Obed Frausto

Tres tradiciones en la teoría de la legitimidad política concibe una nueva categoría, creada por el autor, “hornadas de despliegue”, que ayudan a entender cómo se conforman, transforman y modifican las tradiciones de pensamiento político con el transcurrir del tiempo. El libro describe tres tradiciones del pensamiento político sobre el concepto de la legitimidad. Primero, la legitimidad monológica, que asume que el poder recae mayoritariamente en el soberano, ejerciendo el poder desde la fuerza de Dios, la razón o la ley. En esta tradición se localizan a varios pensadores como lo son Platón, San Agustín, Thomas Hobbes, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt y Niklas Luhmann. Segundo, la legitimidad dialógica, que entiende que el poder es más equilibrado entre el soberano y los ciudadanos. Esta tradición encuentra a pensadores como Aristóteles, Santo Tomás, Maquiavelo, Hannah Arendt y Jürgen Habermas. Tercero, la legitimidad trialógica, que refiere a cómo lo foráneo puede provocar relaciones más equitativas entre el soberano y los ciudadanos. Esta tradición se localiza en la vida de Ruth y Jesús de Nazareth, y en el pensamiento de Bartolomé de las Casas, José María Vigil y Enrique Dussel.

Necrosociety, Mortispolitics, and Miquiztli-politics challenges the underlying assumptions of necropolitics and biopolitics, exploring core concepts such as neoliberalism, neonationalism, and decoloniality, and proposing a new framework that expands our comprehension of these two domains. The book opens by discussing the existing conceptual debates around how we can best conceptualize the political interplay of life and death. It then moves on to explore necrosociety, mortispolitics, and Miquiztli-politics, three concepts put forward as alternative concepts in approaching the politics of life and death. The book posits that the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics ought to be oriented within the theoretical framework of postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial theories. This framing clarifies the ongoing global structural differences between countries operating within a global and internal colonialism context, allowing the reader to see another side of biopolitical and necropolitical issues. "Necrosociety" attempts to articulate dimensions that biopolitics and necropolitics have not yet addressed, exploring a sociological dimension where death has extended to the point that it goes hand in hand with capitalism, producing and multiplying the social and natural-world deaths. Second, "mortispolitics" is created as an alternative category that acknowledges death. Mortispolitics builds upon the notion of death as seen in necropolitics, but instead of focusing on the state of exception, it examines the state of the law. The book uses the North–South distinction because this concept applies only to North America, specifically the United States and Mexico. It articulates a new notion of death, one based on Amerindian peoples’ ideas of sacrifice and cannibalism, arguing for a conception of death that extends beyond necropolitics. Analyzing the interplay between life and death through a political lens, Necrosociety, Mortispolitics, and Miquiztli-politics will be of great interest to students and scholars of political philosophy, political theory, postcolonialism, and Latin American Studies.

Este libro es el resultado de los trabajos colectivos llevados a cabo por el grupo académico e intelectual denominado Grupo Seminario Descolonización Democrática del Pensamiento, conformado por integrantes de México, Estados Unidos, Colombia, Argentina y Brasil. La obra se caracteriza por estar en constante movimiento bajo la filosofía polifónica, en la que existe un coro de múltiples voces que interactúan a través de diálogos sobre temas como la descolonialidad y la modernidad, las imágenes dialécticas del mestizaje y la democracia. Los lectores entrarán en un espacio reflexivo que llamamos la caja de resonancia, donde se fomenta un pensar en transformación y democrático de manera comunitaria.

El pensamiento nómada de Carlos Pereda es un intento de escapar de la razón arrogante hacia la razón porosa a través de máximas que nos animan a hacer todo tipo de preguntas, incluso las que provocan escándalo. Objeto a Pereda con tres cuestionamientos. La primera interrogación se refiere a por qué si el pensamiento nómada se desplaza de un lugar a otro, no puede apartarse de sus propias máximas. La segunda pregunta si el modelo interactivo de resolución de controversias es universal o particular y cómo este modelo interactivo puede resolver agravios históricos. Por último, la tercera interrogante atañe a cómo este panfleto nos puede hacer ver lo común en una forma de emancipación y resistencia política.

Liberal democracy today, having aligned itself with capitalism, is producing a generalized feeling of weariness and disillusionment with government among the citizenry of many countries. Because of a decades-long march of globalized capitalism, economic oligarchies have gained oppressive levels of political power, and as a result, the economic needs of many people around the world have been neglected. It then becomes essential to remember that our ability to change society emerges from our power to formulate different questions; or, in this case, alternative understandings of democracy. This book draws together a variety of alternative theories of democracies in a quest to expose readers to a selection of the most exciting and innovative new approaches to politics today. The consideration of these leading alternative conceptualizations of democracy is important, as it is now common to see xenophobic and racist rhetoric using the platform of liberal democracy to threaten ideas of plurality, diversity, equality, and economic justice. In looking at four different models of democracy this book argues that encounters with alternate conceptualizations of democracy is necessary if citizens and scholars are going to understand the constellation of possibilities that exist for inclusive, plural, economically equal, and just societies.

Pablo González Casanova was a highly influential Mexican intellectual during most of his 101 years of life. He was an exceptional administrator who successfully established two new institutions within the UNAM system, namely a high-school system and a research center. His passion for fostering interdisciplinary collaboration in the fields of science and technology drove these initiatives. This article aims to establish a connection between three key aspects of his theory: internal colonialism, critical thinking within the framework of complex theory, and radical democracy. This paper contends that his concept of radical democracy is crucial in developing internal colonialism and critical thinking in the context of the new sciences and humanities.

In this introductory chapter, the authors examine a concept they call the weariness of democracy, which they define as a heightened sense of disillusionment with the potential of liberal democracy to address large-scale social, cultural, political, and economic problems and to create just and vibrant societies. They examine how this weariness manifests itself in support of anti-pluralist populist leaders, as witnessed in recent rightwing electoral victories in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, and how the rightward turn contributes to further disillusionment among those groups that have been increasingly marginalized by populist movements. The authors argue that this contemporary problem is the historical culmination of liberal democracy’s inextricable alliance with capitalism, which has always favored the economic and political elite. Not only have these plutocracies effectively utilized the neocolonial economic model to ensure their positions, they have used their power to promote homogeneous societies that suppress diversity in language, culture, and religion. The essays introduced in this chapter provide compelling alternatives to this unjust narrative.

Obed Frausto argues that US democracy conceals a dominant cultural tyranny of whiteness that he calls white democracy. Frausto argues in this chapter that white democracy is upheld by two pillars of American ideology. First, the melting pot is a concept that demands cultural assimilation, and it functions as a form of cultural terrorism against immigrants’ cultures, traditions, and languages. Second, the American Dream, the idea that any person in the United States can succeed, encourages selfish individualism and consumerism and also promotes the superiority of US culture. To counteract white democracy, Frausto proposes a conception of plural cultural democracy that promotes the recognition of cultural diversity in politics and the political participation of immigrants.

_Post-anarchism has misinterpreted traditional anarchism with the assumption that all traditional anarchist thought contains ontologically essentialist ideas about the human condition. This paper makes the following argument. I argue that Flores Magón’s anarchist philosophy is not characterized by fundamental and stable essentialism regarding humanity. On the contrary, he promotes the idea that the nature of humanity is arbitrary and inconsistent with a future of moral transformation (becoming)._.