There are books that aim to correct a historical fact, and others that seek to alter the entire map upon which that history has been drawn. Tawíscara. The Hijacking of Democracy (2026), by Professor Jorge Majfud, undoubtedly belongs to the second category. With a boldness rarely seen in contemporary essay writing, the work does not settle for questioning a couple of clichés about the origin of modern institutions; rather, it argues that the entire narrative of Western civilization rests on a carefully silenced intellectual appropriation. Liberal democracy, Majfud asserts, is not the direct heir to classical Athens, but rather the result of a long process of translation, filtering, and, ultimately, the hijacking of political forms developed over centuries by various indigenous American nations, with the Iroquois Confederacy at the forefront.
This extraordinarily ambitious and controversial thesis makes the volume one of the most provocative contributions to recent Latin American thought. Majfud avoids the rigidity of the conventional academic monograph. Although the book exceeds five hundred pages and boasts an impressive bibliography, its true structure is that of a long-form philosophical essay, where anthropology, political theory, literature, and autobiography engage in constant dialogue. The result is less reminiscent of a university treatise than of a work of intellectual history written with the enviable narrative freedom of a novelist.
From the outset, the argument is organized around a central concept: Tawíscara, a figure from the Iroquois tradition who embodies the impostor capable of stealing identities, speaking with others’ voices, and replacing reality with a convincing copy. Far from being a literary embellishment, Tawíscara symbolizes the mechanism by which the West transformed a communal and relational democratic tradition into a model compatible with private property, imperialism, and capitalism. Modern political history would, in this light, be the chronicle of that supplanting of faces.
The choice of this myth is effective because it prevents the book from devolving into a chronological dispute over who first invented democracy. The issue is not temporal priority, but cultural appropriation. The “hijacking” alluded to in the title does not consist of denying Greece’s contribution, but rather of demonstrating how the encounter with markedly egalitarian American societies forced Europe to rethink its own categories, even though it later ended up claiming authorship of those discoveries.
The core of the essay traces a clear historical sequence. First, Europeans encountered communities in the Americas whose organization contradicted the assumptions of feudal and absolutist Europe: societies with a lower concentration of wealth, federative structures, collective deliberation, and notable female autonomy. These practical experiences fueled the imagination of the Enlightenment through chroniclers and philosophers. However, when those ideas returned to the Americas transformed into European liberalism, they did so profoundly altered to serve an order based precisely on what they had originally questioned: private property as an absolute right and capitalist expansion. Majfud does not present this influence as a marginal curiosity, but as a true intellectual “meteorite” that diverted the course of modernity.
One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in bringing to light figures and stories normally relegated to the footnotes of official history. Thus, Thomas More ceases to be merely the Renaissance humanist and becomes an avid reader of the earliest American chronicles; Rousseau appears less as the idyllic inventor of the “noble savage” than as the heir to a debate that had been ongoing for two centuries; and Benjamin Franklin is revealed as a keen observer of Iroquois institutions.
John Locke bears the brunt of this revisionism. For Majfud, liberalism did not invent freedom, but rather redefined its meaning in order to constrain it. Whereas indigenous societies conceived of freedom as inseparable from community and relative material equality, Locke subordinated it to the right to property. This conceptual reversal would explain the glaring contradictions of liberal democracies, which are capable of proclaiming universal rights while simultaneously legitimizing slavery, colonialism, and extreme accumulation. For the author, capitalism and democracy are not parallel processes but incompatible projects; capitalism has survived precisely by appropriating the language of its adversaries to neutralize their subversive potential.
At this point, Tawíscara moves beyond historical reconstruction to become a scathing critique of the present. Contemporary liberal democracy is described as an institutional fossil that preserves democratic vocabulary while progressively losing its social content under the weight of corporate power. The value of the work, however, extends beyond the political; it is also a brilliant reflection on how knowledge is constructed. Majfud insists that dominant ideas survive because they determine which stories deserve to be told and which must remain invisible, proposing a methodological compass that divides thought into dominant, colonized, and demonized ideas.
Although the author aligns with recent trends in global history—it is impossible not to think of David Graeber’s anthropology or Karl Polanyi’s economics—he goes much further by positioning Indigenous influence as the organizing axis of Western modernity. This interpretive breadth constitutes the book’s greatest strength and, at the same time, its main vulnerability. From a strictly historiographical standpoint, some connections are more convincing than others. While there is abundant evidence of Iroquois influence on American constitutional debates, when that premise becomes the overarching explanation for the origin of modern democracy, the argument requires a degree of caution that the essay sometimes sacrifices in favor of narrative power.
Even so, this observation does not invalidate the central thesis. Majfud is fully aware that he is proposing a revisionist reading on a massive scale and makes no secret of the controversial nature of his assertions. This intellectual honesty is enhanced by prose that pulses with energy, seamlessly alternating between philosophical analysis, irony, and the vigor of a political manifesto—a natural flow that at times recalls Eduardo Galeano or Noam Chomsky at his most eloquent.
There is an extremely evocative metatextual detail in the book’s introduction: Majfud recounts a discussion with a student who used an AI-generated summary to refute one of his texts. From there, the author reflects on how algorithms tend to replicate the narratives of power and simplify uncomfortable thinking. The irony provides a perfect conclusion: a book that denounces the hijacking of democracy begins by also denouncing the hijacking of knowledge.
Perhaps therein lies the true unity of Tawíscara. The book demonstrates that power not only steals institutions, but also steals words, turning freedom into property and criticism into a commodity. In the end, Majfud reopens questions that intellectual history had deemed resolved and revives the nearly forgotten tradition of the great civilizational essay, ready to connect five centuries of history to remind us that modern democracy was not born where we learned to look for it, but where we were taught to look away.
Tremenese. UC.
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