About the Series  xi

Editor's Foreword to the English Edition  xiii

Preface  xv

Introduction: World History of Ethical Systems  1

I.1. Origin of the Interregional System: Afro-Bantu Egypt and the Semites of the Middle East  6

I.2. Cultures without Direct Links to the System: The Mesoamerican and Inca Worlds  9

I.3. The "Indoeuropean" World: From the Chinese to the Roman Empire  13

I.4. The Byzantine World, Muslim Hegemony, and the East: The European Medieval Periphery  17

I.5. Unfolding of the World System: From "Modern" Spain of the Sixteenth Century  26

I.6. Modernity as "Management" of Planetary Centrality and Its Contemporary Crisis  32

I.7. The Liberation of Philosophy?  40

Part I: Foundation of Ethics  53

I. The Material Moment of Ethics: Practical Truth  55

1.1. The Human Cerebral Cognitive and Affective-Appetitive System  57

1.2. Utilitarianism  69

1.3. Communitarianism  77

1.4. Some Ethics of Content or Material Ethics  85

1.5. The Criterion and Universal Material Principle of Ethics  92

2. Formal Morality: Intersubjective Validity  108

2.1. The Transcendental Morality of Immanuel Kent  110

2.2. The Neocontractualist Formalism of John Rawls  115

2.3. The "Discourse Ethics" of Karl-Otto Apel  121

2.4. The Moral Majority of Jürgen Habermas  128

2.5. The Criterion of Validity and the Universal, Formal Principle of Morality  141

3. Ethical Feasibility and the "Goodness Claim"  158

3.1 The Pragmatism of Charles S. Pierce  160

3.2. The Pragmatic Realism of Hilary Putnam  167

3.3. The Functional or Formal "System" of Niklas Luhmann  175

3.4. The "Feasibility" of Franz Hinkelammert  181

3.5. The Criterion and the Ethical Principle of Feasibility  186

Part II. Critical Ethics, Antihegemonic Validity, and the Praxis of Liberation  205

4. The Ethical Criticism of the Prevailing System: From the Perspective of the Negativity of the Victims  215

4.1 Marx's Critique of Political Economics  218

4.2. The "Negative" and the "Material" in Critical Theory: Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin  234

4.3. The Dialectics of Drive  250

4.4. The Critical Criterion and the Material or Ethical-Critical Principle  278

5. The Antihegemonic Validity of the Community of Victims  291

5.1. Rigoberta Menchü  293

5.2. The Ethical-Critical Process of Paulo Freire  303

5.3. Functionalist and Critical Paradigms  320

5.4. The "Principle of Hope" of Ernst Bloch  334

5.5. The Critical-Discursive Criterion and the Principle of Validity  342

6. The Liberation Principle  355

6.1. The "Organization Question": From Vanguard toward Symmetric ParticipationTheory and Praxis?  359

6.2. The "Issue of the Subject": Emergence of New Sociohistorical Actors  373

6.3. The "Reform-Transformation" Question  388

6.4. The "Question of Violence": Legitimate Coercion, Violence, and the Praxis of Liberation  399

6.5. The Critical Criterion of Feasibility and the Liberation Principle  413

Appendix 1. Some Theses on Order of Appearance in the Text  433

Appendix 2. Sais: Capital of Egypt  447

Notes  453

Bibliography  655

Index  689

"Enrique Dussel is the towering figure in liberation philosophy. This long-awaited translation confirms his unique position in contemporary philosophy."—Cornel West

"The most significant achievements of Enrique Dussel's Ethics of Liberation are the ways that it shifted the geography of reasoning and taught us that if ethics is universal, it is also geopolitical. Dussel shows clearly that ethics has a politics that demands the political to be ethical and the ethical to be political. He further demonstrates that the geopolitics of ethics can no longer be controlled and regulated by Eurocentrism. Epistemic, political, economic, and ethical arguments and advocacy are being built from within the 'Third World' and they have a global scope. Ethics of Liberation is a book for our time, an essential tool for building nonimperial ethical futures."—Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options

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