A Cosmic Deception: Indigenous Democracy and the Hijacking of the Western Political Tradition

Table of Contents

Abstract

The historiographical paradigm of the Western Enlightenment has long positioned Euro-American intellectual traditions as the exclusive crucible of modern democratic theory. From the Athenian polis to the constitutional debates of Philadelphia and Paris, the canonical narrative asserts a linear trajectory of political progress generated entirely within Western Europe and its Atlantic outposts. In Tawiscara: The Hijacking of Democracy (2026), Uruguayan-American scholar Jorge Majfud destabilizes this Eurocentric consensus by presenting a comprehensive revisionist theory of political philosophy, political economy, and transcultural intellectual history.

Majfud contends that the structural foundations of modern radical democracy—defined by absolute social equity, horizontal consensus, anti-concentrated property dynamics, gender parity, and secular governance—did not originate in classical antiquity or Enlightenment salons, but were directly catalysed by the living sociopolitical systems of Native American nations, most notably the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy.

The argument makes Tawiscara considerably more than a revisionist account of Indigenous influence on the American political tradition. Its deeper concern is epistemological: who receives credit for political ideas, whose political institutions are recognized as theory, and how dominant societies transform oppositional ideas into legitimizing myths. The book’s concept of the “hijacking” therefore describes a recurring historical process rather than a single event. Democratic, feminist, socialist, and anti-imperialist ideas repeatedly emerge as challenges to established power and are subsequently absorbed, neutralized, or redefined. The book’s most original contribution lies in connecting the history of Indigenous political organization to this broader theory of ideological appropriation.

At the same time, Tawiscara raises methodological questions concerning the distinction between influence, cultural transmission, analogy, and historical causation. Its strongest arguments arise when it demonstrates encounters, intellectual circulation, and structural contradictions; its more vulnerable moments occur when broad historical relationships are presented with greater certainty than the available evidence may warrant. Nevertheless, the book offers a provocative reinterpretation of democracy as an unfinished struggle over political memory, material power, and the meaning of freedom itself.

Introduction

The history of democracy has traditionally been told as a story of recovery. Ancient Greece provides the first great example; Rome contributes republican institutions and legal traditions; the Renaissance rediscoveries classical political thought; the Enlightenment subjects inherited authority to rational criticism; and the American and French Revolutions translate philosophical principles into modern political institutions. The subsequent history of democracy becomes a long, incomplete process of expansion: the extension of citizenship, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor rights, civil rights, and universal political participation.

Jorge Majfud’s Tawiscara: The Hijacking of Democracy asks the reader to reconsider this narrative from its foundations.

The book does not merely argue that Indigenous peoples possessed sophisticated forms of government before European colonization. Its more consequential proposition is that Indigenous political experience became part of the intellectual environment from which European modernity developed. The chronicles of missionaries, explorers, diplomats, and travelers carried descriptions of societies that did not fit comfortably within prevailing European assumptions about monarchy, private property, social hierarchy, gender, religion, and political authority. These descriptions, Majfud argues, became a kind of intellectual disturbance—a “counter-narrative”—that contributed to the development of Enlightenment ideas.

The book’s table of contents reveals the breadth of this undertaking. It moves from “Myths, Dogmas, and Counter-Narratives” and “A Meteorite Called Democracy” through “The Birth of Capitalism and the Hijacking of Its Counterculture,” “The Invention of Western Democracy,” “Roman Law: Freedom Is the Right to Private Property,” “The Global Impact of the Northern Indigenous Peoples,” and “The Spirit of the Enlightenment in the Native World.” Later sections examine the American Revolution, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, feminism, imperialism, labor movements, nationalism, internationalism, neoliberalism, and the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy.

The book’s title provides the conceptual key to the entire project. In the opening narrative, Tawiscara is presented as a figure of deception, impersonation, division, and selfish appropriation. He assumes identities that do not belong to him, deceives others, and uses language to manipulate them. The metaphor is subsequently transferred from mythology to politics. A political idea can be similarly appropriated: its vocabulary can be retained while its meaning is altered; its origin can be obscured while its authority is preserved; and an idea developed in opposition to domination can ultimately be transformed into an instrument of domination.

This is the sense in which democracy is “hijacked.”

The central thesis of Tawiscara posits that nascent European capitalism, encountering these radical egalitarian societies in the “New World,” underwent an existential dialectical crisis. In response, Western power structures performed a profound ideological heist: they absorbed the revolutionary counter-narrative of Indigenous liberty, stripped it of its communal and anti-accumulative economic foundations, and reframed it as “liberal democracy”—a system engineered specifically to protect private property, legalize wage servitude, and perpetuate imperial expansionism.

Through the titular allegory of Tawiscara—the flint-hearted Iroquois twin deity who deceives through mimicry, steals faces, and spreads cold destruction—Majfud conceptualises liberal capitalism as a cosmic impostor. The book demonstrates how the genuine, participatory democracy of Turtle Island was murdered and its visage stolen by a system that sanctified property over human life.

The argument is therefore not simply that the modern West misunderstood Indigenous societies. Majfud’s stronger claim is that Western political modernity learned from those societies while simultaneously denying, minimizing, or appropriating the source of that knowledge.

The resulting historical paradox is at the center of the book. Modern liberal democracies speak in the language of liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty, yet the societies that most consistently institutionalized certain forms of communal property, political participation, gender authority, and collective responsibility were frequently represented by European colonizers as “savages.” Meanwhile, the political societies that dispossessed those peoples increasingly described themselves as the representatives of civilization, freedom, and progress.

Tawiscara is an attempt to reverse that historical mirror.

1. Philosophical Framework: The Metaphysical Space, Semantic Hijacking, and Tawiscara

To dissect this historical appropriation, Majfud deploys a sophisticated linguistic and philosophical framework rooted in the mechanics of discourse and ideology. Building upon his theoretical precursor, La narración de lo invisible (2021), Majfud argues that historical struggle is fought not merely within material infrastructure, but across an invisible metaphysical space where signs, ideolexemes, and semantic fields are conquered and administered.

Within this semiotic architecture, every linguistic unit operates under the operational tension of two fields:

Positive Semantic Field (+): The explicit assertion, denotation, or aspirational value of a term (e.g., Freedom, Democracy, Equality).

Negative Semantic Field (-): The boundaries of negation, exclusion, and structural containment that define what the term explicitly rejects.

Ideological hegemony is achieved when the ruling class successfully manipulates the negative semantic field to restrict the scope of the positive semantic field. In the context of political theory, the ideolexeme Freedom was structurally re-engineered by Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke. Under Locke’s formulation, the positive assertion of Freedom was made entirely dependent upon a negative boundary that excluded communal land tenure and defined liberty strictly as the protection of private property, capital accumulation, and territorial enclosure.

This semiotic manipulation mirrors the Iroquois mythological cycle of the twin creator spirits: Oki (Ioskeha), the restorer who builds through communal solidarity, and Tawiscara (Flint), the impatient, deceitful twin born from his mother’s side, causing her death. Tawiscara steals faces, mimics the voices of loved ones, hides useful resources in dark caves for exclusive private use, and creates violent currents and deserts.

Majfud demonstrates that Western liberal democracy is the institutional incarnation of Tawiscara. It adopted the external voice and vocabulary of Indigenous countercultures—speaking of liberty, popular sovereignty, and rights—while concealing a heart of cold flint dedicated to dispossession, racial hierarchy, and imperial warfare.

The concept of hijacking is more sophisticated than it initially appears.

A hijacking does not necessarily destroy the object being seized. It preserves it sufficiently to make use of it. This distinction is fundamental to Majfud’s argument. The history of modern democracy, in his interpretation, is not a simple story of democracy being eliminated by authoritarianism. Rather, democratic language survives while the social and economic content associated with it is transformed.

The same process, he argues, can be observed in relation to freedom, feminism, socialism, anti-imperialism, and other emancipatory movements. The concept therefore functions at three levels. First, there is political appropriation: political institutions or practices are adopted selectively by another society.

Second, there is ideological appropriation: the vocabulary of an oppositional movement is incorporated into the discourse of the dominant order.

Third, there is historical appropriation: the origin of the idea is forgotten, displaced, or reassigned. This third dimension is perhaps the most important.

If the history of democracy is written as though its fundamental ideas originated exclusively in Europe, then Indigenous peoples appear as the objects of European observation rather than as historical agents. If, on the other hand, Indigenous political institutions are treated as part of the intellectual environment of the Enlightenment, the conventional genealogy changes dramatically.

Majfud consequently makes historical memory itself a political question. The question is not merely who governed democratically, but also who was allowed to be remembered as having governed democratically.

2. Epistemic Genealogies: The Indigenous Roots of the European Enlightenment

A major contribution of Tawiscara is its detailed mapping of the textual and intellectual corridors through which Native American sociopolitical organization disrupted and reconfigured European thought. Grounding his historical analysis in 17th- and 18th-century primary sources, Majfud outlines a three-stage transcultural transmission process:

Stage 1: The Empirical Shockwave (1600s–1700s)

Through the extensive publication of the Jesuit Relations (Relations des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle-France), as well as the travelogues of Samuel de Champlain, Gabriel Sagard, and Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, European intellectuals were confronted with detailed accounts of societies operating entirely without monarchs, police forces, prisons, or private land accumulation.

Chronicles documenting the Haudenosaunee and Wendat (Huron) nations revealed political systems where leaders (sagamores or sachems) possessed no coercive authority, held no material privileges, and governed strictly through persuasive dialectic and consensus-building.

Stage 2: Synthesis into the European Counter-Narrative (1700s)

These empirical accounts catalyzed a profound crisis of legitimacy within European feudalism and absolutism. European philosophers utilized the Indigenous worldview as a critical mirror to expose the barbarism of European religious fanaticism, class tyranny, and physical filth.

Majfud traces how works such as Lahontan’s Dialogues avec un Sauvage (1703)—featuring the Huron intellectual Adario—directly inspired Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755) and The Social Contract (1762). The fundamental Enlightenment concepts of the “state of nature,” natural equality, and social critique were not abstract European inventions, but direct adaptations of Native American political discourse.

Stage 3: Suppression and Discursive Erasure

When these radical ideas were adapted by the architects of Anglo-American constitutionalism, a deliberate process of filtering occurred. The Euro-American elite excised the anti-property, matrilineal, and direct-democratic components of the Indigenous model.

To legitimate their new oligarchic structures, they retreated to classical antiquity, claiming Athens and Rome as their sole intellectual ancestors while systematically erasing their living Indigenous inspirations.

3. Structural Contrasts: Real Indigenous Democracy vs Capitalist Liberalism

Majfud establishes a stark comparative topology contrasting authentic Indigenous political economy with the liberal capitalist model that replaced it.

Land Tenure and Property Mechanics

In the Haudenosaunee framework, land was held in common stewardship; property existed only in terms of direct personal use value. There was no legal mechanism for enclosure or speculative accumulation.

Under Lockeian liberalism, freedom was conflated with the absolute right to privatize communal land, transform nature into abstract exchange value, and commodify human labor.

Political Architecture and Authority

Real democracy functioned horizontally through local councils and confederated assemblies. Leaders possessed no police apparatus or standing armies to enforce compliance. Obedience was voluntarily granted only if a leader’s arguments were persuasive.

In contrast, Anglo-American constitutionalism, as articulated in James Madison’s Federalist No. 10, explicitly rejected direct democracy, designing a republican system structured to protect the minority of the opulent against the propertyless majority.

Gender Structures and Matriarchy

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy operated on matrilineal and matriarchal lines. Clan Mothers held ultimate veto power over military actions, nominated and deposed male sachems, and controlled agricultural distribution.

European liberalism imposed a rigid, imported patriarchy that legally disenfranchised women, erased non-binary (“two-spirit”) gender identities, and stripped female citizens of property and political agency.

Coercion and Justice

Indigenous justice systems were non-punitive and restorative, focusing on community reintegration and compensation for victims rather than incarceration. Liberal democracy created the carceral state, inaugurating the prison system (e.g., Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail in 1790) as an instrument of class coercion and racial control.

II. Tawiscara and the Epistemology of Political Power

The opening myth of Tawiscara is not decorative. It establishes the book’s epistemological framework.

The character is associated with imitation, false identity, deception, and the manipulation of language. The narrative emphasizes the sacred character of words and names and the danger of allowing deception to control human judgment.

Majfud then turns this mythology into a theory of political language. Political systems depend upon words: freedom, equality, democracy, civilization, progress, security, nation, property, sovereignty. These words do not possess permanent meanings. Their meanings are contested because controlling their definitions helps determine the boundaries of political legitimacy.

This is why the book repeatedly returns to the difference between a concept and its political use. Democracy may mean popular participation in one historical context and representative government in another. Freedom may mean communal autonomy or individual property rights. Equality may mean equality among citizens, equality among members of a class, or universal equality regardless of social status. Majfud’s larger claim is that these semantic transformations are not politically innocent. A ruling class can appropriate the language of an opposition movement without accepting the movement’s material demands.

This argument recalls Antonio Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, although Majfud does not simply reproduce Gramscian analysis. It also resembles the study of political language undertaken by historians of concepts. Yet Tawiscara adds an important colonial dimension: the struggle over meaning occurs not only between classes within Europe but also between European societies and the Indigenous societies they encounter.

The book consequently treats language as a historical battlefield as he explained in his 2005 thesis The narration of the invisible.

III. The Indigenous Counter-Narrative

The conceptual center of Tawiscara appears in the chapters devoted to the “counter-narrative.” Majfud proposes that European encounters with Indigenous America generated a profound intellectual contradiction. European societies were developing capitalism, private property, colonial expansion, social hierarchy, and imperial power. At the same time, European intellectuals encountered descriptions of societies organized according to substantially different principles. The contradiction was particularly sharp in relation to property. The European observer encountered societies in which land could be treated collectively rather than as a commodity owned exclusively by individuals. He encountered political systems without European-style monarchies, social relations that did not always reproduce European patriarchal norms, and forms of collective authority that did not fit easily into the European categories of monarchy, aristocracy, and centralized state power.

Majfud’s point is not that Europeans suddenly became Indigenous or abandoned their institutions. Rather, the encounter created what he calls a counter-narrative: an alternative image of social possibility. This explains the book’s emphasis on authors such as Thomas More, Montaigne, Rousseau, and later Marx and Engels. The Americas became a conceptual space in which Europeans could imagine alternatives to Europe.

The so-called “New World” was not simply a geographical discovery. It became an intellectual mirror through which Europe could see itself differently. This is a crucial point.

IV. The “Meteorite” of Democracy

Majfud’s metaphor of democracy as a “meteorite” is one of the book’s most revealing images. The metaphor suggests an external shock: democracy, in this interpretation, did not simply develop organically from European political evolution. Indigenous societies provided an intellectual shock that disrupted established European assumptions.

The author explicitly distinguishes between the invention of democratic concepts and the historical impact of Indigenous democratic societies. His argument is not that Indigenous peoples invented every political idea later associated with democracy. Rather, their societies provided a living historical example that challenged European assumptions and influenced later intellectual developments.

This distinction is important because it prevents the thesis from becoming a simple reversal of Eurocentrism. Majfud does not need to claim that Athens was irrelevant. He needs only to establish that Athens was not sufficient. The significance of the Indigenous example lies in its capacity to complicate the Western genealogy of democracy.

V. Equality: From Social Relationship to Legal Abstraction

One of the book’s deepest arguments concerns equality. Majfud contrasts what he sees as the radical character of Indigenous equality with the restricted equality characteristic of many European political systems.

In the classical European tradition, equality often meant equality among members of a recognized political class. Ancient Athens is the obvious example. Citizenship could coexist with slavery and the exclusion of women and foreigners. Majfud argues that this distinction remained significant in modern liberalism.

The Enlightenment universalized equality at the level of political principle, but the material foundations of society continued to permit enormous inequalities of wealth and power. The result was a paradox: citizens could become legally equal without becoming substantively equal. This distinction is central to the book’s critique of liberal democracy. Majfud is not satisfied with the proposition that modern liberalism abolished hereditary aristocracy. He asks what replaced it.

His answer is a new hierarchy organized increasingly around property, capital, and economic power. The old aristocracy did not simply disappear. In his interpretation, many of its functions were transferred into a new social order in which ownership rather than title became the principal source of power.

The argument is particularly visible in his discussion of Locke.

VI. Locke and the Transformation of Freedom

The chapter entitled “Locke: The Hijacking of Freedom” is one of the intellectual hinges of the book. The table of contents itself identifies the sequence: “Dialectics, Democracy, Plagiarism, and Oblivion”; “The Countercultural Factor”; “John Locke, a Liberal Nobleman Against Real Democracy”; “Greek Democracy and Indigenous Democracy”; and “The Unique Freedom of Private Property.”

Majfud reads Locke primarily through the question of property.

The crucial transformation occurs when freedom becomes closely associated with the protection of private possessions. In Locke’s political philosophy, life, liberty, and property become interconnected. Majfud interprets this not as an abstract philosophical development detached from material history but as an ideological articulation of an emerging social order. His reading is intentionally materialist.

The philosophical defense of private property cannot be separated from the historical transformation of communal land into privately controlled property. This becomes particularly important in relation to Indigenous land.

The colonial encounter produced an ideological problem: what happens when Europeans encounter peoples who do not organize land ownership according to European assumptions? One solution was to conclude that land not enclosed or “improved” according to European standards was effectively unused.

Majfud argues that Locke’s theory of property provided a powerful intellectual mechanism for converting this assumption into political legitimacy. The manuscript reproduces Locke’s reasoning concerning common possession, labor, and appropriation and places it in direct relationship to the colonial treatment of Indigenous land.

The book therefore connects three developments often studied separately: enclosure → private property → colonial appropriation. This connection is one of the book’s most consequential analytical moves.

VII. Capitalism and the Destruction of the Commons

Majfud’s critique of capitalism begins earlier than conventional histories that emphasize banking, finance, or industrialization. He locates the origins of capitalism in the transformation of communal land into private property. In the manuscript, enclosure is presented as the crucial mechanism through which land previously held in common becomes an object of exclusive ownership. The same logic is then extended beyond Europe through colonial expansion and the commodification of land and human labor.

This argument gives the book a coherent economic foundation. Capitalism is not defined simply as “having markets.” Markets existed long before capitalism. Instead, Majfud emphasizes a system in which property, accumulation, commodification, and concentrated economic power become structurally dominant. The distinction matters because it allows him to make a sharp comparison between Indigenous communal systems and capitalist individualism.

The issue is not whether Indigenous societies traded goods. The issue is whether the basic social organization of land and political authority rested upon private accumulation. Majfud’s answer is generally negative. The result is a profound contrast: communal property produces one conception of the human being while private property produces another. The first emphasizes collective autonomy and reciprocal obligations; the second emphasizes individual control over resources. The political consequences are enormous.

VIII. “Freedom” Against Itself

One of the most theoretically interesting passages in the book argues that unrestricted economic freedom ultimately destroys freedom itself. The reasoning is straightforward. If one individual accumulates somewhat more power than another, that economic difference can be converted into political power. Political power can then be converted back into additional economic advantage. The result is a cumulative process in which economic inequality generates political inequality, which in turn accelerates economic inequality.

This is one of the strongest theoretical propositions in Tawiscara. Majfud’s argument is not merely that inequality is morally undesirable. It is that inequality undermines the institutional conditions necessary for meaningful freedom.

The “free market” becomes paradoxical because unrestricted competition may eventually eliminate competition. Successful economic actors can purchase competitors, monopolize information, influence legislation, control media institutions, and transform wealth into political authority. Freedom thus becomes self-canceling: the richer individual acquires more freedom of action precisely because others have less. Majfud’s formulation returns the reader to the book’s central problem: Can a society be democratic if its citizens possess radically unequal capacities to exercise power?

4. Historical Trajectories of Dispossession and Co-optation

Majfud’s historical analysis traces how the confrontation between the expanding capitalist empire and the Indigenous continent unfolded across critical inflection points:

The Diplomatic Zenith: 1701 and La Grande Paix de Montréal. The signing of La Grande Paix de Montréal in 1701 represented a monumental victory for Indigenous diplomacy. Thirteen hundred representatives from forty Native nations negotiated a multilateral peace with France, forcing European powers to recognize Indigenous territorial sovereignty and monetary independence (the wampum economy).

The Material Drivers of 1776: The Real Estate Revolution. Majfud dispels the patriotic mythology surrounding the American Revolution, reframing it as a reactionary counter-rebellion by land speculators and slaveholders. Following the British Crown’s Royal Proclamation of 1763—which restricted colonial expansion west of the Appalachian Mountains to prevent further costly wars with Native nations—wealthy colonial elites (including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin) faced financial ruin due to their speculative investments in Indigenous lands.

IX. Indigenous Democracy and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is the principal historical case through which Majfud develops his alternative genealogy. The book describes the Confederacy as a longstanding political system based on collective decision-making, consensus, political responsibility, and forms of social organization substantially different from European monarchy and aristocracy. It emphasizes women’s political authority, communal relations, adoption, political councils, and the absence of European-style centralized coercive institutions.

One particularly important point is the relationship between gender and government. Majfud notes that leadership was not simply concentrated in male political elites. In his account, women possessed institutional authority in selecting chiefs and participating in political life. This is important because it destabilizes another conventional genealogy. Modern feminism is frequently presented as the product of European Enlightenment and nineteenth-century political movements. Majfud instead argues that Indigenous gender relations formed part of the intellectual environment through which European observers began to question their own social arrangements.

X. The American Revolution as a Historical Paradox

The book’s treatment of the American Revolution is perhaps its most provocative historical section. Majfud argues that the American Revolution cannot be understood solely as a struggle between American colonists and the British Crown. It must also be understood within the settler struggle over Indigenous land.

This interpretation fundamentally changes the meaning of “liberty.” The liberty sought by many colonists was real, but it did not necessarily include the liberty of Indigenous nations to retain their territories.

Thus two conceptions of freedom collided. The colonist claimed freedom from imperial control; the Indigenous nation claimed freedom from colonial encroachment. Both could use the language of liberty, but only one would ultimately control the state apparatus that enforced it.

Majfud uses this contradiction to challenge the conventional mythology of the Revolution. The manuscript emphasizes that white settlers violated existing agreements and moved into territories that British authorities had formally attempted to reserve for Indigenous peoples.

The famous revolutionary language therefore becomes inseparable from territorial expansion. This is one of the book’s most powerful historical insights: a revolution against empire can simultaneously become an instrument of settler colonialism. There is no logical contradiction in this proposition. Historical actors can be oppressed in one relationship and oppressive in another.

The Extinguishing of the Fire: 1777. Seven months after the US Declaration of Independence, in January 1777, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was forced to extinguish its central council fire at Onondaga. Divided by the proxy pressures of the Anglo-American war, the League of Peace was fractured. Tawiscara’s stolen-face democracy systematically eradicated the very culture that had inspired the ideal of human freedom.

XI. The Constitution and the Problem of Representation

Majfud’s criticism of the American constitutional order is particularly focused on representation. He contrasts the participatory and consensus-oriented model he attributes to the Haudenosaunee with a representative republic structured around institutional filters designed, in part, to restrain direct popular power.

The discussion of the Senate is especially revealing. Majfud interprets the Senate as evidence of the Founders’ distrust of direct democracy because each state receives equal representation regardless of population. The result, he argues, is a structural distinction between “the people” and the institutional mechanisms designed to govern them.

This argument places Tawiscara in conversation with a long tradition of criticism of American republicanism. But Majfud adds the Indigenous comparison.

The issue is not simply that the American Constitution was imperfectly democratic. It is that the political system may have taken certain structural elements from Indigenous federalism while excluding the more egalitarian social relations that gave those structures their meaning.

The result is what might be called institutional borrowing without social transplantation: the form survives while the substance disappears. This is perhaps the clearest example of the book’s concept of hijacking.

XII. The Founding Fathers and Selective Appropriation

Majfud’s treatment of Benjamin Franklin is particularly significant. Franklin’s interactions with Indigenous representatives provide evidence that American political leaders were familiar with Indigenous political organization. Majfud argues that Franklin’s knowledge was extensive but that the political system ultimately created by the Founders did not acknowledge Indigenous peoples as intellectual contributors.

Here the book makes a distinction between knowledge and recognition. A political elite can learn from another society without acknowledging that society as an intellectual source. This distinction is central to colonial epistemology. The colonized can become an invisible teacher. The colonizer becomes the credited author. The resulting historical narrative then reinforces the original power relationship: the dominant civilization appears to have produced the idea independently, while the subordinated civilization disappears from the genealogy.

The concept of plagiarism in the book should therefore be understood metaphorically as well as literally. Majfud is interested in the politics of attribution.

XIII. Rousseau and the European Image of the “Savage”

The discussion of Rousseau introduces another contradiction. European philosophers increasingly used the figure of the “natural man” or “noble savage” as a means of criticizing European civilization. Yet the actual Indigenous peoples who inspired these ideas were often treated as inferior by European political powers.

Majfud’s point is not that Rousseau simply copied Indigenous societies. Rather, European intellectuals used reports about Indigenous peoples to imagine alternatives to European hierarchy while often failing to acknowledge the political implications of those alternatives. This is one reason the concept of “counter-narrative” is more useful than the simpler concept of “influence.”

The Indigenous world functioned as a counter-image of Europe. Europe looked at America and saw a different possible social order. It could then either learn from that image or neutralize it. Majfud argues that both processes occurred.

XIV. The “Great Myth of Inequality”

The phrase “The Great Myth of Inequality” is another major conceptual marker in the manuscript. Majfud questions the assumption that hierarchy, private accumulation, and unequal political power are natural conditions of human society. The argument is anthropological before it becomes political.

If human societies have existed under different arrangements of property, gender, authority, and social hierarchy, then no particular arrangement can automatically be described as natural. The political significance is considerable. If inequality is treated as natural, political reform appears artificial. If inequality is understood historically, it becomes politically changeable.

Majfud therefore challenges naturalistic explanations of capitalism and hierarchy. The book’s discussion of individualism is particularly important in this respect. It argues that modern economic ideology gradually transforms individual freedom into an abstract principle detached from the material relationships that determine whether individuals actually possess meaningful choices. A person formally free to sell labor is not necessarily economically free. A citizen formally free to vote is not necessarily politically powerful. A society formally committed to equality is not necessarily socially equal. This distinction between formal and substantive freedom runs throughout the book.

XV. Marx and Indigenous Political Thought

The discussion of Marx is another major strength of the manuscript because it prevents the book from becoming a simple liberal critique. Majfud connects Indigenous political organization to the development of European socialist and communist thought. He points to the work of Lewis Henry Morgan and Marx and Engels’ interest in Indigenous social organization, demonstrating how ethnographic study of the Haudenosaunee influenced European socialist theory directly.

The manuscript also presents a striking anecdote involving Mohawk leader Tom Porter, who responded to a Marxist representative by insisting that Indigenous peoples did not need Marx’s descendants to tell them how to organize their own societies. This anecdote contains the central ambiguity of the entire book: Indigenous peoples may have influenced European radical thought, yet European intellectuals may subsequently have presented those ideas as purely European inventions. The direction of influence therefore becomes contested. Who is teaching whom? This question is fundamental to decolonial thought and to the book’s deeper argument about the politics of attribution.

Majfud’s argument suggests that the Indigenous contribution to European political thought—including its influence on Marxism and socialism—has often been overlooked because European intellectual history prefers to present these movements as developments internal to European philosophical evolution. The book therefore proposes a more transatlantic genealogy: one in which Indigenous political ideas are acknowledged as genuine contributors to the development of modern democratic, egalitarian, and radical thought.

XVI. Democracy and Feminism

The section on feminism extends the theoretical pattern established throughout the book. Majfud argues that feminist demands have often been incorporated into liberal capitalism without fundamentally transforming the material and political conditions that generate gender inequality. The language of liberation is adopted while the structural conditions that require liberation remain intact.

The discussion of Edward Bernays is particularly relevant here. Bernays, the founder of modern public relations, is credited with transforming cigarette smoking into a symbol of women’s liberation in the 1920s. Majfud uses this example to illustrate how a genuine demand for social equality can be redirected into a commercial strategy that serves corporate interests while appearing to advance emancipation.

Majfud therefore distinguishes between substantive feminism — which would require transforming property relations, political power, and social organization — and symbolic feminism, which incorporates feminist language into existing economic and cultural structures without changing them. A movement can be culturally successful and politically neutralized at the same time.

The distinction is essential to understanding the book’s larger theory.

XVII. Anti-Imperialism, Labor, and the Lost Radical Tradition

The later sections of Tawiscara broaden the argument beyond the specific case of the American Revolution to encompass American labor and anti-imperialist movements. The manuscript places figures such as Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, Mary Harris Jones, and the Industrial Workers of the World within a tradition connecting class struggle, anti-imperialism, feminism, and racial equality. This is important because Majfud does not portray democracy as simply “lost” after the eighteenth century. Instead, democratic countercurrents repeatedly reappear throughout Western history, generating movements that challenge corporate power, imperialism, racism, militarism, and class hierarchy.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generate a historical pattern that becomes central to Majfud’s theory: an egalitarian idea emerges and challenges the dominant structure; suppression proves insufficient, so the idea is appropriated or redefined; the new version is then presented as evidence of the system’s openness to reform. This is the historical mechanism of hijacking. Democracy may be culturally successful and politically neutralized at the same time. Democratic institutions may persist, elections may continue, and emancipatory language may circulate widely, yet the structural conditions that generate inequality and domination remain substantially unchanged.

XVIII. Nationalism versus Internationalism

The discussion of nationalism provides another dimension to Majfud’s theory. Nationalism can unite people across class divisions by giving them a common identity. Workers who might otherwise recognize their common economic interests with workers in other countries can instead identify with national elites during periods of war. Majfud sees this as a political mechanism through which class consciousness can be redirected toward national consciousness.

The distinction between internationalism and nationalism therefore becomes central to his interpretation of modern warfare. The argument also connects the book to Marxist traditions of internationalism.

Yet Majfud goes beyond conventional Marxist analysis by linking the problem of nationalism to the earlier Indigenous conception of political community. The Indigenous confederacy provides a model in which multiple nations can preserve political identity while participating in a larger political structure.

The Haudenosaunee model consequently becomes an alternative not only to monarchy but also to the European nation-state.

XIX. Democracy and Empire

Perhaps the book’s most persistent paradox is the coexistence of democracy and imperialism. Majfud argues that modern states repeatedly present military expansion as the defense of freedom. The contradiction is visible in the language itself: freedom requires war, democracy requires intervention, security requires domination, civilization requires conquest.

The political vocabulary reverses itself. The oppressed become threats; the conqueror becomes the defender. This is another form of Tawiscara: the mask changes, but the underlying structure remains. The manuscript explicitly describes the development of an ideology in which the “white race,” private entrepreneurs, and expansionists acquire a supposedly special right to dominate others while presenting themselves as defenders of freedom.

Here Majfud’s argument approaches the classic anti-imperialist tradition of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Edward Said, although his historical route is different.

XX. The Extinguishing of the Sacred Fire

One of the book’s most powerful literary-historical moments is its account of the extinguishing of the Haudenosaunee sacred fire. The fire represents institutional continuity. Its extinction represents the destruction of a political civilization. The juxtaposition therefore forces the reader to reconsider what is meant by “founding.” The United States has a founding date — but so did the Indigenous confederacy. The question is whose founding receives historical recognition and whose receives the status of disappearance.

Majfud places this symbolic event alongside the emergence of the United States as a new political power. The juxtaposition creates an extraordinary historical irony: the formal birth of a modern republic coincides with the destruction of an older Indigenous political order. This is one of the strongest literary devices in the book because it compresses the entire thesis into one historical image.

XXI. The Psychology of Desocialization

Another important but less obvious theme is the psychological dimension of political organization. The book argues that modern capitalism does not simply redistribute material resources. It changes how individuals understand themselves. The transition from communal forms of organization to increasingly individualized economic life produces what Majfud calls desocialization.

The individual begins to understand freedom as independence from others rather than as participation with others. This distinction has enormous implications. A person who sees society as a collection of competing individuals is more likely to interpret collective obligations as limitations on freedom. A person who understands freedom through communal responsibility may see social cooperation as the condition of freedom.

Thus two entirely different political philosophies can emerge from different conceptions of the human subject. The Indigenous example becomes important precisely because it provides an alternative anthropology. The individual is not first an isolated economic actor. The individual exists through relationships.

XXII. The Contemporary Crisis

The final sections bring the argument into the twenty-first century. The book identifies contemporary liberal democracy as suffering from a crisis that is simultaneously economic, political, ideological, and epistemological. The concluding architecture includes discussions of globalism, nationalism, internationalism, poverty, universal basic income, the “anti-Enlightenment,” and contemporary electoral politics.

This is where the metaphor of hijacking becomes fully contemporary. Modern democracy has not disappeared: elections continue, constitutions continue, political parties continue. Yet the concentration of wealth and media power can increasingly separate formal political equality from actual political influence. The problem becomes especially acute when technology is integrated into political communication.

The book’s opening justification is deliberately ironic: Majfud describes a student using an AI-generated summary to challenge an argument in one of Majfud’s own books, without knowing that Majfud had written the book from which the AI-derived argument originated. The anecdote is funny, but it also introduces a serious epistemological problem. Artificial intelligence can reproduce information without necessarily understanding the historical context in which that information was produced.

XXIII. The Book’s Most Original Contribution: A Theory of Intellectual Expropriation

The deepest contribution of Tawiscara is not simply its argument about Indigenous influence. It is the concept of intellectual expropriation. Colonialism is normally understood as the seizure of land, resources, labor, and political sovereignty. Majfud adds another category: the seizure of ideas. The process operates through a recognizable sequence.

First, the dominant society encounters an alternative social system. Second, it represents that system through its own categories. Third, it extracts concepts that are useful. Fourth, it modifies those concepts to fit existing power relations. Fifth, it suppresses or minimizes the original source. Finally, it presents the transformed concept as its own achievement.

This theory can explain why liberalism could adopt equality while maintaining property inequality; why democracy could coexist with slavery; why feminism could become advertising; why anti-imperial rhetoric could coexist with empire; and why capitalism could present itself as the defender of freedom. The concept of hijacking therefore operates as a general theory of ideological transformation.

XXIV. Critical Evaluation: The Problem of Historical Causation

A serious academic reading of Tawiscara must also identify its methodological vulnerabilities. The most important is the distinction between influence and resemblance.

It is entirely plausible that European observers encountered Indigenous political systems and that these encounters influenced European political imagination. The manuscript contains extensive material concerning missionaries, explorers, diplomatic exchanges, Indigenous delegations, and intellectual works through which information circulated. But influence is difficult to demonstrate.

A similarity between two political institutions does not necessarily establish borrowing. Nor does the fact that an intellectual knew about Indigenous societies prove that a particular idea originated there.

The strongest version of the thesis therefore requires distinguishing between direct borrowing, indirect intellectual influence, cultural analogy, independent development, and shared historical conditions.

At several points, Majfud acknowledges this problem himself. For example, when discussing Matilda Gage’s use of George Bancroft regarding Iroquois influence, the manuscript explicitly concedes that Gage’s citation is not precise. That admission is important because it demonstrates that the author is aware of the difference between evidence and interpretation. This does not invalidate the thesis.

Nevertheless, some passages move quickly from evidence of contact to broad claims about intellectual causation. A more conventional academic monograph would probably distinguish these levels more systematically.

It means that its strongest form — “Indigenous democracy directly produced modern Western democracy” — is harder to sustain than a more measured formulation: Indigenous political societies constituted a significant part of the intellectual environment in which modern democratic theory developed. That formulation is both more defensible and, arguably, more interesting.

XXV. The Risk of Reversing Eurocentrism

A second methodological problem concerns the possibility of replacing one historical hierarchy with its mirror image. If European historians have traditionally exaggerated European originality, it does not follow that every important Western political concept must have originated in Indigenous America.

The book is at its best when it avoids replacing European exceptionalism with Indigenous exceptionalism. Its strongest argument is comparative rather than celebratory. Indigenous societies were neither perfect nor static. European societies were neither uniformly oppressive nor intellectually isolated. History is more complicated.

The value of the Indigenous comparison lies precisely in demonstrating that human societies have experimented with different solutions to common political problems.

XXVI. The Book as a Challenge to the Political Theory Canon

Traditional political theory courses begin with Plato and Aristotle and proceed through Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Marx, and later liberal and critical theorists. Tawiscara ultimately challenges the canon of political philosophy itself.

This raises a fundamental question: What would political theory look like if it took Indigenous political thought seriously as a genuine intellectual tradition rather than as ethnographic background? Majfud’s book does not fully answer this question, but it asks it with unusual force. This is perhaps the most intellectually productive aspect of the manuscript.

XXVII. Tawiscara and Decolonial Thought

The book belongs to the broader intellectual movement often described as decolonial or postcolonial thought, but it is not reducible to either category. Like Edward Said, Majfud is concerned with representation and the political production of knowledge. Like Frantz Fanon, he examines the psychological consequences of colonial domination. Like Enrique Dussel, he questions the Eurocentric construction of modernity. Like Walter Mignolo, he is concerned with the relationship between colonial power and epistemology. Like Achille Mbembe, he examines the persistence of colonial structures within supposedly postcolonial political orders.

Yet Majfud’s distinctive intervention is historical. He asks not merely whether modernity was colonial. He asks whether modernity may have learned from the peoples it subsequently colonized. This reverses the direction of the standard colonial narrative. The colonized is no longer merely the object upon which modernity acts. The colonized becomes one of the historical sources from which modernity itself emerged.

The colonized is no longer merely the object upon which modernity acts. The colonized becomes one of the historical sources from which modernity itself emerged.

XXVIII. Democracy as an Unfinished Historical Project

The final significance of Tawiscara lies in its refusal to treat democracy as a completed achievement. Democracy is not something a society possesses merely because it conducts elections. It is a relationship between political equality and actual power.

If economic inequality becomes sufficiently extreme, political equality may become largely formal. If media ownership becomes concentrated, freedom of information becomes compromised. If political campaigns depend heavily on private wealth, electoral sovereignty becomes vulnerable. If historical narratives exclude entire civilizations from the genealogy of political thought, intellectual democracy is weakened. If the language of emancipation is repeatedly transformed into a marketing strategy, cultural liberation becomes detached from material transformation. Majfud therefore proposes, implicitly, a much more demanding definition of democracy. Democracy requires not merely the right to vote but meaningful participation in the determination of the conditions under which people live. It requires political equality, but also the economic conditions that make such equality substantive. It requires freedom, but freedom understood as collective self-determination, not merely individual non-interference. It requires institutions that remain accountable to the populations they govern. And it requires memory: without historical memory, democracy can be hijacked—persuaded, again and again, that its enemies are its friends.

Modern Implications: Neo-Feudalism, Technocratic Autocracy, and the Crisis of Post-Capitalism

In the final sections and epilogues of Tawiscara, Majfud bridges his historical revisionism with a critique of contemporary 21st-century global order. He argues that the historical compromise between capitalism and liberal democracy has reached its terminal phase. As profit margins compress and ecological limits are breached, the ruling elite is discarding the pretense of liberal democracy altogether, openly embracing the “Dark Enlightenment”—a hyper-technocratic, neo-feudal paradigm promoted by Silicon Valley oligarchs and corporate monopolies.

The Dark Enlightenment and Corporate Monarchy. Majfud documents how contemporary tech-monopolists explicitly advocate for replacing “inefficient” democratic institutions with corporate monarchies modeled after tech firms. This movement represents an unabashed return to medieval feudalism, where algorithmically enforced surveillance replaces legal citizenship and populations are managed as disposable labor.

The Cult of Efficiency and Anti-Empathy. Analyzing statements by modern billionaire figures, Majfud highlights a rising aristocratic narrative that explicitly demonizes human empathy as a “civilizational weakness”. This ideological pivot mirrors the historical psychopathologies of past colonial elites, serving to legitimize state-sanctioned cruelty, austerity, and austerity-driven dispossession.

The Post-Capitalist Imperative

Majfud concludes that humanity faces an existential crossroads. The modern crises of climate collapse, obscene wealth inequality, and nuclear militarism are the direct products of a capitalist system predicated on infinite growth and dispossession. No reform within liberal democracy can resolve these contradictions, as liberal democracy was engineered specifically to protect the capital accumulation that causes them. The only viable post-capitalist future lies in recovering the core principles of the Indigenous counter-narrative: the abolition of speculative private property over survival necessities, the restoration of communal stewardship and ecological balance, the re-establishment of direct, participatory consensus politics, and the absolute commitment to social, racial, and gender equity.

One of the book’s central arguments is that there can be no genuine democracy without a balance of power—a condition that is impossible under capitalism when economic inequality is radical, astronomical, and continually growing.

Jorge Majfud’s Tawiscara: The Hijacking of Democracy stands as a monumental work of historical critique and political philosophy. By exposing how the stolen face of Indigenous democracy was placed upon the apparatus of capitalist enclosure, Majfud provides scholars with the conceptual tools needed to deconstruct modern political mythology. The book reminds us that the struggle for human liberation does not require inventing untested utopias out of abstract theory, but rather recovering the historical truths of Turtle Island that were suppressed by the cold, flint-hearted spirit of Tawiscara.

Conclusion

Jorge Majfud’s Tawiscara: The Hijacking of Democracy is best understood as an extended argument about the relationship between democracy, historical memory, colonialism, property, and power. Its central thesis is deceptively simple: the modern Western understanding of democracy did not emerge from an exclusively European intellectual tradition. Indigenous political societies, especially the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, formed part of the historical environment in which European thinkers confronted alternative forms of political organization. The resulting encounter helped generate a counter-narrative concerning equality, freedom, communal property, political participation, gender, and social responsibility. But the book’s real argument begins after this historical encounter. The counter-narrative was transformed. Ideas that challenged hierarchy could be converted into doctrines compatible with hierarchy. Freedom could become property. Equality could become equality before the law without economic equality. Democracy could become representative government without substantive popular sovereignty. Feminism could become a commodity. Anti-imperialism could become nationalism. Socialism could be demonized and then partially absorbed. Even the memory of Indigenous political institutions could be incorporated while the peoples who created them were dispossessed.

This is the meaning of the hijacking. The genius of the metaphor is that the stolen object remains recognizable. Democracy does not disappear. It continues to speak. It continues to organize elections. It continues to celebrate freedom. It continues to invoke equality. But its political trajectory can be redirected. The deepest contribution of the book is therefore epistemological rather than merely historical. Tawiscara asks who gets to be remembered as an author of political ideas. It challenges the assumption that written European philosophy is the only legitimate archive of political thought. It asks readers to regard Indigenous political organization not as primitive custom but as a form of political theory embodied in institutions, memory, diplomacy, social relations, and collective practices.

The book’s most provocative claim—that Indigenous political experience was a major catalyst for the European counter-narrative that eventually became associated with the Enlightenment—should be approached critically, especially where the evidence for direct intellectual transmission remains difficult to establish. The distinction between influence and resemblance must remain central to serious scholarship. Yet even where particular causal claims require qualification, the larger historical intervention remains powerful.

The conventional history of democracy has been too comfortable with a linear genealogy. Tawiscara replaces that genealogy with a conflict.

On one side stands a political order increasingly organized around private property, accumulation, empire, hierarchy, and individualism. On the other stands a heterogeneous collection of political traditions in which communal property, consensus, reciprocal responsibility, collective memory, and broader forms of participation could be organized differently. The historical significance lies not in declaring one civilization wholly good and another wholly bad. It lies in recognizing that modernity was produced through encounters, conflicts, appropriations, and exclusions.

The West did not simply invent itself. It encountered others, learned from them, transformed what it learned, and then, in many cases, forgot where that learning came from. That is why the figure of Tawiscara is so effective. The impostor does not merely destroy. He imitates. He takes another’s face. He speaks with another’s voice. He divides those who might otherwise recognize one another. A democracy can be made to speak in the voice of those who control it. The political metaphor is unmistakable.

And the ultimate challenge posed by Tawiscara is consequently not simply to recover an Indigenous contribution to the history of democracy. It is to recover democracy itself from the historical forces that have repeatedly appropriated its name. The task of historical criticism is to recover the voices that disappeared behind the mask.

Bibliographic Framework

The manuscript’s own bibliography places the argument in dialogue with a wide range of primary and secondary works, including John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Thomas More, Amerigo Vespucci, Theodore Roosevelt, Howard Zinn, Bruce Johansen, Darrin McMahon, the Jesuit Relations, and works on Indigenous political history.

Particularly important for understanding the intellectual architecture of Tawiscara are, as listed in the book (notes and documents not included here):

Basic Bibliography of Tawiscara

Ackerman, Kenneth D. Trotsky in New York, 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution*. United States: Counterpoint, 2016.

Alfonso X the Wise. The Seven Books. Selection, prefaces, and notes by Francisco López Estrada and María López García-Berdoy. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1992.

Amerigo Vespucci. The New World. Letters Concerning His Voyages and Discoveries. Texts in Italian, Spanish, and English. Introductory study by Roberto Levillier. Buenos Aires: Nova, 1951.

Blackhawk, Ned. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2023.

Bregman, Rutger. *Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World*. United Kingdom: Little, Brown, 2017.

Father Paul Le Jeune. *The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791; the Original French, Latin, and Italian Texts, with English Translations and Notes*. France, Sébastien Cramoisy, rue St. Jacques, 1634.

Gankin, Olga Hess, and Fisher, Harold Henry. *The Bolsheviks and the World War: The Origin of the Third International*. United Kingdom, Stanford University Press, 1940.

Gibbons, James. Our Christian Heritage. United Kingdom, John Murphy, 1889.

Graeber, David, and Wengrow, David. *The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity*. United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Guevara, Ernesto. Complete Works. [4 volumes] Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Plata, 1967.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America. United Kingdom, WW Norton, 2022.

Hanlon, Joseph, et al. Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South. United Kingdom, Kumarian Press, 2010.

Herthzler, Joyce Oramel. The History of Utopian Thought. [1922] New York: Cooper Square Publisher, 1965.

Jesuits, Jesuits. *The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents*, Vol. 33: *Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791*. United States, FB&C Limited, 2015.

Johansen, Bruce Elliott. *Debating Democracy: Native American Legacy of Freedom*. United States, Clear Light Publishers, 1998.

Locke, John. The First & Second Treatises of Government. United Kingdom, Pantianos Classics, 2016.

McMahon, Darrin M. Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea. United States, Basic Books, 2023.

Majfud, Jorge. The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Imperialism in Latin America. Rebelde Editores, 2021.

Majfud, Jorge. Flies in the Web: A History of the Commercialization of Existence and Its Means. Humanus, 2023. Flies in the Web: Anglo-Saxon Capitalism and American Post-Capitalism. University of Valencia Press (PUV), 2025.

Majfud, Jorge. “The Socialist Origin of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance: An Ideolexic Analysis.” 2013, pp. 193–96.

Marik, Soma. Reinterrogating the Classical Marxist Discourses of Revolutionary Democracy. India: Aakar Books, 2008.

Marx, Karl. On America and the Civil War. The Karl Marx Library, Volume VI. Edited and translated by Saul K. Padover. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1972.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. United Kingdom, Appleton & Company, 1889.

More, Thomas, Sir, Saint. Utopia. [1516] “Utopia” and the History of Edward V / by Sir Thomas More. With Roper’s Life. Edited by Maurice Adams. London: W. Scott, 1890.

Nation Iroquoise: A Seventeenth-century Ethnography of the Iroquois. United Kingdom, University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Page, Jake. In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians. Tantor Free Press, 2024.

Roosevelt, Theodore. American Ideals and Other Essays. United Kingdom: Knickerbocker Press, 1907.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men. Madrid: Printed by José del Collado, 1822.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions. London: Penguin Books, 1953.

Vespucci, Amerigo. The New World. Letters Concerning His Voyages and Discoveries. [1502] Texts in Italian, Spanish, and English. Introductory study by Roberto Levillier. Buenos Aires: Nova, 1951.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. United States, HarperCollins, 2015.