Enrique Dussel’s project is to confront the hegemony of Eurocentric philosophy, and fashion out of this confrontation a philosophy of liberation whose character is uniquely Latin American and more generally subaltern (reflective of the world’s poor). The opposition to European hegemony at the center of Dussel’s work is animated by a profound desire to ameliorate the suffering of the poor and marginalized, and to avert ecological catastrophe as a logical consequence of how life is dominated and controlled by powerful states. Ethics of Liberation, first published in 1998 and newly translated, is an enormous intellectual undertaking that opens with an alternative history of ethics that challenges the view of ethics as originating in Hellenism and extending through Eurocentrism from a global systems perspective. Dussel then engages the traditions of utilitarianism, communitarianism, Marxism, Kant, Rawls, the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce and Karl-Otto Apel, the Frankfurt School as reflected in and departed from by Jurgen Habermas, and finally the primacy of ethics argument of Emmanuel Levinas. Dussel challenges idealism with materialism, formalism with the lived experience of suffering, the anti-politics of free-market thought with an equation of politics with human life, pessimism with hope animated by a secular rendering of liberation theology, the priority of unsustainable growth in capitalism with a political economy founded on ecological sensitivity, and dependency on the ethical systems of the Northern Hemisphere with a “philosophy of the periphery” that eschews authoritarianism and conceives of liberation as an ongoing struggle against exclusion and victimization. This list of oppositions constitutive of Dussel’s argument is not at all exhaustive. It stands as an attempt to give the prospective reader of Ethics of Liberation a sense of the scope of the project.

There are two overarching dimensions to Dussel’s work that are distinct but inseparable. The first is a critical or deconstructive engagement with philosophical systems and institutions that equate European thought with modernity. The liberation of postcolonial states and people originates with the weaknesses and contradictions at the center of the structure of global power. The second is an indigenous critical ethics that emerges autonomously in response to the militarism and authoritarianism of Dussel’s native Argentina and with growing awareness of Northern thought’s complicity in the exploitation of Latin America. This ethics is composed of and gives voice to the poor, women, workers, and indigenous groups. There are critical encounters, inspired and informed by Marx, that expose the contradictions and inevitability of crises within the dominant system of thought. But there is also the transformative and liberating principle disclosed in the life of Rigoberta Menchu and in the pedagogical practices of Paulo Freire. The dialogic and edifying interactions between people experiencing various forms of oppression-- represented by Menchu’s immersion in Mayan culture, Freire’s work with the poor, and Dussel’s own recognition of the mestizaje of Argentina and Mexico-- give rise to a critical consciousness that challenges the condescending sense of superiority of the North while forging a truly alternative reality consonant with human flourishing freed from suffering. This alternative reality is an “anti-hegemonic validation of the community of victims”; it is the result of social movements composed of those on the global periphery who seek to liberate themselves democratically.

Note that Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation is not a politics of liberation. From Levinas, Dussel accepts the primacy of the ethical that clears the way for a political and “liberatory-messianic moment.” The Ethics is a preliminary to Dussel’s Politics of Liberation, which illuminates philosophical, religious and cultural obstacles that any political movement dedicated to the elimination of oppression must recognize. But the illumination itself emanates not from the victims of Eurocentric hegemony, but from what Gramsci would call “organic intellectuals,” like Dussel, who cast themselves in leadership roles anchored empathically in experience of the marginalized while hovering above and seeing further and more clearly than any political actor involved in a poor people’s social movement.

As an extension of Marxist thought, Ethics of Liberation is fittingly a work that celebrates systemic contradiction, the opposition of radical politics to totalitarianism, and the dialectical interplay of inclusion and exclusion in democracy. But perhaps the most profound tension exposed in this study is embodied in Marx’s Eleventh Thesis: the relation of the ethicist, the philosopher or, more broadly, the intellectual to movements for political change. Dussel is fighting a battle on two distinct fronts: the first takes the form of immanent critique of Eurocentric philosophy with an eye toward personal liberation and self-expression. The second involves Dussel’s reckoning with his own social position in relation to political life along the margins of humanity. In a later work, Dussel writes that “the liberation politician, Gramsci’s organic intellectual, is more a promoter, an organizer, and a light that illuminates the path constructed, unfolded, and perfected by the people” (Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics, trans. George Ciccariello-Maher Duke University Press, 2008), p. 98). The image here is of the intellectual following, yet guiding the rebellion, and then cleaning up after the actions of the masses. But this is not the position Dussel takes in his Ethics of Liberation. His Ethics distrusts “vanguardism,” while arguing for the necessity of “political education” and “party organization” to guide the conscientization of the community of victims. This asymmetry between the feasibility principle or “strategic rationality” of intellectuals of a party and the formalism (democratic justice) of the people cannot be reconciled but is an integral part of the materiality of ethics and human life where the instinct for survival and reproduction reside.

Dussel’s view of the future, grounded in the material conditions of the present, is the impetus for his philosophical work. His ethics is a celebration of human life and fecundity. Yet, he observes that the path we are on as a species leads to extinction. The ecological dimension of Dussel’s ethical vision is underdeveloped, but profound. For political theorists and ethicists, the Ethics of Liberation along with Dussel’s other translated works, combine to establish him as a seminal thinker who moves the perspective of the poor from obscurity to the center of any consideration of political justice, sustainability and action. This volume is certainly marred by recourse to un-democratic technical jargon and the insularity of academic philosophy constituted by conceptual confusion that blurs the line between metaethical discourses and political engagement. Dussel's ambition to establish a universal, material foundation of ethics is a rationalist project that, if anything, gets in the way of his work to expose incoherencies and “negative” or “victim producing” aspects of Eurocentric rationalism. His claim to a stable, universal material foundation obscures the precariousness of the line he walks between the communal consensus required by any social movement that empowers victims and is presupposed by discourse ethics, and the resistance to consensus that enervates liberation ethics and its radical democratic political expression. But his ethics is nevertheless the work of a scholar devoted to the cultivation of a vocabulary that can articulate the pains and creative potential of the excluded and a worldview that begins with deprivation and ends with an always provisional democracy.