Across Latin America, popular street protests have echoed the refrain “The people, united, will never be defeated!” In the recent work of Enrique Dussel, perhaps Latin America's most prominent political philosopher of the last 40 years, we have a theoretical expression of this call for radical democracy. From his early work in ethics and the philosophy of liberation to his examination of the epochal events of 1492 in the Americas, Dussel has been a leading Latin American voice in the critical study of modernity. With Twenty Theses on Politics, he now embarks on what could well be his magnum opus. This short treatise is a manifesto for what he intends to write in the coming years, and it is, in effect, an effort to provide a theoretically and normatively robust understanding of democracy, taking the notion of the people as cardinal.

In this important yet stylistically challenging text, we see Dussel's effort to break the traditional boundaries of Western political philosophy. The author himself is well versed in the Western tradition, and we can see the influence of Husserl, Hegel, Marx, Jürgen Habermas, and others in his writings. At the same time, he believes that this tradition has inadequately dealt with some of the principal problems of modernity, such as the meaning and role of “the people” and “power.” These two concepts lie at the heart of the book. For Dussel, traditional political theory has not explained them properly. We thus need new approaches. At the core, his work relies on notions associated with modernity, such as reason, freedom, equality, the state, and the subject, but seeks to transcend them through critical, post-Marxist, and postmodern strategies. Because he is concerned with a global—rather than a merely Eurocentric—worldview, and since his approach is critical of some illusions of modernity, he calls his perspective “transmodern.” His work is emblematic of Latin American political thought, and it incorporates and creatively develops numerous ideas derived from Paulo Freire, Gustavo Gutierrez, Ernesto Guevara, and Bartolomé de las Casas, inter alia.

Dussel's earlier work on the philosophy of liberation has a legacy visible in the Twenty Theses in their focus on the people. Just as Gutierrez's liberation theology was grounded on a preferential treatment of the poor, Dussel seeks to center his theorizing on what he calls “the people” (el pueblo). For him, the demos is the most important actor in the formulation of a cogent sense of justice. He redefines much of the lexicon of political theorizing. He argues, for instance, that the concept of power must be understood in light of its meaning in Spanish: The word for power is poder, which also is the verb “to be able to.” Thus, for him, power is fundamentally about how we are to be able to provide a legitimate political order and to live life fully as human beings. In both respects, the people are pivotal, for only the totality of the people can justify particular normative political tenets, and only the people as a whole can determine to what extent their lives are being satisfied at the material level (in terms of food, shelter, clothing, and labor).

The aim of this Argentine-Mexican philosopher is to provide a Husserlian phenomenology of “the people” and of “power.” Here, he goes against the tradition of Hobbes and others, where power can be seen as domination of one agent over another. Dussel attempts to provide an analytics of political relations. However, his schema is self-contradictory. At one point, he argues that “the political” is only one field of many, alongside the fields of athletics, culture, the family, and so on (p. 6, figure 1). However, he goes on to say that “[f]ields are those political spaces” (p. 6) where cooperation and conflict exist. This means that, in fact, all fields are political and, hence, the political is not merely one among many fields. To complicate matters even further, at a different instance in a diagram of “fields,” he posits that while politics intersects other fields such as economics or culture, these other fields do not intersect (p. 44). In other words, there is a political moment in economics and culture, but these fields are not contained in the larger sphere of the political. This also implies that culture and economics do not intersect, which is patently untrue. Thus, even at the purely analytical level, Dussel's effort is not consistent. His account of the public sphere—centered on a concern for the “gaze of others,” the “theatrical,” and the “ostensible” (p. 9)—owes much to Hannah Arendt. Yet this aesthetic view of publicity, though interesting, is unfortunately undertheorized in the book.

Dussel's first 10 theses have to do with politics as they are, and his second 10 theses center on how to transform this politics. Central to his analysis is the distinction between the people and the elite. He wants to include the poor, the marginalized, the nonwhite, women, the subaltern classes, the elderly, and so on as categories making up “the people,” in contrast to the ruling groups of a society. The “will-to-live” (p. 13), he argues, is rooted in the popular masses' need to satisfy basic requirements and to live flourishing lives. This lies at the base of “the popular,” and is intended to drive toward a “positive” understanding of political power, one where it is aimed at satisfying needs, not on dominating others. When the people are united and work together, he insists, they achieve what he calls potentia. The institutions they can establish through such collaboration he calls potestas.

Dussel claims that this reconceptualization of power as positive corresponds to the praxis of the new social movements that have emerged in Latin American civil society, but especially to the consolidation of recent left-of-center, democratically elected governments like those of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Luiz Lula da Silva, and (surprisingly) Néstor Kirchner. Far from signifying a return to vanguard-led leftist politics, Dussel believes that the legitimacy of these regimes rests on popular consent. He claims that what he calls “obediential power,” the capacity to observe directives from leaders, is possible if the citizenry as a whole has a meaningful participatory role in the discussions and policies within a regime. Power becomes fetishized when elites believe that their authority is good in itself and without regard to popular consent. In such situations, “the founded, the edifice, appears as the foundation, and the foundation, as the founded, the edifice” (p. 31). Such domination, in other words, is an inversion of power properly understood. Dussel's purpose is to negate this negation.

To the extent that he remains relatively anchored to modernist concerns with power, consent, and democracy, Dussel provides insights of relevance to contemporary political theory. Yet his reliance on postmodern language often obscures his reasoning and leaves the reader puzzled. He is also prone to digression. For instance, when discussing the fetishism of power, he lapses into quasi-Freudian commentary, asserting that “the will to dominate that such corruption entails surreptitiously slides toward the sexual domination of the subaltern woman. I am speaking here of an unconscious subjective confusion in which the libido or pleasure at exercising despotic power over the other … and the erotic domination of their bodies, all intersect with one another” (p. 34). In a context in which no other reference is made to the erotics of power, such digressive comments may make for good rhetoric, but they do not make for good political philosophy.

Drawing on Antonio Gramsci (p. 75) and Ernesto Laclau (p. 72), Dussel argues that the people can achieve hegemony through historical blocs in power. That is, various subordinate groups can form coalitions and achieve power that is legitimated through popular consent. Democracy is the “forging of a legitimate consensus” (p. 62). For this to be achieved in a real sense, he believes that a “critical transformation” of the political order must be achieved. This is the focus of the second part of the book. In this part, the idea of “victims” (p. 69) assumes a central place. For the author, the victims are those members of the citizenry who have been marginalized and exploited, and whose empowerment is the primary purpose of democracy. But this approach to “people's power” is overly simplistic and thus problematic. Dussel's definition of “victims” or “the people” includes the poor, peasants, women, nonwhite people, the handicapped, the elderly, and so on. Indeed, it is exceptionally broad and encompassing, and he offers little theoretical explanation of what constitutes this assortment of groups as the people, nor does he explain how each of these different groups will be able to surmount problems of collective action and interest-group politics so as to coalesce politically into a unified force. In the same way, he fails to consider the possibility that individuals who are nonwhite, handicapped, elderly, and even of lower-class origins could belong to a power elite. In short, his theory of power leaves much unanswered.

In short, Dussel effectively fetishizes the very idea of “the people.” Rather than viewing a political community as an artifact created by political actors and leaders, he seems to assume that a people is out there and simply needs to realize its positive political power in foundational moments (this realization is what he calls hyperpotentia). One could argue that, in fact, a people is forged and shaped, that is, chronically redefined, and indeed that it has porous boundaries. There is no such thing as the people in itself. For this reason, we cannot begin to perform the kind of Husserlian phenomenology of “the people” that Dussel envisions. The Machiavellian insight is valuable here: Particular leaders (“princes”) must exist to shape and form a people out of an inchoate mass. Dussel does refer to Machiavelli often, and to some leaders such as Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, but he seems to see them as expressions of popular will rather than as Machiavellian princes who shape their constituencies. He thus ignores the dynamics of leadership, patronage, and exclusion that are necessary in the shaping of a people, and that most certainly have been in play in the case of the leaders cited here.

For instance, in the case of Bolivia, which Dussel mentions often, Evo Morales's strategy has in fact been to forge a principally indigenous-peoples movement into a political party and then into a ruling political class that tends to exclude nonindigenous peoples at the higher echelons. This tack, pace Dussel, is not universally inclusive (even if we were to grant it historical legitimacy), nor is it an expression of the totality of the Bolivian people. Indeed, a serious political theory of democracy must be able to distinguish between the rhetorical power of populist leaders and the veracity of their claims to democratic legitimacy—a distinction to which Dussel seems indifferent.

Still, this book is relevant for us today because it defends the idea that an alternative to the status quo is indeed possible. Critical of Iris Young and Habermas, Dussel tells us that “[t]he excluded should not be merely included in the old system … but rather ought to participate as equals in a new institutional moment (the new political order). This is a struggle not for inclusion, but for transformation” (p. 89, emphasis in the original). That is to say, in the realm of politics, we have no reason to think that things should continue as they are. Political actors can choose conservative, liberal, or anarchic strategies, but the radical democratic option is also an alternative that needs to be explored theoretically and in practice. Here it becomes clear that Dussel is perhaps closer to the modernist ethos than to the postmodernist one. He seeks the new, which is one meaning of the modern. He also believes a political order is possible, as opposed to merely a multiplicity of points of power. As Machiavelli, the founder of modern political thought, believed, a new prince is needed to establish “new modes and orders.” This “exceptional political leader” (p. 90)—as Dussel describes him or her—is an important, yet undertheorized, element in his account. Equally untheorized is the complex relationship between such leadership and democracy. Such issues are nonetheless central to contemporary political theory.