Book contents
- Cold War Liberalism
- Military, War, and Society in Modern American History
- Cold War Liberalism
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Free World Leadership and the Limits of Liberalism
- 3 Precursors, Practitioners, and Legacies of Cold War Liberalism in the Middle East
- 4 Walter Lippmann
- 5 Catholic Internationalism and American Empire
- 6 The Productive Character
- 7 Cold War Liberalism or Socialist Revisionism?
- 8 “Slavery Old and New”
- 9 The City That Could Have Been
- 10 Richard Hofstadter and the Demonology of the Cold War Right
- 11 Conservatives in a “Liberal Age”
- 12 The Noncommunist Boom
- 13 Afterword
- Index
12 - The Noncommunist Boom
The Transformation of Carlos Fuentes and the Democratic Left in Latin America, 1959–1990
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2026
Book contents
- Cold War Liberalism
- Military, War, and Society in Modern American History
- Cold War Liberalism
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Free World Leadership and the Limits of Liberalism
- 3 Precursors, Practitioners, and Legacies of Cold War Liberalism in the Middle East
- 4 Walter Lippmann
- 5 Catholic Internationalism and American Empire
- 6 The Productive Character
- 7 Cold War Liberalism or Socialist Revisionism?
- 8 “Slavery Old and New”
- 9 The City That Could Have Been
- 10 Richard Hofstadter and the Demonology of the Cold War Right
- 11 Conservatives in a “Liberal Age”
- 12 The Noncommunist Boom
- 13 Afterword
- Index
Summary
This chapter examines the influence of Cold War liberalism on Mexican public intellectual Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) between the Cuban Revolution and the end of the Cold War. Fuentes’ ideological trajectory from social democracy to neoliberalism mirrored that of many other Latin American intellectuals and was the result of two distinct factors: Cold War liberalism’s late arrival to Latin America and internal divisions within the Latin American left over the Cuban Revolution, the “dirty wars,” and the economic malaise of the long 1970s. In particular, Fuentes’ political writings show how the elitist drive of Cold War liberalism facilitated the ascent of neoliberalism by reframing political debate around the proper limits of state power rather than social transformation.
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- Cold War LiberalismPower in a Time of Emergency, pp. 246 - 271Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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