Ever since Plato discovered that the best way to record the brilliance of the philosopher Socrates was to set down his teacher's imaginary conversations in the Academy, conversational question and answer has been humankind's primary teaching tool. Over the millennia, Socratic Dialogue has been celebrated, reinvented, deconstructed— even lampooned— in a long tradition stretching back through Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, Laurence Sterne, Isaac Walton, Shakespeare and others.

But Alfredo Behrens's timely book must surely represent a new landmark in this ever- growing dialectical genre of “Socratic variations.” His mission is to advance our cultural understanding of Latin America and the home- baked spirit of its business and political leadership models, by means of the imaginary dialogues of two fictional heroes from the pampas. They are cowboys who in these parts are named Gauchos. If you want to name their style, you might call it “magical realism meets management theory.” Yet The Gaucho Dialogues is more than a study of organizational behavior, seen through a Latino lens. It hitches a ride on literature and history too.

The first intention of the writer— an academic teaching business leadership— may be to lay bare the reasons why empirical Anglo- Saxon management methods seem so often doomed to failure when adopted south of the Rio Grande. Yet— most intriguingly for our own times— the writer uses Latin America as a chilling case study in how nationalist, right- wing populism can take root and corrupt any society. He shows too, how political leaders everywhere can seize and hold power by appealing to darker emotional forces driving voters. So this critical examination of Latin America's political foundations— which have made this region both the alma mater and “patient zero” of destructive populism— is doubly relevant in an age in which voters in Northern Hemisphere democracies have begun to greedily devour these very same ideas.

Behrens brings to life Martin Fierro— all mustachioed machismo, knife- wielding bravura and homespun wisdom from the campsite— by pillaging the eponymous 1872 work of José Hernández, Argentina's poet laureate of Gaucho culture. Fierro's less fiery counterpart and imaginary interlocutor is the more educated Don Segundo Sombra, a literary figure created half a century later by Ricardo Güiraldes, also an Argentine writer who but for his untimely death might have achieved the status of an Hispanic Rudyard Kipling.