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  • El Pueblo and Its Problems: Democracy of, by, and for Whom?
  • Alexander V. Stehn

I thought I would speak this evening on the “need” not so much for a “new political party” as for a “new politics,” a new conception of politics, a new conception of government, and of the relation of the government to the people.

—John Dewey, “Needed—A New Politics”1

The Aztec term altepetl and the Mayan term Amaq’ refer to the “community” or the pueblo, and even vividly to the “we” that has been forgotten by modern, Western experience. As a result, in Latin America—through the indigenous influence that permeates the continent—the word pueblo means something more profound than merely “the people.”

—Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics 2

The recent surge of interest in developing philosophical conversations across the Americas has often taken democracy as its theme. For example, in October 2010 the inaugural issue of the Inter-American Journal of Philosophy was published, leading off with an article by Guillermo Hurtado: “El diálogo filosófico interamericano como un diálogo para la democracia” (“Inter-American Philosophical Dialogue as a Dialogue for Democracy”). Hurtado proposes that “one of the guiding lines of the dialogue be democracy understood not simply as a form of government but also as an ideal of our life together” (10). No one associated with the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) needs to be convinced that North American philosophy has a great deal to contribute in this regard. Simply scanning the paper and panel titles of the SAAP 2011 Conference indicates that democracy will be treated from the perspectives of James, Royce, Dewey, Addams, Follett, Du Bois, King, and Rorty. In response to Hurtado and others who have called for philosophical dialogue across the Americas,3 my article focuses on some aspects of democracy that appear when considering the concept of el pueblo and its role in the Latin American liberation philosophy of Enrique Dussel. [End Page 103]

As is the case with “the people”—its English counterpart—el pueblo refers paradoxically to the subject and the object of democracy, understood both as a form of government and as what Dewey and others have called “a way of life.”4 While I do not wish to set up a hard and fast opposition between North American and Latin American philosophies, I would like to suggest that there is much to gain from Latin American discussions of el pueblo for linguistic, historical, and philosophical reasons, which I address respectively in the three sections of my paper:

  1. I. Section I makes linguistic a claim: We are less likely to lose sight of the genuinely communal nature or collective identity of “the people” when considering el pueblo because it is unambiguously singular, grammatically speaking.

  2. II. Section II makes a historical claim: For North American philosophers, looking at the micro-history of a particular pueblo in Mexico’s Yucatán allows the familiar idea of “the people” to become strange, enabling us to pay more attention to the complex concrete, historical, and genealogical dimensions of el pueblo.

  3. III. Since I do not want to set up a barrier between the linguistic/historical and the philosophical, my brief concluding section considers what philosophical resources Latin American discourses of el pueblo might contribute to the project of questioning the self-evidence of the individualistic ethical, political, and ontological claims made by neoliberal globalization.5 I also suggest that careful historical work is necessary to understand the role that el pueblo plays in Latin American philosophies of liberation.

I. Linguistic Considerations: The People vs. El Pueblo

Since “We, the people of the United States” conferred authority on the United States Constitution well over two hundred years ago, the previously radical notion of popular sovereignty as the only basis of legitimate government has become a commonplace.6 Nonetheless, the words written in 1652 by the English Royalist Sir Robert Filmer to support the divine right of kings still ring true: “What the word people means is not agreed upon.”7 More recently, the political theorist Margaret Canovan has distinguished three ambiguous senses that “the people” shares with its equivalents in other European languages...

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