Decolonial philosophy and the historical-sociological blindness of the theories of modernity: a new way to Latin-American philosophy

The paper argues on the Latin-American philosophy as a decolonial praxis which unveils and overcomes the historical-sociological blindness of the theories of modernity (such as Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas). This historical-sociological blindness is characterized (a) by the separation between European culture and the modern Realpolitik of the colonialism as non-dependent and non-mutually-supported moments, and (b) by the reconstruction of the process of constitution of the European modernity as an endogenous, self-referential and basically internal movement of evolution, ignoring again its correlation and profound linking with colonialism. The paper argues that the critical and emancipatory role of the modernity’s normative paradigm only is possible by that historical-sociological blindness. So, the Latin-American philosophy, the moment it denounces and unveils the historical-sociological blindness of the theories of modernity, points directly to the self-restraint of the modernity’s normative paradigm as the basic theoretical-political agenda and praxis for a decolonial philosophy, as condition also to the correction of the modernity itself. Contrarily to Habermas, who defends the renewal of the modernity’s normative paradigm as a non-fundamentalist epistemological-moral universalism, the decolonial philosophy will show that the historical-sociological blindness only can be resolved from the self-restraint of the modernity and from an anti-colonial politics based on the reparation for colonialism as a critical-normative concept for theoretical analysis and political praxis regarding modernity-modernization as a totalizing epistemological-cultural-societal movement towards colonialism.