Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion
Enrique Dussel
2013, Duke University Press
715 pages, paperback
THIS blockbuster of a treatise has been seen as a milestone in global debates about the origins and nature of ethics. The publication of Ethics of Liberation in English for the first time generated much anticipation about a work now considered one of the most important efforts to rethink the history of ethics of recent times. Enrique Dussel, an Argentine exile who has developed his academic career in Mexico, is the author of many books and the most influential Latin American philosopher of his generation. In Ethics of Liberation he challenges the domination of western narratives in this field by arguing that our fundamental moral and ethical traditions did not emerge in ancient Greece and develop through European and American thought. Dussel, by contrast, asserts that the origins of modernity lie outside the western tradition. His ideas fit within a broader vision that aims to articulate the possibility for groups excluded and marginalised from western modernity and neoliberal rationalism to achieve liberation. This vision and its essential solidarity with the opressed has propelled him to the heart of political and economic debates in Latin America and beyond.
