Exploring Existentialist Democracy as Alternative Ethics for Human Sustainable Development in Africa

Abstract

The challenge of reconciling private and public interests is a major concern for scholars, formulators and managers of development policies and implementations. This challenge has attracted a great deal of attention in classical philosophical and political discourses. Marxism presented the development of class-consciousness in terms of the relationship between the individual and his or her group. Classical liberalism represented the growing intellectual and political forces against all social and political systems that impeded the release of energies and passions of the individuals. However, this paper observes that these classical theories may be inadequate in their analyses and prescriptions as guides for the understanding of group-individual relationship. Therefore, the paper proposes existentialist democracy as an alternative theory leading to a new paradigm for development in Africa.