At a glance

International Sociology
26(2) 266267
The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0268580910391014
iss.sagepub.com

In Memoriam Bolvar Echeverra

The important Mexican-Ecuadorian philosopher and social theorist Bolvar Echeverra,
professor of philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, died on 5
June 2010 in Mexico City. Born in Riobamba, Ecuador on 31 January 1941, he began
his reading of philosophical texts in 1958 with existentialists such as Unamuno, Sartre,
Camus and Heidegger. The 1959 Cuban revolution was an important political and
intellectual influence on his subsequent work. In 1961 he moved to Freiburg, Germany,
and shortly thereafter to West Berlin. In the pre-68 groups he was recognized and
esteemed as a third world-specialist, and made friends with the student leaders Bernd
Rabehl and Rudi Dutschke, visiting the latter regularly until shortly before his death in
Danish exile in 1979. In 1968, Echeverra wrote the introduction to the first Germanlanguage biography of Che Guevara.
From 1968 until his death, Echeverra lived in Mexico City, where he married twice.
From his first marriage to Professor Ingrid Weikert of UNAM (Universidad Nacional
Autnoma de Mxico), there is one son, Andreas (b. 1976); and, from his second, at the
beginning of the 1980s, to Professor Raquel Serur, also of that university, there are two
sons, Alberto (b. 1984) and Carlos (b. 1986).
In 1975, Echeverra was appointed professor of economics at UNAM, the largest and
most important university in Latin America, and in 1987, he was appointed professor of
philosophy in the Philosophy Faculty of that university, considered one of the best in the
world. From 1974 to 1990, he was a member of the board of the theoretical political and
social review Cuadernos Polticos. Bolvar Echeverra was awarded the prize Premio
Universidad Nacional 1997 (UNAM) in the section of Social Sciences and the Premio
Libertador Simn Bolvar al Pensamiento Crtico 2007, in acknowledgement of his book
Vuelta del siglo [Turn of the Century] (2006).
His philosophical and economic writings have two main argumentative and thematic
orientations: on the one hand, a critical, undogmatic and productive interpretation
of the works of Karl Marx and, on the other hand, the development of a materialist
theory of culture, in the widest sense of the word. He tried to introduce Marxs analysis
of the natural form of social reproduction, the importance of which has often been
underestimated, into theoretical and philosophical discussion, with the intention of
gradually demystifying bourgeois ideas about their own social reality. The philosophical
terms nature and culture are often only introduced as a substitute for those aspects
of current social reality which are not recognizable by the predominating ideology. By
contrast with most Marxist and critical authors, Echeverra does not come to the quick

Reviews: Economics and Social Embeddedness

267

conclusion that we had better not speak about culture and nature as aspects of social life.
Following Walter Benjamins dictum that discussion about tradition should not be left
without resistance in the hands of conservative and right-wing forces, Echeverra tried to
develop a materialistic theory of culture and natural social relations. Thus he developed
further central aspects of the critical theory of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Neumann,
Alfred Schmidt and in particular in the last years of his life Benjamin. He did it in a
way which is unique in a worldwide context.
The death of Bolvar Echeverra is a great loss, not only for the non-Eurocentric
development of critical theory in a Spanish-speaking political and intellectual context,
but also for the worldwide discussion about the possible conditions for the radical
transformation of social and economic structures of existing social relations and their
destructive tendencies.
Stefan Gandler
Universidad Autnoma Quertaro, Mexico