| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

John Lynch. Simón Bolívar: A Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 349. $35.00.
Simón Bolívar poses a formidable challenge to biographers. From his military leadership to his political writings, he was larger than life, and he lived in tumultuous times. He inspired great loyalty in people like General Antonio José de Sucre, his secretary Daniel O'Leary, and his lover Manuela Sáenz, and great hatred in opponents like mulatto caudillo Manuel Piar and Colombian Liberal Francisco de Paula Santander. How to evaluate a man who had no peers?	1
John Lynch has provided the most successful one-volume account of Bolívar's life to date. While focusing his smooth narrative on the relatively well-known outlines of the Liberator's life and career (1783–1830), Lynch also considers the social and racial context in which Bolívar moved. The Enlightenment thought that inspired him did not address issues of colonialism in a multiracial population, and the Liberator modified those ideas to fit the American context. A reformist rather than a revolutionary, Bolívar remained constant in his commitment to political liberty and legal equality. Although many believe that Bolívar displayed authoritarian and even monarchist tendencies in the latter stage of his career (1827–1830), Lynch argues that the Liberator retained his attachment to liberalism. He differed from his liberal critics primarily in his belief that only a strong central government could implement reforms like the abolition of slavery. Moreover, Lynch argues that Bolívar's lasting legacy was his insistence that personal power must yield to institutionalized authority. His constitutions, however, were not always perfectly fitted to the situation. The Bolivian Constitution he wrote called for a life presidency, a clause that other ambitious politicians could not accept.	. . .

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