Once Again on the Latin American Chaocosmos. Reflections on Carlos Granés’s «Latin American Madness: A Cultural and Political History of the Twentieth Century». Russian translation. Moscow: Azbuka Publishing House, 2026

One of the key problems in the study of Latin American civilization is the analysis of the specific ways in which culture determines the social, political, and economic processes unfolding in the region. This specificity is shaped by particular relationship among the principal subsystems of the civilizational system: by the especially significant role of the pattern maintenance subsystem and by the constant tension between the impulses emanating from it — that is, from the axiological and meaning-giving foundation of sociality — and those arising from other spheres, above all the economy and, to a lesser extent, politics. Granés’s book, devoted chiefly to the interrelation between politics and spiritual culture, covers a vast body of material and, at first glance, appears to address precisely this specificity. Yet its scholarly value is sharply diminished by the abundance of rigid and highly politicized judgments, which reveal the author’s deeply negative attitude toward all Latin American revolutions and revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, whether nationalist or socialist, as well as toward all attempts by Latin Americans to achieve what Granés deems an unattainable ideal: the creation, on the basis of their own traditions, of social, political, and ideological models corresponding to their civilizational identity rather than to the ideal «pure» forms of social organization, in practice, Western ones. Adherence to such «pure» forms is a vivid expression of the dominant Western type of ratio — formal rationality — in which, according to Max Weber’s well-known formulation, the «spirit of capitalism» found its expression. At the same time, the content of Granés’s book is not reducible to this logic or to the corresponding one-sided politicized assessments, which in fact lie beyond the boundaries of scholarly discourse. In his recognition of diversity as the defining feature of Latin American reality, of mestizaje as the civilizational strategy that has predominated in practice, and of Latin Americans’ ability to creatively rework foreign experience as the principal precondition for forging an original culture qualitatively different from the European models first received, Granés — despite his explicit Westernism — emerges as a typical representative of Latin American civilization. These features are by no means manifestations of formal rationality. Rather, they point to another type of ratio, one that, as the article demonstrates, differs from it in qualitative terms. Granés’s entire book is permeated by the tension between these fundamentally different types of rationality. In our view, the work bears witness not to «madness», but to the dramatic process by which Latin American thought seeks forms of expression adequate to its own civilizational identity.

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