RODO, JOSE ENRIQUE (1872-1917), Uruguayan phi losopher, author and politician, was born in Montevideo on July 15, 1872. He was educated in a free lay school and at the Uni versity of Montevideo, where he showed extraordinary aptitude for history, literature and philosophy. In 1895 he was one of the founders of the National Review of Literature and Social Sciences, in which, in the following year he published an essay on literary criticism, "El que vendra," which brought him immediate recog nition as a writer and critic. In 1898 he was made professor of literature in the university, and two years later was appointed di rector of the National library, but in i90 r he gave up both po sitions to enter congress, to which he was elected in 1902 and 1908 and where he took an earnest part in initiating social legislation; he was not, however, a radical, and in a pamphlet, Liberalismo y jacobismo (1907), he strenuously opposed government anti-church legislation. In 1910 he represented Uruguay at the centenary of Chilean independence. Rodo's influence, however, as a rallying point of Latin-American youth was due to his authority as ex ponent of optimism, as stylist and as advocate of unity in Spanish American literature and culture. His first important philosophical
work, Ariel, based on Renan's eclecticism, appeared in 1900 in defence of Latin-American culture against the utilitarianism of ttp. United States. In 1909 he published Motivos de Proteo, an assertion of the inevitability of change and the possibility of self improvement, which represents Rodo's highest attainment as thinker and master of the Spanish language, and caused him to be hailed by Spanish-Americans as their philosopher par excellence. His essays on Ruben Dario (1899), Bolivar and Montalvo won him a similarly unique place in Spanish-American letters, to which, in those on Bolivar and Montalvo, included in El Mirador de Prospero (1913), he gave models of historical and critical essays. He died at Palermo in May 1917.
See H. D. Barbagelata, Introduction to Cinco Ensayos (Madrid, 1915) ; M. H. Urefia, "Jose Enrique Rodo," Cuba Contempordnea (Aug. 1918) ; Andres Gonzalez-Blanco, Escritores representativos de America (Madrid, 1917) ; V. G. Calderon, Semblanzas de America (Madrid, 1919) ; I. Goldberg, Studies in Spanish-American Literature (New York, 1920). (W. B. P.)