Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution

by Donald C. Hodges

In this critical study of the thought of Augusto Cesar Sandino and his followers, Donald C. Hodges has discovered a coherent ideological thread and political program, which he succeeds in tracing to Mexican and Spanish sources. Sandino's strong religious inclination in combination with his anarchosyndicalist political ideology established him as a religious seer and moral reformer as well as a political thinker and is the prototype of the curious blend of Marxism and Christianity of the late twentieth-century Nicaraguan government, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional.

378 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1986

Reviews

[Thomas Baughman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author looks back to the beliefs and philosophy of Augusto Cesar Sandino for an interpretation of the ideology of the Sandinista regime. He concludes that the FSLN's leaders are neither social democrats nor traditional Marxist-Leninists but, rather, exemplars of a Marxist-Leninist New Left influenced by Sandino's anarchist version of communism, for which an atypical theology of liberation, expounded by Father Ernesto Cardenal, is "the single most important carrier." A very interesting and thoughtful study.