Democracy and Liberation

Abstract

Dussel’s The Invention of the Americas depicted the Spanish Conquest as a constitutive event in the rise of the modern Eurocentric world order, with its autocratic dichotomy between “center” and “periphery.” Dussel does not impugn the trajectory of modernization and democratization as such, but only their use as instruments of foreign domination—what he calls the “myth of modernity.” With Todorov, he laments the lack of relationality, that is, the unwillingness to recognize the qualitative equality of others; to overcome this lack, he advocates a radical paradigm shift to “transmodernity.” As Dussel explains in The Underside of Modernity, overcoming domestic and global autocracy requires both active resistance and the articulation of counter-discourses, such as the “philosophy of liberation.” He perceives modern democracy as a tensional correlation of three factors: people (potentia); political actors (potestas); and shared goal (eudaimonia). His argument is basically directed against the “self-referentially” of political power.