Politics of Liberation

'If Enrique Dussel had been born in the United States, France or Germany he would be an intellectual celebrity. Author of dozens of books in Spanish, few have been translated into English. This book seeks to begin to remedy this injustice.'

Ivan Petrella, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of Miami

Politics of Liberation presents a world political history, a partial and initial attempt at describing the history of political actors, the 'people', and their philosophical inspirations. It is a decolonizing of political history to begin to tell the accurate world story. In order to explore a politics of liberation a true world political history has to be told and understood.

The frameworks to be overcome include: 1. Helenocentrism, which neglects the non-Greek and non-Roman influences on Greece and Rome; 2. Westernization, which neglects the Byzantine world among others in terms of political development; 3. Eurocentrism, which neglects or denigrates the world outside of Europe when describing political history; 4. the periodization of political history according to European standards; 5. the falsely assumed secularization of politics; 6. the colonizing of Latin American and other peripheral political philosophies; and 7. the exclusion of Spain/Portugal and Latin America from modernity.

This is not simply one alternative reading, but it is a counter-narrative, describing the world's tradition of politics. It examines what has been said and what has not even been investigated. The starting point is the suffering of the people.

Enrique Dussel is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Iztapalapa campus of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Autonomous Metropolitan University, UAM) and also teaches courses at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM). He has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (from the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in Mendoza, Argentina), a Doctorate from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, a Doctorate in History from the Sorbonne in Paris. He is the founder with others of the movement referred to as the Philosophy of Liberation, and his work is concentrated in the field of Ethics and Political Philosophy.

Thia Cooper is Assistant Professor in the Religion Department of Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, MN and author of Controversies in Political Theology: Development or Liberation (SCM Press, 2007).