Why is it so difficult today to construct philosophical theories and critical social sciences, when there is so much to criticise, when there are more and more situations that arouse discomfort, indeed indignation, and lead to non-conformism in all arenas: cultural, political, economic, social, ecological, legal? This is demonstrated by the popular protests in the Arab world against autocrats, the student mobilisations, the movement of the Indignados, which began in May 2011 in Spain and spread throughout the world, the mass calls against the war from all social sectors, the Arab Spring, the World Social Forums, the Movement for Alternatives, the World Forum on Theology and Liberation, etc.

Why is it so difficult to propose development alternatives from the political and economic sciences, when the great promises of freedom, equality, and perpetual peace of modernity have remained unfulfilled and when the realisation of some promises, such as that of dominating nature, has had such perverse consequences for the planet? Is it possible to formulate an oppositional postmodern thought that recovers these promises and goes beyond the deconstruction and political disenchantment of the dominant postmodernity? How to fight against hegemonic globalisation and what strategies to pursue in favour of counter-hegemonic globalisation? How do we counteract the proliferation, or rather the structural growth of exclusion in the Third World, which is on the way to becoming social fascism? How to approach the task of reinventing the state, democracy and political culture in order to respond to this situation?

These are all profound questions that Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Coimbra, Portugal, 1940), PhD in Sociology of Law from Yale University, has been answering with scientific rigour, intellectual creativity and in tune with social movements for more than five decades, Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Economics, former Director of the Centre for Social studies, Coordinator of the Permanent Observatory of Portuguese Justice at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School (USA).S.A.)

In 2003 he published Crítica de la razón indolente. Contra el desperdiciar de la experiencia (Desclée de Brouwer, Bilbao, 2003) - Two years later, El milenio huérfano. Ensayos para una nueva cultura política (Trotta, Madrid, 2005). I wrote about them in two reviews in the newspaper El País and they served to introduce me to the creative thinking and critical theory of Boaventura de Sousa Santos. In 2009 I read Sociología jurídica crítica. Para un nuevo sentido común en el derecho (Trotta, Madrid, 2009). These are three major works that offer fundamental keys for the elaboration of a critical theory of society, politics, economics and law.

In 2014 he published two works that can be considered foundational to the new paradigm of Epistemologies of the South: Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide (Paradigme Publisher, London, 2014) and Epistemologías del Sur. Perspectivas (Akal, Madrid, 2014), co-edited with María Paula Meneses. To these we can add Si Dios fuese un activista de los derechos humanos (Trotta, Madrid, 2014), which is an approach to the political theologies of liberation developed in and from the global South. In 2017 appeared Justicia entre saberes: Epistemologías del Sur contra el epistemicidio (Morata, Madrid). April 2019 saw the publication of El fin del imperio cognitivo. La afirmación de las Epistemologías del Sur (Trotta, Madrid, 2019), where he defends the need for an epistemological transformation that guarantees global cognitive justice as a necessary condition for global justice.

Transgressive thinking

Boaventura de Sousa Santos's intellectual itinerary is not characterised precisely by his installation in the system, or even in a single discipline or branch of knowledge, but rather by the search for and transgression of disciplinary boundaries. In all his works, the most varied disciplines interact harmoniously: philosophy, from Aristotle to Foucault, political science, social sciences, legal sciences, philosophy of law, legal sociology, anthropology, aesthetics, literary criticism, and the sciences of religions. I am honoured to have contributed to their engagement with the latter in our meetings and texts in permanent dialogue. The result is a dynamic, plural, non-constrained thinking, open to new cultural climates and to the multiple challenges of our time.

From the outset, he confesses his true socio-cultural location. "I am not a modernist. And neither am I a postmodernist in the aforementioned sense (celebratory postmodernism)." In between, he proposes a third position: "oppositional postmodernism," from which he argues that there are modern problems for which there are no modern solutions. The modern paradigm can contribute to the solutions we seek, but it can never produce them.

Santos is one of the most creative social scientists on the current intellectual scene. He has a great capacity for innovation both in his own language, full of images, symbols, and intuitions, and in his content and proposals, and he knows how to coherently articulate critical analyses with alternatives, protests with proposals, ethical indignation with political reconstruction, critical theory with historical utopias. Far from treading well-trodden paths, it breaks new ground in research and writing.

The symbol gives food for thought, said Paul Ricoeur. I believe that the same can be applied to Boaventura's itinerant and non-installed thought: it gives food for thought, because it has been thought and meditated on in depth and with the radicalism of a transgressive thought. He places himself in the critical tradition of modernity, albeit with a distance in fundamental aspects, precisely in those that were born already sick and developed pathologically.

While modern critical theory persists in its efforts to develop emancipatory possibilities within the dominant paradigm, the Portuguese social scientist believes that it is not possible to conceive genuine emancipatory strategies in this sphere, as they all end up becoming regulatory strategies dictated by the system itself and, ultimately, at the service of the dominant paradigm, which is more exclusionary than welcoming in all fields, in knowledge and everyday life, in politics and economics, in religion and culture.

It is necessary to design, through the utopian imagination, a new horizon where the emerging paradigm is announced. A horizon that is everywhere visible in social movements and global resistance struggles, in the social sciences and the sciences of religions, but to which the carcinogens of modernity are still insensitive, many of them converted into fundamentalists of modern values with an expiry date, which they nevertheless want to impose on all of humanity and nature as the most developed and, therefore, the one with the greatest universalist projection.

The critical theory of modernity must be transformed into a "new emancipatory common sense", believes Santos, who defines his intellectual work as a double excavation:

a) In the cultural rubbish generated by the canon of Western modernity, with a well-defined objective: to recover the traditions, alternatives and utopias expelled from it.

b) Colonialism and neo-colonialism, in order to discover more egalitarian and reciprocal relations between Western culture and other cultures. The excavation is motivated not by an archaeological interest, but by the desire to identify, amidst the ruins, epistemological, cultural, social and political fragments that help to reinvent social emancipation.

The work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos is transgressive in all the fields of research in which he works. At least three levels of transgression should be highlighted:

a) That of the boundaries between academic disciplines, since it circulates with great freedom and competence in all of them: epistemology and law, literature and history, anthropology and psychology, moral and political philosophy, sociology, and political science.

b) That of geographical and cultural borders, through its cosmopolitanism in scientific work, especially in countries of the global south, but not from the neutrality of a distant researcher, but through a vital immersion, a political commitment, and a multidirectional dialogue between theories and actors from all latitudes.

c) That of the jealously guarded separation in academia between theory and practice by establishing an intrinsic connection between the two.

Reinventing law beyond the neoliberal model

His book Sociología jurídica crítica: Para un nuevo sentido común en el derecho (Trotta, Madrid, 2009) is a new demonstration that the academic and research itinerary of this Portuguese intellectual, social scientist and critical jurist is characterised by interdisciplinary work, the transgression of disciplinary boundaries and the proposal of alternatives. The key question that arises is how to reinvent law beyond the neoliberal and demosocialist model, without falling into the conservative agenda, and how to achieve this to combat the latter efficiently.

The answer is a new critical theory of law that translates into the proposal of the legality of subaltern, insurgent cosmopolitanism, based on the counter-hegemonic use of law and rights. In the book, the most plural disciplines interact: philosophy, from Aristotle to Foucault, philosophy of law, political science, social sciences, legal sciences, aesthetics, social thought, etc. The result is an interdisciplinary masterpiece of the sociology of law.

New critical theory of society

We live in times of paradigmatic transition. With the consolidation of the convergence between the paradigm of modernity and capitalism from the mid-19th century onwards, we are entering a process of degradation produced by the transformation of emancipatory energies into regulatory energies. This is where we find ourselves: regulation has taken the place of emancipation, and even those of us who believe we are emancipated live under regulation.

The collapse of emancipation places this paradigm in its final crisis, with no possibility of renewal. However, among the ruins, there are signs—albeit vague—of the emergence of a new paradigm. In his work Critique of Indolent Reason: Against the Waste of Experience, Santos defines the parameters of the paradigmatic transition on two levels, epistemological and social, and in three fields: science, law, and power, which constitute the central object of his critique and occupy a central place in the configuration and trajectory of the paradigm of Western modernity.

Boaventura lays the foundations for a new critical theory of society, convinced that the inherited social sciences are not able to account for the new socio-cultural, economic and political climates. However, he is not unaware of the difficulties in constructing it and rigorously faces the challenges. The new theory is based on four main lines. The first is a new theory of history as a response to the challenge of technological renewal that achieves two objectives: to incorporate silenced, marginalised and discredited social experiences, to reconstruct non-conformism and social indignation, and to seek alternatives.

The guide in this search is Walter Benjamin's allegory of history in his commentary on Klee's painting Angelus Novus about the "angel of history" who turns his face towards the past, where he observes a perennial catastrophe that piles up ruins upon ruins and throws them at his feet, an image of the accumulation of suffering in history. Hegel, who defined human history as the butcher's bench, had already announced this. It is one of the most incisive critiques of the modern philosophy of "progress", the predominant one in Western thought, especially in the philosophy of history and in social-democratic political theory and practice, questioned by Walter Benjamin.

The second focuses on overcoming the prevailing Northcentric and Western preconceptions in the social sciences. De Santos shows the coloniality of power and knowledge in its full extent, and expands the criteria and principles of social inclusion through new synergies between equality and difference to be reconstructed multiculturally.

The third is the reinvention of knowledge as emancipation and ethical interrogation, with three important implications for the social sciences: the shift from monoculturalism to multiculturalism and from multiculturalism to interculturalism; from heroic expertise to uplifting and contextualised knowledge; from conformist action to rebellious action.

The fourth is to prioritise the theoretical reconstruction and political re-foundation of the state and democracy in times of globalisation. Contrary to the claims of neo-liberal globalisation, the state continues to be a decisive field of social action and political struggle, and democracy is something much more complex and contradictory than the hasty recipes promoted by the World Bank would lead one to believe. The necessary condition for tackling the social exclusion that affects more and more human beings is a two-fold reinvention: that of the state and that of democracy.

New forms of domination and refounding of the state and democracy

Santos conceives of the state as a "very new social movement", which requires the democratic refounding of public administration in order to make efficiency compatible with democracy and equity, and to achieve an improvement in results without falling into the trap of privatisation. Another essential democratic refoundation is that of the third sector, which requires a correct articulation between it and the state, without having to lead to the complementarity of both or the substitution of one for the other. The third sector is subject to the same vices as the state. In many countries it has not yet been democratised and easily falls into paternalism and authoritarianism.

Inseparable from the two previous reinventions is the *reinvention of *. The democratic values of modernity, freedom, equality, autonomy, subjectivity, justice, solidarity, and the antinomies between them, the Coimbra and Wisconsin professor believes, survive, but they are subjected to an increasing symbolic overload. They come to mean increasingly disparate things to different groups and individuals, to the point that the excess of meaning paralyses the effectiveness of these values and thus neutralises them.

Santos proposes suggestive alternatives for theoretical and analytical reconstruction centred on the state, democracy, and globalisation. To this end, he seeks a new equation between the principle of equality and that of the recognition of difference in the face of the two systems of hierarchical belonging in the paradigm of modernity in its capitalist version: the system of inequality and that of exclusion. It draws attention to the fallacies of globalisation, including determinism and the disappearance of the South. And, very importantly, he draws a distinction and differentiation between hegemonic globalisation and counter-hegemonic globalisation.

One of the important elements to take into account in the critical analysis of the paradigm of modernity is that there is no single form of domination and no single principle of social transformation, but many and interconnected ones. Domination and oppression present themselves with multiple faces, some of which, such as patriarchal domination, have hardly been the object of attention of modern critical theory, which has passed through them like coals, hardly paying attention to them, and worse, reinforcing them even more.

The five monocultures and the five ecologies

The most suggestive and creative chapter of The Orphan Millennium is, in my opinion, the one entitled "Towards a sociology of absences and a sociology of emergencies," which summarises the theoretical and epistemological reflections of an extensive research project in six countries belonging to different continents (Mozambique, South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, India, and Portugal), whose main objective was to show what possibilities there are of carrying out alter globalisation from below, that is, from social movements and non-governmental organisations, and what their limits are.

It takes up the critique of indolent reason in its various forms: impotent, arrogant, metonymic, and proleptic, which underlies the hegemonic knowledge produced in the West during the last two centuries and which was deployed in the context of the consolidation of the liberal state, the industrial revolutions, capitalist development, colonialism, and imperialism. The critique focuses on metonymic reason, which operates obsessively with the idea of totality in the form of order and is today the dominant one. It is here that Boaventura de Santos designs his original sociology of absences and emergencies.

It analyses, first, the world of the five monocultures, a world that wastes experience:

a) Monoculture of knowledge, which believes that the only knowledge is rigorous knowledge (epistemicide).

b) Monoculture of progress, of linear time, which understands history as a one-way street: the advanced, developed world is ahead; the rest is residual, obsolete.

c) Monoculture of the naturalisation of hierarchies, which considers hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender to be a natural phenomenon, and therefore believes that they cannot be modified;

d) Monoculture of the universal as the only valid thing, regardless of context; the opposite of the universal is vernacular, invalid; the global takes precedence over the local.

e) Productivity monoculture, which defines human reality by the criterion of economic growth as an unquestionable rational objective; a criterion that is applied to human labour, but also to nature, turned into an object of exploitation and depredation; those who do not produce are lazy.

The five monocultures provoke five main social forms of non-stock legitimised by metonymic reason: the non-credible, the ignorant, the residual, the local and the unproductive. Boaventura questions each of the five monocultures, all of which are constructions of Western modernity, and proposes corresponding responses:

a) In contrast to the monoculture of scientific knowledge, it offers the ecology of different forms of knowledge with the necessary dialogue and unavoidable confrontation between them.

b) As opposed to the logic of linear time, which is a secularisation of the eschatology of Judaism and Christianity, he designs the ecology of temporalities, which positively values the different temporalities as ways of living contemporaneity, without establishing hierarchies or value judgements on them, for example, between the activity of the African or Asian peasant, that of the World Bank executive, and that of the hi-tech farmer in the U.S.A. One and other activities have different temporal rhythms, but equally valid; the recognition of the different temporalities implies recovering their corresponding ways of life, manifestations of sociability, and productivity processes. These activities have different temporal rhythms, but they are equally valid; the recognition of the different temporalities implies the recovery of their corresponding ways of life, manifestations of sociability, and productivity processes.

c) In contrast to the monoculture of social classification, which attempts to identify difference with inequality, the ecology of recognitions appears, which seeks a new articulation between both notions, giving rise to "equal differences"; this ecology of differences is constructed on the basis of reciprocal recognitions; this implies the reconstruction of difference as a product of hierarchy and of hierarchy as a product of difference.

d) Faced with the monoculture of the universal as the only valid one, he presents the ecology of trans-scales, valuing the local as such, de-globalising it, that is, placing it outside hegemonic globalisation, where the local is undervalued, indeed, scorned, and disregarded. Is there no place then for the globalisation of the local? Yes, Boaventura replies, but with the qualification that it is a "counter-hegemonic reglobalisation", which broadens the diversity of social practices. It is an exercise in cartographic imagination to discover on each scale both what it shows and what escapes, and to seek a new articulation of the global and the local, in which the latter is not phagocytised by the former.

e) Against the productivist monoculture of capitalist orthodoxy, which prioritises the objectives of accumulation over those of distribution, it defends the ecology of social production and distribution, i.e., the need to recover and promote other alternative systems of production, such as workers' cooperatives, "fair trade," self-managed enterprises, popular economic organisations, the solidarity economy, etc., discredited by orthodox capitalism.

A subaltern God and human rights activist

It is worth highlighting Boaventura's sensitivity in his most recent research and interventions to the role of religions and progressive and pluralist political theologies in the processes of reinventing knowledge, the state, democracy, counter-hegemonic human rights, and social movements. This is a field in which he has made relevant contributions, as he demonstrated at the World Forum on Theology and Liberation, held in Porto Alegre (Brazil) from January 21 to 25, 2005, where we met personally and embraced. I thanked him for the clarity and luminosity of his texts, and he thanked me for having written a review of his book La razón indolente (Indolent Reason). I believe that it was in this forum that he initiated a fruitful dialogue between the critical theory of society and theology from a liberating perspective, which reached its zenith with his aforementioned work Si Dios fuera activista de los derechos humanos (If God were a human rights activist). I thank him for the numerous references to my socio-theological works and their inclusion in the final bibliography. They are the best expression of our harmony on the way to another possible world by the path of learned hope, as Ernst Bloch said.

Boaventura notes that we live in a time when scandalous social injustices and unjust human suffering do not generate the moral indignation and political will to combat them and to build a more just and egalitarian society. In these circumstances, we cannot waste any of the emancipatory social experiences that can contribute to this construction.

As an active participant in the WSF, he observes that many activists in the struggle for socio-economic, ecological, ethnic, sexual, and post-colonial justice base their activism and their demands on religious beliefs or Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, indigenous, etc. spiritualities. It is the emergence of new subjectivities that combine alter-globalisation militancy with transcendent or spiritual references, which, far from distancing them from the material and historical struggles for another possible world, engage them more radically and deeply.

All religions, he recognises, have a potential to develop liberatory political theologies, which are capable of being integrated into counter-hegemonic struggles for human rights and against neoliberal globalisation, and which can be a source of radical energy in such struggles.

It provides a rigorous analysis—both in terms of content and depth, as well as breadth of knowledge - of such political theologies: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, etc., feminist theologies, intercultural and interreligious theologies that theoretically ground the relationship between religious experience and counter-hegemonic engagement, and refer to emancipatory practices. In turn, it identifies the main challenges that these theologies pose to human rights.

These religious discourses do not follow the Enlightenment conception of religion, which places religion in the private sphere and secludes it in places of worship, but defend its presence in the public sphere, not by way of an alliance with power, but by locating it in spaces of marginalisation and exclusion, linked to social movements, respectful yet critical of the autonomy of temporal realities and the process of secularisation, and without any pretence of confessionalizing society, politics, culture, etc.

In short, what Boaventura does is an exercise in intercultural translation of the two normative politics that seek to operate globally: that of human rights and that of liberatory political theologies, seeking areas of contact from which new or renewed energies can emerge to bring about radical social, political, economic, and cultural transformation.

If God were a human rights activist is certainly a metaphorical conditional to which de Sousa Santos gives a metaphorical answer: "If God were a human rights activist, He or She would definitely be in search of a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights and of a practice consistent with it. In doing so, sooner or later this God would sooner or later confront the God invoked by the oppressors and find no affinity with him or her. In other words, He or She would come to the conclusion that the God of the subaltern cannot but be a subaltern God".

This definition of God as "subordinate" is fully in line with the image of God in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions as the God who opts for impoverished individuals and groups, the God to whom the Jewish prophet Jeremiah gives the name "justice": "Yahweh, our righteousness. That is his name (Jeremiah 33,16). Boaventura's definition of God seems to me to be very accurate, as is José Saramago's: "God is the silence of the universe, and the human being is the cry that gives meaning to that silence." These are the two definitions that I like the most of the many I have read and with which I identify.

The limits of discursive rationality

Santos distances himself from the Eurocentric critical tradition with the aim of opening up analytical spaces for "surprising" realities, where liberating emergencies can emerge. He acknowledges the masterly intellectual reconstruction of Western modernity carried out by Jürgen Habermas, but also the limits of a second modernity constructed on the basis of the first. What characterises the second modernity is the abysmal line it draws between Western and colonial societies. A line that Habermas grasps with great lucidity, but which he is unable to overcome.

The German philosopher believes that his theory of communicative action, as a new universal model of discursive rationality, can overcome both relativism and eclecticism. But, asked whether such a theory can be useful to progressive forces in the Third World and to the struggles of democratic socialism in democratic countries, the German philosopher replies, "I am tempted to answer no in both cases. I am convinced that this is a limited and Eurocentric view. I would prefer not to have to answer." An apophatic reply that Santos interprets, I believe, accurately in this way: "Despite its proclaimed universality, Habermas's communicative rationality excludes, de facto, the effective participation of four-fifths of the world's population. Exclusion that takes place in the name of a supposed universality and with the utmost honesty. We are faced with a "benevolent but imperial universalism."

But not everything is imperial and dominant universalism in Western modernity. There are other marginalised versions that need to be recovered. They are those that were made invisible, silenced, and marginalised "for doubting the triumphalist certainties of Christian faith, modern science and law, which simultaneously produced the abysmal line and made it invisible", says Boaventura, showing us the way for the search for utopias, Western or otherwise, of yesterday and today from the "epistemology of the South", one of the most creative contributions of Professor Santos, which I will analyse below.

Epistemologies of the South

In 1995 Boaventura formulated with great lucidity the three orientations on which an Epistemology of the South should be based: "learning that the South exists, learning to go to the South, learning from the South and with the South". He did so in his seminal work Towards a New Common Sense. Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. The initiative coincided with the impact and wide circulation of Mario Benedetti's poem "El Sur también existe", sung by Juan Manuel Serrat with this cadence: "... Y aquí hay quienes se desmueren/ y hay quienes se desviven/ y así entre todos logrran/ lo que era un imposible:/que todo el mundo sepa/que el Sur también existe". A new paradigm was being born: the irruption of the global South in the field of knowledge and emancipatory experiences with their own identity and empowerment.

Since then, the initiative has taken shape and has been developed in different publications, debate forums, conferences, and congresses. One of the most important was the International Colloquium on "Epistemologies of the South. Global South-South-South-North and North-South Learning", organised by the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra in July 2014 as part of the ALICE project, which Boaventura directed, with the participation of six hundred people.

Today, it finds its most rigorous and interdisciplinary development in three works mentioned at the beginning: Epistemologías del Sur. Perspectivas (Akal, Madrid, 2014), the latter edited together with María Paula Meneses, researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Justicia entre Saberes: Epistemologías del Sur contra el epistemicidio (Morata, Madrid, 2017), and El fin del imperio cognitivo. La afirmación de las Epistemologías del Sur (Trotta, Madrid, 2019).

Epistemologies of the South. Perspectives brings together thinkers mostly from the geographical South - Africa, Latin America and Asia—but also from the North, who are also vitally and intellectually, in heart and mind, on the side of the metaphorical South, i.e. on the side of those oppressed and exploited by the different forms of capitalist domination in its colonial relationship with the world.

Precisely one of the objectives of the paradigm of the epistemologies of the South is to repair the serious damage caused by the colonial-capitalist "holy alliance", which has generated the homogenisation of the world with the consequent elimination of cultural differences and the waste of many emancipatory experiences, as Santos has already shown in his work Critique of Indolent Reason: Against the Waste of Experience. The extreme expression of the colonial-capitalist alliance has been "epistemicide," which consists of the suppression, or rather the violent destruction, of non-Western local knowledge.

Colonialism is still alive and active today, albeit in a more subtle form, in the form of the coloniality of power, economy and knowledge, analysed by the Peruvian intellectual Aníbal Quijano, who makes a clear distinction between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism refers to a structure of domination/exploitation in which the control of political authority, production resources and the labour of a population is held by another authority of a different identity that has its headquarters in another territorial jurisdiction.

Coloniality is one of the elements that constitute the global pattern of capitalist power and is based on the imposition of an ethical classification of the world's population as the cornerstone of this pattern of power and operates in all spheres of human existence and nature.

Boaventura's starting point in his epistemologies of the South is that there is no knowledge without social practices and actors, and that both take place within social relations. It is these that give rise to different epistemologies, none of which are neutral. Modern capitalism and colonialism have played a fundamental and very negative role in the construction of dominant epistemologies. From this point, some fundamental questions arise, to which this work attempts to respond with the richness and creativity that is to be expected from the inter-cultural, inter-continental, inter-ethnic, and inter-disciplinary character of its contributors:

Why, Boaventura asks, has the dominant Western epistemology, over the last two centuries, eliminated the social and economic, cultural, and political context of the production and reproduction of knowledge from reflection? What are the consequences of this elimination on knowledge as a whole? Are there inclusive alternatives that correct the systematic exclusion of knowledge from the South? How can we redefine, on the basis of a symmetrical dialogue of epistemologies, the major issues at the heart of the debates?

Among these themes, he cites the following: the dictatorship of markets and the democratisation of democracy; human dignity and human rights and their denial by neoliberalism; the ecological crisis and its main manifestations, the emerging ecological consciousness, its struggles and alternatives; tradition and progress; women's emancipation and neo-patriarchy; corporeality and power relations; corporeality, violence and resistance; neo-colonialism and decoloniality, the theory of social classes and the theory of social classification; neo-liberal globalisation and alter-globalisation movements; new economies; new constitutionalism, etc.

A fundamental fact to take into account is the existence of a great plurality of knowledge in the world, which constitutes the richness of the human being and of nature in all areas, including epistemology. No knowledge is absolute, nor can it understand itself in isolation, but only in reference to other knowledge. Each has its possibilities, but also its limits. This leads to the need for a relationship, comparison and horizontal dialogue between knowledge.

However, the relationship between different kinds of knowledge is characterised today by asymmetry, even in its own typology: Western knowledge considers itself to be "superior" and declares itself "hegemonic," while degrading non-Western knowledge as inferior and considering it to be subaltern. This asymmetry pretends to be recognised as natural to the point of becoming the ultimate criterion and instance in the comparison with other knowledges.

Colonialism has exercised and continues to exercise, in addition to other forms of domination, epistemological domination, which translates into an unequal knowledge-power relationship resulting in the suppression or undervaluation of many forms of art, knowledge, social organisation, exercise of power and spirituality of the colonised peoples.

Eduardo Galeano puts it with his characteristic originality and literary brilliance: "The dominant culture admits indigenous people and blacks as objects of study, but does not recognise them as subjects of history; they have folklore, not culture; they practice superstitions, not religions; they speak dialects, not languages; they make crafts, not art".

And I add: they are wild nature, not cultivate nature; they have idols, not gods; they practise idolatrous cults, not sacred rites; they have superstitions, not sacraments; they have ancestral customs, not knowledge; they do magic, not science; they are contemplative, not active; they live anchored in the past with no prospect for the future.

In response to such discrimination and derogatory judgements, the paradigm of epistemologies of the South denounces the elimination of local knowledge, highlights the knowledge that successfully resisted colonialism, recognises in all its breadth and depth the plurality of heterogeneous experiences and knowledge and the continuous and dynamic interconnections between them, and investigates the conditions for horizontal dialogue between different knowledges. In this way, it aims to contribute to the decolonisation of the different fields of knowledge, having, and power.

The book is structured around four thematic axes. The first, entitled "From Coloniality to Decoloniality", identifies, analyses and questions the way in which economic, political and cultural domination constructed the hierarchies between knowledge and their naturalisation. The second, characterised as "The Modernities of Traditions", studies the process of construction of the rigid dichotomy between modernity and tradition, and the consideration of non-Western knowledge as residues of the past to be dismissed.

The third axis, entitled "Geopolitics and Subversion," reflects on the epistemological diversity of the world and highlights the value of knowledge hitherto devalued as local. The fourth, "The reinventions of places", notes that the hegemonic definition and imposition of the places of Western capitalist modernity meant an impoverishment of the great richness and diversity of cultures and epistemologies in the global South, but also in the global North, and offers euristics of new, marginalised and forgotten places of knowledge not subject to colonial and capitalist domination.

The pretended and pretentious Western monopoly in the sphere of knowledge has been a complete failure. Its unique game must come to an end if it has not already ended. There are other actors, other players from the South and the alternative North—who are calling for a breakthrough. The West needs to be humbled to recognise this, even if, given its historical arrogance, it will find it difficult to make such a "confession."

It is necessary to geograph humanity, nature, science, culture, thought and everyday life in a more plural (and counter-hegemonic) way, beyond the narrow, Eurocentric cartography of modernity. This is the challenge facing the new paradigm of epistemologies of the South, which is advancing apace with the collaboration of epistemological and cultural traditions that have hitherto been silenced, if not denied.

This book is a fundamental step in that direction and embarks on an exciting journey from the one to the multiple, from knowledge to inter-knowledge, from the universe-world to the pluriverse-world, from abstract universal thinking to contextual pluriversal thinking, from Western hegemonic epistemology to inter-epistemology; from the coloniality of power and knowledge to decoloniality, from the Eurocentric theory of social classes to a historical theory of social classification, from exclusionary monocultures to the inclusive ecology of knowledge.

From the European periphery

A new contribution by Boaventura is his book The Difficult Democracy, which brings together texts written between 1980 and 2016, duly contextualised, "from the European periphery", which constitutes the hermeneutic key to the whole work and moves within the horizon of the book Epistemologies of the South. In it, he makes a rigorous critical analysis of the democratic processes experienced in several Southern European countries, especially in Portugal, which he contextualises in their historical moment and in the European and global space.

The analysis deals with the different crises of the last decade: financial, economic, political, environmental, energy, food, and civilisation crises, all of which are globally related, although, he adds, they occur with different intensities and consequences depending on the countries and religions.

He emphasises the repercussions of the crisis in European countries that are considered peripheral in relation to a centre that very negatively conditions their political and social options. His lucid assertion that it has been the indigenous peoples of Latin America who in the last two decades have made visible, in different ways, the conception of the global crisis of capitalism at different levels: as a crisis of their mode of production, their way of life, coexistence and relationship with nature.

An aggravating factor of the crisis that few social scientists and political scientists notice and to which Boaventura attaches special relevance in his political analyses is the proliferation and strengthening of fascism with a democratic façade. Boaventura distinguishes between two types of fascism: social and political. The former occurs in social relations when the stronger party holds such superior power over the lower party that it has an unofficial right of veto and control over their desires, needs and aspirations for a dignified life. This is a despotically exercised right, which is the very opposite of a right based on human dignity.

Three significant examples of social fascism are violence against women exercised by the patriarchy; work carried out under real slave labour conditions; and young Afro-Brazilians in the peripheries of the big cities. We live", he asserts, "in societies that are politically democratic and socially fascist" (p. 320). The statement could not be more accurate. The greater the restriction of social and economic rights and the less effective the justice system is in the face of human rights violations, the more space is left free for social fascism.

Social fascism, together with the overexploitation of natural resources and the environmental catastrophe it causes, constitutes one of the two most destructive impacts of neoliberal capitalism on social relations. The phenomenon that fuels social fascism is the weakening of democratic processes, which gives rise to forms of domination similar to those of the savage capitalism of the 19th century. History repeats itself in its most dehumanising and nature-predatory aspects!

Political fascism consists of and manifests itself in "a dictatorial, nationalist, racist, sexist, xenophobic political regime" (p. 320), which, under certain circumstances, can be the regime of choice for the ruling classes when their interests are significantly affected, and which can also seduce the working classes when their standard of living is threatened by social groups below them.

How to live the crisis and get out of it? I share Boaventura's answer:

With dignity and hope in a world that is transforming the right of all into the privilege of a few. However, hope is not invented, it has to be built with non-conformism, nourished with "competent rebellion" and translated into real alternatives to the present situation. Reason and hope are inseparable. As the philosopher of utopia Ernst Bloch, well known to Boaventura, states, "reason cannot flourish without hope; hope cannot speak without reason. Only when reason begins to speak does hope, in which there is no falsehood, begin to flourish again".

Letters to the left

Particularly brilliant from a literary point of view, lucid in their political analysis and suggestive in their transformative proposals for the future, I find the "Fourteen Letters to the Left", which I read at the different times they were written and which I have read again grouped together with the luminosity that comes from an overall view.

No. 14 caught my attention: I don't know whether it is symbolic or just a cardinal number. Many texts have symbolic numbers: the Four Rules of Descartes' Discourse on Method, Moses' Decalogue, Marx's Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, Enrique Dussel's 13 Theses of Matanzas, Luther's 95 theses. What is certain is that Boaventura's own epistolary literary genre demonstrates the modesty with which the author makes his proposals: they are "letters", not theses, they are invitations, not impositions.

The letters are addressed to different collectives that make up the plural left today: political parties and social movements fighting against capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, as well as unorganised citizens who share the aims and aspirations of these parties and movements.

The letters are a call to rebuild the left in order to avoid barbarism and constitute an appeal for the left to reinvent itself in the current conditions, based on a rigorous reading of the paradigm shift that is taking place and to which it can and must also contribute politically and ideologically.

Decalogue

Here, in the form of a decalogue, are some of the lines that, for me fundamental, of the agenda that Santos is setting for the left for today and tomorrow.

  1. Urgency of reflection: the left is not usually ready to reflect, neither when they are in government nor when they are in opposition. They always have other urgencies before that of reflection. And that is suicide, because without reflection they impose the tiresome repetition of timeless slogans that do not advance history towards emancipation, but subject it to the dictatorship of the given. Faced with the installation in the given, which limits itself to giving answers from the past to questions of the present without any creativity, the left should follow Bloch's proposal: "If the theory does not coincide with the facts, so much the worse for the facts".

  2. National states are post-sovereign: they have lost sovereignty and have transferred many of their prerogatives to the financial powers. This is precisely what neoliberalism aims to do: to disorganise the state through a series of regressive transitions: from collective to individual responsibility; from tax-based action to credit-based action generated by the financial suffocation of the state; from recognition of the existence of public goods to be cared for by the state to the idea that state interventions in potentially profitable areas illegitimately reduce the possibilities for private profit; from the primacy of the state to that of the market; from social rights to philanthropy.

  3. The lefts of the global North started out as colonialists, subscribing to the "colonial pact", uncritically accepting that colonial independence would end colonialism and undervaluing neo-colonialism and internal colonialism. It is time to change course. The challenge before them is to prepare for anti-colonial struggles of a new kind.

  4. The left must re-found democracy beyond neo-liberalism and confront anti-democracy, combine representative democracy with participatory and direct democracy, articulate these democracies with the community democracy of indigenous and peasant communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, legitimise other forms of democracy such as demo-diversity, broaden the fields of democratic deliberation in the family, in the street, in schools, in factories, in knowledge and know-how, in the media, promote democratic reform of the UN and international agencies, defend the democratic reform of the UN and international agencies, defend the right to democracy and the right to democracy, to broaden the fields of democratic deliberation in the family, the street, the school, the factory, knowledge and know-how, the media, to promote democratic reform of the UN and international agencies, to defend anti-capitalist democracy in the face of an increasingly anti-democratic capitalism, and in the event of having to choose between capitalism and democracy, to make real democracy prevail.

In Boaventura's felicitous expression, it is necessary to democratise democracy, besieged by the dictatorship of the market and kidnapped by anti-democratic powers, to put justice at the service of democracy and citizenship, and in the case of our continent, to democratise Europe! A genuine and radical democracy that is simultaneously post-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal.

  1. De-commodification is a priority, even an unrenounceable imperative. We produce and use commodities, but neither we nor others are commodities, nor is nature. That is why our relationship with others and with nature must be fraternal-soral and eco-human, not mercantile. Human beings are citizens rather than consumers and entrepreneurs. Not everything is for sale, not everything can be bought and sold. There are public and common goods that cannot be commodified or marketed: nature, water, health, culture, and education.

  2. Decolonizing is another urgent task of the left. This means to eradicate from social relations all forms of domination based on the dialectic of superiority-inferiority of certain human beings: women, blacks, indigenous people, etc. The task of decolonisation especially concerns Europe, the centre of modern colonialism. Its superiority complex in all areas: religious, cultural, political, scientific-technical, epistemological, etc., led it to believe that it had a mission to colonise the world and made it incapable of discovering the values of other, non-European cultures. If Europe wants to reconcile with the world and with itself, its decolonisation is necessary, decisive and urgent.

  3. There is a disjunction, which Boaventura describes as disturbing, between the Latin American and European lefts. The European left seems to agree on the need for growth as a response to the pathologies suffered by Europe, as a solution to the problem of unemployment and as an improvement in the living conditions of those whose lives are most threatened. The Latin American left debates the development and growth model and, in particular, extractivism. There are two positions: the one in favour as a means to reduce poverty, and the one against neo-extractivism as the most recent phase of colonialism. For Boaventura, neo-extractivism constitutes the most direct continuity of historical colonialism, as it involves: the expulsion of peasants and indigenous people from their lands and territories (denial of the right to territory); the multiple and unpunished assassination of social leaders at the hands of hitmen hired by businessmen; the expansion of the agricultural frontier without taking any environmental responsibility; poisoning of peasant populations by aerial spraying of herbicides and insecticides.

  4. The left must build a power alternative, and not just an alternation in power. Left politics must simultaneously and jointly be anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, counter-hegemonic, anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal and anti-homophobic.

  5. The plurality of the left is a value to be promoted and defended, but fragmentation must be avoided. It is therefore necessary to recognise difference as a right, but to try to maximise convergences and minimise divergences.

  6. Progressive or left-wing parties and governments have relatively often abandoned the defence of the most basic human rights in the name of development. Boaventura looks at the world through the eyes of Blimunda in Saramago's novel Memorial of the Convent, who saw in the dark, and finds that: most human beings are not subjects of human rights, but objects of human rights discourses; there is much unjust human suffering that is not considered a human rights violation; the defence of human rights is invoked to justify the invasion of countries, the plundering of their wealth and the deaths of innocent victims as collateral effects.

Because of these situations, he asks: "Is the primacy of the language of human rights the product of a historical victory or a historical defeat? Is the invocation of human rights an effective tool in the struggle against the indignity to which so many social groups are subjected, or is it instead an obstacle that de-radicalises and trivialises the oppression to which indignity translates and softens the bad conscience of the oppressors?

The best synthesis of the fourteen letters is the affirmation that the choice of the left is not between the politics of the possible and the politics of the impossible, but "in knowing how to be always to the left of the possible.

Reformulation of Marx's Thesis 11 on Feuerbach

In 1845, a year after the -Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts-, Karl Marx wrote the famous -Theses on Feuerbach, which can be seen as the first formulation of his intention to construct a materialist philosophy centred on transformative praxis, in a radically different direction from the then dominant philosophy, which had Ludwig Feuerbach as its primary representative. In the eleventh thesis, undoubtedly the best known and most quoted of all, he states: "Philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways, but it is a question of *transforming it". When he speaks of "philosophers" he is referring to the people who produce scholarly knowledge, which today would include all humanistic and scientific knowledge considered fundamental as opposed to applied knowledge.

Throughout his work Boaventura highlights the three main modes of modern domination: class (capitalism), race (racism) and gender (patriarchy), which act in articulation and whose articulation varies with the social, historical and cultural context. Subsequently, he has drawn attention to the fact that this mode of domination is rooted in the society/nature duality, without the overcoming of which no liberation struggle will achieve its goal.

In this scenario, he rephrases thesis 11 as follows: "Philosophers, social scientists and humanists must collaborate with all those who struggle against domination in order to create ways of understanding the world that make possible practices of world transformation that liberate the human and non-human worlds together".

Non-westernist Western thinker

In one of his contributions in Epistemologies of the South. Perspectives, entitled "Beyond abysmal thinking: from global lines to an ecology of knowledge", Boaventura analyses "non-Westernist" Western thought exemplified in the philosophy of Luciano de Samosata, the learned ignorance of Nicholas of Cusa and Pascal's wager.

Perhaps two other "non-Westernist" Western thinkers could be included: Bloch and Benjamin. I spoke about both of them in the lectures I was invited to give at the Boaventura de Sousa Santos Chair at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra in 2015. Ernst Bloch elaborates a utopian philosophy that has its basis in hope, considered as a principle (Prinzip Hoffnung) and fundamental determination of objective reality in its totality, and in the ontology of -not-yet-being (Noch-Nicht-Sein), which understands reality as a process.

It is precisely Boaventura's sociology of emergencies that offers a concept of reality that is fully in tune with Bloch's conception in that it does not reduce it to the factual, to the given once and for all, to the immutable, but understands it as the processual, the imagined, the emergent, that which has not yet appeared, that which is to come. Boaventura agrees with Bloch that if theory does not coincide with the facts, so much the worse for the facts. The epistemologies of the South do not only move on the plane of logos, but also of imagination and myth.

Walter Benjamin is critical of the philosophy of history of the European Enlightenment and its idea of progress, uncritically assumed by social democracy, which is also questioned by the Frankfurt School philosopher. Michael Löwy defines him as "a revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, a Marxist adversary of 'progressivism', a nostalgic for the past who dreams of the future, a romantic supporter of materialism".

Benjamin's theses on the concept of history, written in 1940, a few months before his death, constitute the best synthesis of his philosophical thought and are, in Michael Löwy's expression, a 'fire warning'. 1 Of particular note is Thesis 9 on Klee's painting Angelus Novus, which serves as the title of one of Boaventura's books (The Fall of the Angelus Novus) and as inspiration for the elaboration of a new theory of history which, in Boaventura's own words, "allows us to rethink social emancipation from the past, in some way, with a view to the future."

Boaventura de Sousa Santos himself should be added to the list of authors cited as non-Western thinkers. All that has been said so far about his intellectual profile confirms this.

World social forums

Santos is one of the creators and main inspirers of the World Social Forum (WSF), as well as a member of its International Committee. His book, Foro Social Mundial. Manual de uso (Icaria & Antrazyt, Barcelona, 2005) is a living chronicle of the history of the WSF, which is undoubtedly the strongest manifestation of resistance to neoliberal globalisation and which the author defines as "subaltern cosmopolitan politics."

The forums are not limited to being just an "idea factory"; from the outset they have become "proposal machines." For the future, he proposes to move from realistic utopias to credibly formulated alternatives with a high degree of concretisation. Bloch's idea of moving from abstract utopia to concrete utopia resonates here. The political strength of the WSF and its member movements depends on this.

The epistemology of the WSF is constructed through two processes that the author defines as "sociology of absences and sociology of emergencies", to which I referred earlier, in clear contrast to the hegemonic social sciences and to the epistemology of neoliberal globalisation, which is dominated by scientific-technical knowledge and discredits all rival knowledge.

I conclude this intellectual profile with the assessment of Boaventura de Sousa Santos by the Puerto Rican decolonial sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel, to which I subscribe: "The work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos constitutes a fundamental contribution to the decolonisation of the social sciences. His work is an example of a decolonial theory produced in Europe in critical dialogue with the thinking of the Global South. On the basis of Santos' work, there is no justification for arguing that it is not possible for a thinker from the Global North to think alongside and with the Global South."

Notes

1 Cf. Michael Löwy, Walter Benjamin: fire warning. Una lectura de las tesis 'Sobre el concepto de historia', Fundo de Cultura Económica, Buenos Aires-México, 2013.