COMMUNITARIAN DEMOCRACY AND ANDEAN COMMUNITARIANISM

DECOLONIAL APPROACHES FROM THE LATIN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

Abstract

There is a polarization in Western academies between individualism and communitarianism. However, the hegemonic communitarian theses, despite their own criticisms, also took on particular values as nuclei endowed with universal validity. Thus, it proposed to reflect critically on the limits of the Eurocentric debates,  roblematizing the sense and role of the community in two traditions: the western hegemonic and the Andean. Such reflection is important to reveal some axioms that are not perceived if analyzed within the limits of
Totality (Euro-North American rationality) and the effect of this is to concealment of other modes of reality. The objective is to carry out this analysis by discussing  communitarian democracy, constitutionalized in Bolivia. For that, is needed an interdisciplinary approach and the study will adopt the ana-dialectic method, theorized by Dussel. The first section will discuss the limits of hegemonic Western communitarianism, evidenced by the critical interpellation of Exteriority (periphery, like Latin America). The second, it will describe the institutionalization of community democracy and the worldview of the Andean communities. The third section will argue for the need for a new theoretical category for the understanding of the collective subjects protagonists of the new Latin American institutionalities. The perception that the Andean communities have traditions and aspire to different modes of reality than those recognized in Eurocentric rationality, demands new categories, as Andean communitarianism can designate.