their fallibility and able to engage in the performance of all functions—reading and writing, producing and consuming, living or dying—solely by themselves. The picture of an all-encompassing, infallible human being thus constitutes the boldest and greatest utopia of all. Furthermore, the people in the story do not possess any feelings of loneliness or grief or joy and hence do not offer laudatory or derogatory comments with regard to their situation. Borges's utopian portrait of humanity removes important traits of a non-utopian condition, namely, fallibility and emotional frailty, and consequently erases their effects, from anxiety to literary dependency to political oppression.Footnote ³⁰

Secondly, the plot speaks straightforwardly to the type of individualism that serves as the basis of Borges's political utopia, the self-sufficient individual.Footnote ³¹ Whereas in the world of Acevedo, individual identity depends on being perceived by others and individuals are haunted by countries and common markets, in the world of the future, individuals live separately and are in complete control of their lives and deaths. There are no governments, and wars have ceased. The story celebrates the absence of government and conveys Borges's impression that the individual had been historically threatened by the state, an organization he thought persistently interfered with individual liberty.

“A Weary Man's Utopia” was published in 1975, and hence can be seen as a summary of Borges's philosophical preoccupations and political sympathies. Long before that date, he had criticized political interference, which had for him specific victims: culture, literature, and, more broadly, the realm of thought and expression. Borges was actively engaged in the denunciation of this interference. In 1939 he lamented the effects of war among certain groups in Buenos Aires, conducive to “the extinction or abolishment of all intellectual processes,”Footnote ³² and in 1946 he asserted that “dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.”Footnote ³³ By 1950, in the context of China's Cultural Revolution, he is definitively convinced that “burning books and erecting fortifications are the usual occupations of princes.”Footnote ³⁴ The “usual occupations” of governments included, of course, the perpetration of wars, a tendency essentially inimical to the unity provided by culture. In “Juan López and John Ward,”Footnote ³⁵ written shortly after the Falklands War, an English soldier reads the Quixote, an Argentine soldier reads Conrad, and their common literary interests are menaced by war. Borges's resistance to political interference and to the dismantling of cultural unity triggered his adherence to liberal anarchism, to which I now turn my analysis.

Politics as Interference vs. Liberal Anarchism: “The Congress” and “Avelino Arredondo”

Borges's opinions on politics and on his own political affiliation have not been the object of much systematic analysis. This may be due to the fact that most works on Borges are literary, or to a suspicion that his opinions were perhaps quite controversial. Even critics like Vargas Llosa, who shares Borges's concern for individual liberty and contempt for any form of collectivism, dismisses Borges's political stance as “something that does not mean much.”Footnote ³⁶

It is precisely the scholars' treatment of Borges's liberal anarchism that captured my attention. Among those who first dealt extensively with the topic of politics in Borges are Rodríguez Monegal, who explains Borges's political preferences as the result of a gradual withdrawal from reality because of his progressive blindness, and Balderston, who argues for a historical or contextual reading of his stories.Footnote ³⁷ Yet in Balderston's index there is no reference to liberalism or anarchy, and he labels the magazine Sur, where Borges published frequently, as antifascist and pacifist without specifying if it was conservative, communist, or anarchist (or any other). Rodríguez Monegal mentions Borges's joining the Conservative Party as a result of the influence of family and friends, and not as an affiliation chosen, to use Borges's words, as an “act of scepticism”Footnote ³⁸ and as a reaction against political “barbarism,” which he associated with populist and fascist regimes.Footnote ³⁹

Among those who acknowledge Borges's liberal anarchism there is somehow a partial or incorrect reading of it. Franco assimilates Borges's political philosophy to a libertarianism that “privileges the freedom of the powerful and is not concerned with liberation from economic oppression”; for González, Borges's anarchism is a theme that appears late in his works after he had abandoned the hope of a liberal government; according to Bell-Villada, Borges's “urbane liberalism” is an “idealist intellectual's interpretation; it sees political turmoil being brought about not by economic dislocations but by the mass appeal of a few seductive ideas”; and Rodríguez-Luis aligns Borges with “European bourgeois liberalism.”Footnote ⁴⁰

To a certain extent these authors capture the spirit of Borges's stance, since he was indeed uninterested in economic analysis (and in economic issues generally), and he intensified his anarchism as the years increased as well as his suspicion that government interferes with individuals. Yet to think that his anarchism appears only late in his works, or to relate it to the freedom of a privileged few, or only to Europe, is to overlook several facts. For one, we know from his autobiography that he acquired his liberal anarchistic opinions early on from his father.Footnote ⁴¹ Second, Borges did not identify with the “privileged few”; on the contrary, in an autobiographical note he wrote that he “rejoiced in belonging to the bourgeoisie … the plebs and the aristocracy, devoted to money, gaming, sports, nationalism, success and publicity, seemed to him identical.”Footnote ⁴² Third, his thought should not be traced back to European influences only; as has been convincingly argued, Borges is better understood as being at the crossroads of European and local, criollo influences.Footnote ⁴³ Finally, except for González the issue of Borges's liberal anarchism has remained under-analyzed, despite Borges's own insistence on it.Footnote ⁴⁴

So what was Borges's liberal anarchism? According to Sylvan the term anarchy means “without head” and implies a decision-making process dispersed among all members of a polity, as opposed to governmental coercion and closed ideas of authority.Footnote ⁴⁵ In this sense, anarchy is not the Hobbesian depiction of the war of all against all, nor does it carry a connotation of disorder, but is rather a political stance that sees the state as corrupt, intrusive, and aggressive. However, as with many political concepts, anarchy is a noun that needs to be accompanied by adjectives to avoid confusion. Conceptually, anarchy can be compatible with a communist organization that is inimical to liberalism insofar as the latter defends a notion of private property absent in the former. From this angle, Borges considered himself a liberal anarchist, since he made it clear that “no one has ever called me a Communist, a nationalist, an anti-semite.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Moreover, his anarchistic dislike for the state translated into a distrust of the political per se, understood indifferently as partisan activities, the activity of governing, or the establishment of national boundaries and identities. He was indeed reluctant to admit that countries should be a valid or at least a primordial category of political organization: “As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. … All of those myths that we impose on ourselves—and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity—are very harmful.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Borges's political stance had a historical as well as an intellectual source, and these sources converged in his critique of politics for interfering with individual endeavors by means of conflict, death, and humiliation. Civil strife and war were obviously the most extreme forms of State interference with individuals generally and in particular with Borges's own ancestors and family. His relative Francisco Laprida was killed in the Argentine civil wars of the 1820s, an event he depicts in the famous “Conjectural Poem.”Footnote ⁴⁸ His great-grandfather Isidoro Suárez fought in the wars of independence and was later exiled from Argentina due to civil strife, as he recounts in the poem “A Page to Commemorate Coronel Suárez, Victor at Junín.”Footnote ⁴⁹ His grandfather, coronel Francisco Borges, served in a frontier post and died in battle; his other grandfather, Isidoro Acevedo, took part in the wars of unification in 1860s.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although he died old and peacefully, his grandson envisioned him killed “by an army of city shadows … Thus, in the room with a garden view / he died in a dream for the motherland.”Footnote ⁵¹

There were other contemporary forms of political interference that attracted the writer's attention. The growth of fascism forced him to speak against the domestic and foreign policies implemented since the early 1930s in his country and intensified during General Perón's administration.Footnote ⁵² As a consequence of his political opinions, Borges was dismissed from his position as Director of the National Library and was mockingly appointed Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits, an office he declined. In 1948, also under Perón's presidency, his only sister Norah spent a month in jail, and his mother was placed under house arrest for having “disturbed the public order” by singing the national anthem in the street.Footnote ⁵³ Besides Argentina's political problems, world history also gave him sufficient cause to protest. He and his family had to rush back home from Europe at the beginning of World War I, and at the outbreak of World War II he found himself surrounded by fascist sympathizers in Buenos Aires.

Intellectually, Borges adhered to Herbert Spencer's staunch defense of individualism and his distrust of government intervention in individual and social life. Spencer develops these ideas especially in his work The Man vs. The State, where he writes that “the great political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments.”Footnote ⁵⁴ But Borges goes even farther than Spencer (who had ideas about how a proper parliament would act) and contests the very idea of representation in “The Congress,” a story that calls into question the possibility of successfully representing and averaging the multiplicity of individualities in a single representative body. It is worth examining the plot more closely to bring out Borges's critique of the way political institutions function.

“The Congress”Footnote ⁵⁵—which bears a “Kafkian” title, according to its authorFootnote ⁵⁶—was inspired by the case of Anacharsis Cloots, an eighteenth-century French baron who dreamt of a universal family of nations, about whom Borges probably read in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition.Footnote ⁵⁷ Anacharsis Cloots is replaced by Alexander Glencoe in an ironic tale about the attempt, and eventual failure, of a small group to form a body that could represent “all people of all nations.”

In the story, set in the 1970s, the narrator Alexander Ferri is a poor man who as a young student had arrived in Buenos Aires to make a living. Nothing extraordinary occurs to him until decades later, when he is invited to attend the meetings of a small group that assembles weekly for the purpose of doing something “more important and more secret” than the activities carried out at the “pompous, dome-capped building” (an allusion to the real legislative body). The members of this Congress do not know what their exact role or purpose is. Ferri infers that they are “to discover gradually and without haste the goals that the Congress sought.” The chairman is Glencoe, a rancher from Uruguay, who had failed to become a Congressman and had decided to found another Congress of greater scope.

Eventually the number of delegates to the Congress starts to grow. Inspired by the love of their job, some of them renounce their honoraria, and those who are not willing to do so leave, so that “only the faithful remained.” As the debates unfold, someone warns that the problem with the Congress is that “designing a body of men and women which would represent all humanity was akin to fixing the exact number of Platonic archetypes, an enigma that has engaged the perplexity of philosophers for centuries.” How many and what types of classes were to be represented? The ghost of John Wilkins appears at this point in the form of the humorous categories of representation that Borges presents: “ranchers, Uruguayans, founding fathers, red-bearded men and men sitting in armchairs.” Which should be represented? And “was one engineer sufficient to represent all engineers, even engineers from New Zealand?” In the task of finding a category for each delegate, Ferri is scornfully made the representative of “wops” by another delegate, Fermín Eguren. Chairman Glencoe immediately corrects Eguren and instructs Ferri to be the representative of immigrants, “whose labors are even now helping to build the nation.”

Besides the “Platonic” difficulty of matching the diversity of reality with the idea of representation, the Congress also experiences the concrete problems Borges thinks characterize political organizations generally: overexpansion, rivalry, flattery, and the burning of books. The overexpansion of congressional activities is depicted in the accumulation of printed material. Members of the Congress first realize it can “not do without a library of reference books”; later they decide that the library should include “classics of every land and every language,” and the list is eventually expanded to contain newspapers and “random collections of university dissertations, short stories, bulletins and theater programs.” As the library grows, the packages begin piling up, without being catalogued and in improper places such as a wine cellar. The overexpansion of the Congress is also reflected in spurious expenditures. Since the delegates have to agree on a common language to be used during their meetings, Ferri and Eguren are sent to London and Paris, respectively, to “do research.” Both stay longer than initially instructed, squandering money for unofficial purposes. Ferri has a romantic affair (that he later discloses with remorse), and Eguren delays his return for the mere pleasure of being in Paris, where he spends “vast sums” of money.

Flattery and rivalry also characterize the meetings, where, according to the narrator, almost all the delegates speak to seek the approval of the chairman. Since only some delegates had remained after renouncing the payment of honoraria, their flattery of the chairman reveals the nonpecuniary aspects of the love of power, strong enough to find expression even among the “faithful.” The rivalry between Ferri and Eguren in their attempts to attract the leader's attention also points to the need for courage, a recurrent theme in Borges's work.Footnote ⁵⁸ Eguren is terrified one night when faced by an armed man, and is humiliated by Ferri's quick and effective reaction in which he challenges the aggressor to a duel and forces him to retreat. The humiliation that Eguren feels is ironic, since he had thought of Ferri as the “representative of wops,” and not as helping to “build the nation.” In his eyes, “wops” are useless, but in protecting him from an illegal violent death, Ferri had shown that he was indeed of great use. By protecting Eguren, can Ferri be seen as contributing to the construction of a peaceful nation? On the one hand, the protection of the right to live is a necessary implementation of the rule of law, which is, in turn, a major building block of a peaceful nation. On the other hand, by attempting to engage in a duel rather than calling the police, Ferri was bypassing and possibly undermining the institution of law and order, in effect, by taking the enforcement of the law into his own hands. It is not possible to see from this single story whether Borges thinks that the police are irremediably ineffective or corrupt and that Ferri was, therefore, justified.Footnote ⁵⁹

Finally, the chairman orders the group to burn all the books in the library: “Every few centuries the Library of Alexandria must be burned,” he says, and so confirms Borges's opinion about the prince's “usual occupations.” In deciding to burn the books without consulting with the deliberative body, Chairman Glencoe acts according to another of Borges's views concerning the tendencies of politicians: the disposition to abuse power. Strangely enough, nobody in the story reacts negatively to his decision; perhaps they already knew what was about to happen, or perhaps they always felt the chairman would have the final word. In any case, when he hears from Glencoe that the Congress is not a specially defined group of people but that it “embraces the entire world,” Ferri promptly agrees and thinks that “the Congress truly and secretly exists, it is the universe and ourselves,” a statement that points directly to the inadequacy of any form of representation, and consequently to the inadequacy of modern representative governments as we know them. At the end of the day the efforts to create the Congress fail, not because of Glencoe's authoritarian will or the group's internal disputes, but because of their fallibility, that is, their failure to grasp the truth of the complexity of the “universe.” 

Just as “The Congress” addresses the problems of representation, so “Avelino Arredondo” is set in the context of a dysfunctional regime that provokes a political assassination. Both stories reflect the recurrent problems of politics as Borges sees them; in a way the first story presents the causes of those problems and the second story depicts their most extreme effect. “Avelino Arredondo”Footnote ⁶⁰ is based in a real event that took place in Uruguay in 1897, when President Juan Idiarte Borda was killed by a young man of his own Colorado Party, which was ruling the country amid civil conflict and war.Footnote ⁶¹ The killer was Arredondo, a young clerk and student of law disenchanted with the cronyism and factionalism of political bosses and the party machine. He resorted to political assassination in what he later declared was the only way of achieving justice and restoring political stability to his country.Footnote ⁶²

Borges's story focuses on Arredondo's careful preparations for the crime. Months before the selected date, he tells his friends and his fiancée that he is going to the country for a while and bids them goodbye. He then spends months inside his house, with the Bible, his servant, and the rain as his only companions. During his long seclusion, he plays chess and awaits the moment of his “joy and liberation.” Occasionally, he thinks of his fiancée but instantly drives the thought away and reminds himself that he should not long for what is unavailable. One night he goes out to a bar and runs into a group of soldiers who shout that it is “outlawed to give news about battles” and insist that he say Viva el Presidente! (Long live the president!) Arredondo complies with their order despite his hatred of the president, but he tells himself he is not a coward, as he proves on August 25 when he shoots President Idiarte Borda in a public parade and turns himself in. He then declares that he had broken with his friends and his fiancée so as not to implicate them, and that he had not looked at newspapers so that nobody could say they had incited him to the crime. Claiming to have acted alone, he is convicted of the crime and imprisoned.

“Avelino Arredondo” is the application of the Borgesian notion of politics as interference in a concrete historical event.Footnote ⁶³ The plot is set in the context of enduring instability, the use of force and clientelism to sustain power, and the consequent civil conflict leading to war and murder. There is a vivid contrast between these violent conditions and Arredondo, who acts to secure peace and assumes the responsibility for that action with serenity. There is no explicit evaluation of Arredondo's actions in the story; the reader witnesses an account of the facts and of his feelings in the same way that he would read them in a newspaper chronicle. The text must not be read as an apology for violence or for political assassination, but rather as an expression of Borges's interest in taking political events as inspiration for his stories. Given that political factions and their devastating effects have been rampant in Latin American history, it seems only natural that Borges would deal with these topics in his fiction.

The issue of factions in the story brings to mind Madison's fear that, in seeking to eliminate factions, the cure would be worse than their effects. Borges replicates Madison's fear, but he does not share the hope that an extended republic would mitigate the evil effects of faction, because of his doubts about any representative regime succeeding in such a task. So, where Madison talks of the necessity of government owing to the non-angelic nature of men,Footnote ⁶⁴ Borges defends liberal anarchy by appeal to the non-angelic nature of politicians. Read together with “The Congress,” “Avelino Arredondo” highlights the shortcomings and impediments—conceptual and factual—in the working of all political institutions.

However, Arredondo's crime is also an example of the fallibility of human nature, on account of his mistaken belief that an assassination is an acceptable and effective means of solving a country's instability. To see why Borges might think the fallibility of self-sufficient individuals might be less problematic in anarchy than in alternative regimes, we should ask: would Avelino's crime have taken place in an anarchistic setting devoid of the struggles for political representation? I venture to say that it probably would not. Since the crime took place, and civil strife was rampant, the question is which of the two—anarchism or the established regime—is worse in its effects. Leaving aside utilitarian calculations about the number of victims in each scenario, Avelino's intention is to fight against the uniformity imposed by Idiarte's faction, while from the soldiers and Avelino we gather that Idiarte aims at erasing opposite factions altogether. Again, as Madison observed, “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man. … The causes of faction cannot be removed; and … relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Arredondo fights authoritarianism because he understands the need to combat the effects of factions. The soldiers are deceived into supporting an authoritarian regime that promises order by suppressing opposition but succeeds only in fostering widespread violence. At the end of the day, and when compared to Arredondo's motivations, the existing political regime seems to be a more egregious example of human fallibility.

Borges's story was inspired by a pamphlet written by Luis Melián Lafinur (Causa política de Avelino Arredondo [1898]), the counsellor for Arredondo's defense and Borges's second uncle.Footnote ⁶⁶ In an afterword to the book, Borges informs us that his uncle had asked that Arredondo be pardoned, but that the judges sentenced him to five years in prison. According to Bolón, the perspective of Melián Lafinur's pamphlet is diametrically opposed to Borges's inasmuch as it defends the collective nature of the crime.Footnote ⁶⁷ When justifying his stance, the counsellor argued that governments inspired fratricide and murder, and that civil wars foster insanities like Avelino's. He concluded that Avelino should therefore be pardoned, because he acted out of “patriotic and noble motives.” In reversing Melián Lafinur's argument by pointing to the individualistic nature of the crime, Borges insists on the preeminence of individual choice and individual responsibility.

Borges not only highlights Arredondo's stature but assigns to him a place in the nation's political memory by (mis)informing the reader in the afterword that a street in Montevideo bears Arredondo's name. This information is inexact and also ironical, because it is supposed to be based on microfilms of the newspaper El Día, dated August 20–31, 1897, which contained the news and comments on the crime, and La Razón, dated August 26, that had long disappeared from the National Library in Montevideo.Footnote ⁶⁸ The disappearance is not surprising, because El Día had been the voice of the Colorado Party in opposition to Idiarte and La Razón had published a long article accusing Idiarte of being solely responsible for the failure of the pacification attempts.Footnote ⁶⁹ Borges was aware of this historical lacuna and rescued Arredondo from oblivion by making him part—at least in fiction—of the construction of the national memory.Footnote ⁷⁰

In addition to taking personal responsibility for his own actions, Borges's Arredondo is exemplary in knowing that he is able to carry out the task he has set for himself, and adhering to his understanding of his civic duty to help restore order to his country. Avelino complies with the soldiers' command at the bar not because he is a coward; he is not. He obeys in order to remain unnoticed and perhaps to remind himself that he had a higher aim. In detaching himself from the affection of his friends and his fiancée, he exercises a sort of emotional self-restraint for the sake of a political cause. He often thinks tenderly of those he loves, but he knows that they cannot be involved in the execution of his plan. In these regards, Avelino embodies not only the self-sufficient and responsible political man, but equally importantly, the self-aware and self-restrained embodiment of the demands of civic ethics. The fact that Avelino is misguided about how to achieve stability does not invalidate the priority these demands had for him. I will further analyze the issue of civic ethics and its political implications in the next section.

Institutional Order and Civic Ethics: “The Bribe” and “Our Poor Individualism”

Borges's case for liberal anarchism (constructed on the idea of the strong individual) and his simultaneous yearning for an orderly civil life may be reconciled by looking at the role of civic ethics in his stories and opinions, in which self-restraint is seen as the condition for an orderly institutional setting. For him, ethical conduct, understood as compliance with the expected social rules, is indispensable to the good functioning of any human institution. Noncompliance as an attitude emerging from a self-interested individualism unconcerned with the rules of social order tends to generate conflict. In other words, individualism in conjunction with lawlessness, that is, liberal anarchism without an ethics of self-restraint, is prone to generate political interference meant to resolve it, resulting in violence.

The ethics of self-restraint envisioned by Borges mandates taking actions contrary to one's self-interest. This is shown in “The Bribe,”Footnote ⁷¹ a tale about two professors working at the same university in the southern United States: Dr. Winthrop, a native of Boston, and young Professor Eric Einarsson, originally from Iceland. Winthrop is a scholar of Puritan origins who has “found it hard to adapt to the customs and prejudices of the South.” At one point Winthrop has to advise the head of his department whether Einarsson or his friend, Professor Locke, an American, should chair a conference. Both possess sufficient academic credentials. Einarsson's “sharpness and impertinence had won him general dislike,” but would make for a better moderator at the conference than Locke with his shy and taciturn disposition. An article is then published that indirectly calls into question Dr. Winthrop's pedagogical method; the article is signed “E. E.,” followed by the institutional affiliation of the author. A few days later, Einarsson is selected to chair the conference and comes to Winthrop's office to thank him. He then confesses that by publishing the article he had intended to use Winthrop's fair-mindedness to favor his own interest in chairing the conference, since Winthrop would feel ethically obliged to appoint someone who had criticized his work. Thus, Einarsson induces Winthrop to follow his “sense of right and wrong” with that “curious American passion for impartiality.” In doing so, Winthrop consciously acts against his own self-interest in seeing his critic deprived of the position and ends up recommending him for the conference.

Borges wrote that “The Bribe” “could not have happened anywhere else,” since it reflects what he admired about the American Protestant ethos: a commitment to “doing what is right” and to impartiality.Footnote ⁷² His first visit to the United States was in 1961, which possibly explains the growing presence of ethics in his late works. In the prologue to In Praise of Darkness (1969) he writes that “one of the virtues that make me prefer Protestant nations to Catholic ones is their concern for ethics.”Footnote ⁷³ In the beginning of the story, the author contrasts the Protestant ethos with the “prejudices of southern U.S.”; elsewhere, he contrasts it with South Americans, who “tend to think in terms of convenience” while “people in the United States have an ethical attitude.”Footnote ⁷⁴

The opposite of the American ethos is specially reflected in the Argentine case, which Borges lucidly analyzes in several essays. In the early piece “Our inabilities” (1931), Borges complains about the average Argentine person who “insists on irreconcilable differences with outsiders” and who refuses to “admit them as responsible members of this world.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Winthrop's decision to favor a foreigner with the Conference chair would have never occurred in the southern country, trapped as it is in a “megalomaniac will” that predisposes people to “hate” each other. The concern for impartiality is replaced by a “poverty of imagination and resentment” that Borges criticizes “with no joy.”

Borges elaborated upon his comparison of the cultural ethos in North and South America in his 1933 article “A Sentence by Quixote,” in which he compares and distinguishes the Argentine/Spanish attitude towards law and order—which we may describe as suspicious and distant—with other Western nations that possess “a passion for legality,” and in particular with the American attitude which is driven simultaneously by a passion for “adventure” and a passion for “order.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In his eyes, the natural American hero is the policeman, the vigilante, and any person who collaborates with them in enforcing the law. No Argentine would praise this collaboration, and their natural hero may also be an assassin. If the Argentines feel “that law infringement is not a virtue,” they are also open to the idea that it may not be a sin.

The Argentine ethos and its political implications are examined in the essay “Our Poor Individualism,”Footnote ⁷⁷ in which Borges looks at its origins and justification. He traces the indifference to legality back to the Spanish heritage, as illustrated by Don Quixote's dictum: “Let each answer for his own sins. … It is not fitting that honest men should be the instruments of punishments inflicted on others, when they are in no way involved.”Footnote ⁷⁸ When the concrete individual is not harmed, he should not take part in enforcing law or duty. Eventually, the individual finds his place living “at the margins or in spite of the government,” contributing to the creation of a culture of individualism unconcerned about the political community. Curiously, in this essay Borges finds this individualistic feature very promising, because in a time in which both fascism and communism had a growing appeal, he hoped that Argentine individualism would make a contribution to the world by “protecting the individual from the State.” In “A History of Tango” Borges repeats the idea that Argentines, unlike North Americans and most Europeans, do not identify with the state. For him, the state and, by implication, its laws and regulations are seen by his countrymen as constraining freedom.Footnote ⁷⁹

Decades later, his hope of an “Argentine contribution to the world” evaporated, when the writer realized that Argentina did not profit from the practice of isolated individualism, precisely because “politics is the contrary”; it is about “engaging with the whole.” The Argentine author argued that thinking in terms of concrete persons undermines the sense of community and crowds out thinking in terms of ethics, which is by definition the field of abstract and general rules.Footnote ⁸⁰ Thus, the late Borges deplored the type of individualism that is indifferent to the community, one that breeds a lack of social ethics and causes civic disorder. Borges's arguments here come full circle: given that only self-restrained individuals can assure social order, in the political realm only a law-abiding ethos and the respect for impartiality can prevent the need or occasion for undue political interference and can make a liberal anarchistic setting plausible.

So what was to be done in those cases like Argentina where an unrestrained individualism had paved the way for political abuses? Borges's double reaction was to strengthen the discourse on ethics and to denounce those abuses with the arms of letters.Footnote ⁸¹ The literary constituted for him the most suitable realm to decry political fallibilities and to channel our imagination to more utopian—and for him not more insensible—political goals.Footnote ⁸²