The Rebellion of the Victims and the Slow Invention of the Secular State

To better understand section four in the first chapter of Política de la liberaición: Historia mundial y crítica, entitled “The rebellion of the victims and the slow invention of the secular State”, we must note that, for Enrique Dussel, history is a constructive, progressive movement, which can be categorized into four stages: 1) The Egyptian-Mesopotamian (from the IV millennium BC), 2) the Indo-European (from the II millennium BC), 3) the Asian-Afro-Mediterranean (from the IV century AD) and 4) the world-system (from 1492 AD). In this section of the first chapter, Dussel introduces us to the third stage, which is made up of a) the regions of Persia and of the Turán-Tarim, and later the Muslim world (from the 7th century AD), as the center of commercial connections; b) India, as a productive center; c) China, as the extreme east; d) Bantu Africa, as the extreme southwest; e) the Byzantine-Russian world, as the Occidental extreme and f) Western Europe, as the western extreme. In this paper, I pay particular attention to how the third stage differs from the second; thus, the transformations that occur in stage III will denote, not only the limits of stage II, but will also demonstrate the constructive-progressive movement of history.