The Politics of Philology offers an insightful assessment of how the work of Alfonso Reyes helped to create the role of the writer as a public intellectual in Latin America. Robert T. Conn reconstructs Reyes's model of intellectual community, tracing its links to the various strands or the nineteenth-century tradition of philology, and arguing that Reyes was influential in forging a sense of unity among the Latin American writers of his generation based on their belonging to a common artistic circle, and on shared notions about the nature or art and its relation to society.