It cannot be divorced from the more general concern about the way in which different traditions have come to understand pricelessness and usefulness as values or even distinguish them as opposites.
And it is neither essentially liberal nor necessarily progressive: recognition of the autonomy of the sphere of commercial exchanges predates modern liberalism. But in the past, this recognition was accompanied by a call for other kinds of social relations to compensate for the limitations of commercial exchange. Throughout history the emphasis, more often than not, has been on the limitations and the regressive character of commercial exchanges leading to accumulation.
As anthropologists have long observed, most traditional societies focused on the way in which accumulation may threaten the equilibrium and the balance of power within and between societies. One of the functions of religious discourse, for instance, has been to fend off this potential for violence.
This is why most religious traditions have contained prohibitions concerning the charging of interest, included strategies for debt-release and so on. What appears to be new about the approach taken by a number of economists and policy-advisers in places like Germany and the Americas from the s onwards is a move in the opposite direction: an emphasis on the potential expansion of the viewpoint of commercial exchanges to nearly every other sphere of society, from motherhood and reproduction to international relations.
Having originated in the late Renaissance, modern politics and international relations explored the consequences of the image of the world as a machine developed by speculative geographers and early explorers — among them Christopher Columbus.
In accordance with that image, physical variables such as geography and climate would impinge upon the relative capacities and intellectual development of the different peoples of the world. This, in turn, would help explain or justify processes of expansion and appropriation, cultural diffusion and the moral and educational trusteeship of some peoples, cultures and nations over others, perceived as child-like, patiently waiting for illumination and purification from elsewhere.
In contemporary times, modern politics and international relations inspired by a return to and revision of the canon of liberalism have added to this mindset the image of man as a calculating machine. From that point onwards, global analysts and policy-makers would see their task as bringing to light the calculations through which individuals, groups and decision-makers around the world choose to allot given scarce resources to this end rather than another, thereby creating new earning streams through their work and talent.
From their perspective, the focus of institutions and policies worldwide should be on securing and facilitating the conditions in which capital-able people can flourish and new earning streams created.
This also means moving to contain populations perceived as less capable because of their physical, cultural or institutional environments. Since in accordance with this perspective such secured spaces where available goods can circulate freely may also become scarce, to govern the peoples of the world becomes itself a matter of economic calculation framed in terms of security risks, a duty to protect vulnerable peoples or a right to intervene in the name of diversity, economic security and humanity.
Generally speaking, from the s and s onwards this language has engaged governments, military men, inter-governmental organisations, international financial institutions, aid agencies, reconstructed humanitarians and private companies to assemble into a planetary network sharing the burden of global management and moral and educational trusteeship.
This pluralistic language emerged from the older vocabularies of imperialism, dependency and colonisation. But it also differed from them, in appearing more benign, less wedded to one particular set of religious beliefs or even aggressively atheistic, and also in its ability to co-opt or substitute the liberationist imagery of human rights.
I do not see it as a fully formed ideology or an inherently pejorative term. Consequently, my use of the term does not suggest a singular or biased ideological perspective.
Put simply, if the mainstream wisdom of morally certain policy-makers and future-obsessed economists of the new liberal persuasion is like that of the fox in the well-known Greek fable, then my standpoint in this book is like that of the hedgehog. Friedman, without which nations dependent on the exploitation of raw materials would allegedly never be able to join the Lexus and Samsung world, that the global south will take the north into the next century.
Peoples in the global south were told that fitting themselves with the straitjacket was the only path for developing countries to follow in order to succeed in the new global economy. These diverse networks are significantly different from the older international economic alliances and regional or trans-national organisations.
Rather, they are responsive to western self-approved privileges such as the power of veto in the UN Security Council, their tendency to use more or less unilateral force in the rest of the world, or the self-serving nature of many of the policies and institutional arrangements informing the practice of international financial and decision-making institutions.
They combine older languages and practices of reciprocal recognition with the ethics of fraternity of associations and the modern language of public recognition through law, and also with newer understandings of equality and freedom as self-determination, sovereignty over resources and control over their own political and economic paths, and the ability to imagine different forms of economic life. This may be the point where the recovery of older practices and notions of community in Latin America and elsewhere intersects with the planetary search for an answer to the lack of imagination and truthful recognition that plagues our contemporary social landscapes and international relations.
Going beyond the realm of nations and local groups, where recognition seems secured from the outset, entails considering forms of association that see liberty not only as the freedom to govern ourselves but also as the liberty to give ourselves to the other. The latter involves exploring to what extend we can replace the exclusivity of profit incentives with an incentive derived from the interest to serve humanity and maintain its integrity and dignity even beyond the realm of the human itself — meeting the needs of other human beings and entities with whom we may be in principle totally unfamiliar.
As incentives come, the latter is no less material than the former. Perhaps it is actually more down to earth: it might be the case that we have put profit and wealth in the place formerly occupied by the sacred not because we have become too materialistic, but rather the opposite, because money does seem to give us access to some ultimate possibility of fulfillment in a way not even god or religion can.
For the minute we stop chasing ultimate meaning and felicity, we might discover exactly how to be happy and lead meaningful lives. Could this be what lies behind the fact that Latin American nations tend to appear more often than others at the top of lists comprising the happiest countries on earth?
While US influence remains strong in much of the region, for instance in Colombia and in parts of Central America, many nations in South America and the Caribbean have taken a more independent stance, and are now playing prominent roles on the global stage. And as the November edition of the Economist reported, Brazil turned upside down an infamous trend of big loans, debts and defaults in Latin America with international financial institutions by announcing that it would now lend money to the International Monetary Fund.
Unlike China, it is a democracy the political and economic development model of which is firmly based on the respect and promotion of social and political human rights. Unlike India, it has no insurgents, no intractable ethnic or religious conflicts, and has renounced the use of atomic weapons. Unlike Russia, it has diversified its industry protection to export-oriented process industries, overcoming the possibility of sole dependence on such exports as oil and arms, and treats its neighbours and minorities, as well as foreign investors, with respect.
And crucially, as a society, Brazil has chosen to set a historical course to reduce the searing inequalities that have long disfigured it, and which still account for a stubbornly high crime rate, a violent police force and environmental devastation, particularly in the Amazon where the Yanomami live, thereby setting an example that is being followed throughout Latin America and elsewhere.
What counts, apart from the technical aspects and specifics of Brazilian policy, is the philosophy that is at its root. For it raises the most important issue of our time: the question of the right to social ownership of a common good.
Approaching freedom, work, intellect or education as constitutive of and integral to what it is to be a modern human being, and therefore also as priceless — a common good as well as a social right — is, judging by the available evidence, imposing itself on the right to private ownership, or access to a common good in the form of private debt.
This is also the principle upon which conditional direct cash-transfer programs, pioneered by Latin American governments during the first decade of the twenty-first century, can move in the direction of a guaranteed fair income for all workers, thereby removing the process of giving an income from the sphere of economic exchanges.
Business ownership and cash-transfer programs evolving towards a guaranteed fair income are two new and practical concepts that remove the conditions of possibility for creative initiative and the process of giving an income from an over-extended sphere of economic exchanges and place them in the rights sphere.
Not only are they practical and viable, they also correspond much better to the nature of a modern industrial society of skills and entrepreneurship, such as the one that is taking shape in Latin America in defiance of the older dogmatisms of the right and the left. It calls for fraternity and association in economic life, along with reform of land, work and capital.
Furthermore, with the onset of the Great Recession after the world crisis of , and in view of the transformations brought about by new technologies that are altering our sense of relations in space and time, the rationale that spawned barter and private property relations between the end of the Middle Ages and the Age of Discoveries and Empire is beginning to fray.
The result of these events is that access to common goods in the form of private debt is going to give way increasingly during the twenty-first century to legitimate claims to social rent and relationships in vast global networks. Latin American countries like Brazil, Venezuela, Chile or Bolivia — in spite of their differences — are all pioneering this philosophy. Traditionally, the majority of Latin American countries have been perceived as politically weak and volatile.
Between the s and the s, the US allied itself with the armed forces in Latin America in an effort to contain the advance of left-wing governments and insurgency in the region. Three decades on, things have changed. Diminished control over the military is perhaps the most visible evidence of the decline of US influence in the region, with few but important exceptions such as Colombia.
And even in this country things are changing for the better. This is by no means the only sign that a dramatic political and economic change is under way. Today, South America is a potent symbol to many in Europe, America and the so-called Third World because it has managed to challenge the prevalent form of globalisation. Garcia's answer was cartographic. In his picture America Invertida the continent is switched round so that the Cape Horn is at the top of the world.
As Garcia would later write, "because our North is really the South. There should be no North, for us, except in opposition to our South. So we now turn the map upside down, to give us a fair idea of our position, and not as they wish in the rest of the world".
For much of the last 70 years, few have shared this perspective. Through the long years of military dictatorships, civil wars and economic instability, the continent has intrigued the Global North culturally but has remained politically and economically peripheral.
However, as Oscar Guardiola-Rivera argues in his book on "how the South will take the North into the 22nd century", things are changing fast. But Latin America has been a vital part of the global community since the seventeenth century, when the Spanish silver peso became the world's first global currency instrument.
Today it is home to six hundred million people and some of the fastest-growing economies on the planet. Latin America may not outshine or outspend the United States on the world stage anytime soon, but its voices will be heard. Its consumers, resources, and emigrants are already affecting us; they will be even bigger factors in our future. What if Latin America Ruled the World? Scholar Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is an ideal guide for a searching portrait of the Latin America that we rarely hear about.
He has lectured in law, philosophy and politics on three continents, and is the author of What if Latin America Ruled the World? Building housing is a long, slow affair. It's even slower when developers are building housing for homeless people.
Just cobbling together financing from myriad sources can take up to two years, and then there's the permitting, the political haggling. Officials in France and Germany have accused the U. Governors complain of a "wild west" in bidding. As the racial justice movement fells statues of former leaders and aims to raise new ones to other historical figures, the question must be asked: Why not look deeper for the causes of progress?
Mitchell Santos Toledo came to the United States when he was 2. His parents had temporary visas when they brought him and his 5-year-old sister to the country. They never left. He is o. America rescued Ilhan Omar and her family, but to hear her tell it, we are the ones who should be grateful. Rare Books. Video Games. My Account. Item 1 of 0. By Oscar Guardiola-Rivera.
Very Good. Add to cart. Reviews: Trustpilot. Summary For most Europeans and Americans, Latin America is little more than their underdeveloped sibling.
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