Manual de Historia de las Ideas Políticas, Tomo V / OTRAS VOCES

This fifth volume of the Manual on the History of Political Ideas from the Faculty of Finance, Government, and International Relations at the Externado University of Colombia is titled "Other Voices" and concludes the collection; the previous volumes were on the classics, the relationship between politics and religion, and Marxism and democracy. This book reviews the ideas of thinkers as diverse as the Chinese Confucius (551-779 BC), the Arab-Spanish Averroes (1126-1198), the American Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), the Cuban José Martí (1853-1895), the German Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), the Frenchman Albert Camus (1913-1960), the Bengali/British Amartya Sen (1933), and the Italian Giorgio Agamben (1942), led by professors Enrique Ferrer, María Paulina Gómez, Magda Catalina Jiménez, and Héctor Rojas. These eight authors bear no clear relationship to each other or to the previous volumes, but all are relatively original and unorthodox, which explains the title of the volume.

The contexts of these thinkers' work were very different. Confucius shaped the religious beliefs of ancient China and much of the Eastern world. Averroes, a Cordoban Aristotelian and Muslim, enriched medieval political philosophy in the times of fellow Aristotelians Avicenna and Saint Thomas Aquinas. In his essay "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau called for resistance to unjust laws, such as slavery and the war with Mexico, influencing figures such as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, among others. Martí, a Cuban poet and national martyr, led the island's independence revolution; he wrote memorable pages for Latin American political history, such as the essay "Our America," and is the fundamental hero of Castroism and anti-Castroism in his country. Schmitt was one of the most important ideologues of Nazism at the time, a renowned defender of states of exception. Camus was born in Algeria, founded French existentialism during the Second World War and the postwar period, along with his compatriot Jean-Paul Sartre, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature for titles such as The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Rebel. Sen, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, is one of today's most important development theorists. Finally, Agamben, author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, is one of the proponents of Foucault's concept of biopolitics and one of the greatest critics of states of exception.