Bolívar Echeverría


Bolívar Echeverría was a philosopher, economist and cultural critic, born in Ecuador and later nationalized Mexican. He was professor emeritus on the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Life and work

Echeverría studied in Germany and Mexico. He participated on the German student movement in the late 1960s, establishing friendship and long-lasting collaboration with its leaders, including Rudi Dutschke. In 1970, he started permanent residence in Mexico, where he lived as a translator, also continuing his studies on philosophy and economics. Later on, he developed a seminar on Marx's Das Kapital, which lasted six years and included intensive systematic readings of the book. Since then he became an academic of the Faculties of Philosophy and Economics on the UNAM, where he founded several magazines on culture and politics, such as Cuadernos Políticos ; Palos de la Crítica ; Economía Política and Ensayos . He was also part of the Editorial Board of magazines like Theoria ; and Contrahistorias. La otra mirada de Clío.
His investigations where mainly concerned on: the ontological problems of existentialism, especially in Sartre and Heidegger; Marxian critique of political economy, focusing on the contradiction between Use value and Exchange value; and a contemporary development of critical theory and the Frankfurt School, including cultural and historical phenomena of Latin America. From this standpoint, Echeverría formulated a rigorous critique of postmodernity, with which he developed his theory of capitalist modernity and the baroque ethos, a form of cultural resistance in Latin America. He also wrote extensively on the fundamental contradictions of modernity as a civilizatory process and explored the possibilities of what he called an alternative modernity, in other words, a non-capitalist modernity.
Echeverría received several awards for his work, including: Premio Universidad Nacional a la Docencia, Premio Pio Jaramillo Alvarado and Premio Libertador Simón Bolívar al Pensamiento Crítico.
He died in Mexico City on June 5, 2010, of a heart attack, as a result of several blood pressure complications.

Major works