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Abstract: This paper deals with the philosophical aspects of modernity and democratic change in Africa with a focus on Ethiopia. The traditional or religious nature of Ethiopia's political and economic system has posed a serious challenge to modernization. In addition, the contemporary experiment with ethnic politics and tribalism has exacerbated the problem. The country's continued existence has been endangered because of its repeated failures at modernization. I therefore argue that one of the major challenges to democracy and modernization in Ethiopia is the inability to transcend ascriptive, primordialist, and tribalist criteria of political membership.
Keywords: ethnophilosophy, Ethiopian nationalism, ethnic nationalism, modernity, professional philosophy, pragmatic politics
Introduction
Contemporary political philosophy has been concerned with liberty, equality, and fraternity as the three basic ideals of the modern democratic age. Regardless of differences in their methodology, the great political ideologies of the past three centuries, such as liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, offered their respective visions of the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity (Kymlicka 208). Values such as liberty, equality and fraternity are modern values with a universal appeal. Andreas Eshete (1) states that "historical self-consciousness", or the capacity to think retroactively about the past to compare it with our own time, is the conspicuous mark of modernity. Eshete seems to indicate the considerable agreement among Western scholars that the West is the birthplace of modernity regardless of its exact date of birth (Eshete 1). However, the idea that the West is the birthplace of modernity is disputed by contemporary scholars (see Taiwo; Dussel). Eshete (1-2) argues that even though there are several historical phenomena associated with the advent of modernity, the attempt to single out a specific phenomenon is disputable. He claims that the attempt to trace the origins of modernity risks a category mistake because periods are not facts but conceptual tools, which we use to understand the past retroactively to frame our imagination. However, periodization may lead to errors in historical thought because it may lead to factual errors about the exact time when important things happened (Eshete 1-2). Eshete (2) argues that there is no binding "explanation of human progress."
Western thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, and Weber proposed sophisticated explanations of human progress. Marx argued that "constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance...