Decolonizing democracy : power in a solid state / Ricardo Sanin-Restrepo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sanín Restrepo, Ricardo, author.

Series:

Global Critical Caribbean Thought

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Democracy--Philosophy.

Democracy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (251 pages).

Place of Publication:

London, [England] ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Democracy is the apparent motor of globalization, binding together ideas and institutions such as citizenship, human rights, race, the free market, multiculturalism, development, politics and the economy. This book looks to overturn this dogma and demonstrate that ‘liberal’ democracy in fact encrypts and naturalizes the horrors of capitalism and of coloniality, while denying true or radical democracy, principally through constitutions and constitutional theory. Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo turns to the colonized, the marginalized, the creolized, and creates two novel concepts of politics, the “hidden people” and the “decryption of power” to reach a politics through and of radical democracy. The book shows that democracy is the only space of proper politics and the essential opposition of colonization and power as potestas. Sanín-Restrepo connects post-structuralism, subaltern studies, critical legal studies, de-colonial studies and Caribbean thought to muster the necessary theoretical tools to propose new grounds to decrypt the semblance of democracy that is liberalism and thus to demonstrate that democracy, far from being the standardized rule of the majority, a simple process or an institution, is the true being in the world and of the world.

Contents:

Coloniality: decrypting power in a solid state

First definition of democracy: the hidden people as the dark energy of power

Difference and simulacra: the poisoned gift of Platonism

The plastic soul of democracy: power between potentia, potestas, and actuality

The phantom pain of civilization: against Negrís understanding of Spinoza.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781783487073

1783487070