Abstract
In the society of risk, the acceleration and multiplication of political crises and the uncertainty produced by the effects of the democratic modernisation create hitherto unheard-of political gaps. Such gaps are successfully filled by actors of the civil society when it is necessary to take government responsibilities. Implicitly, it is possible to track authoritarian characteristics coming from the continuities of the Latin American political culture in which the elites appear with a renewed and predominant leadership role. In this way, the authoritarism, masqueraded as democratic, would not be originated in the deceptive theoretical separation of Estate and civil society, but in their enigmatic mutual understanding, in their battle to define governmentality. It is indeed a battle expressed in terms of over-representation of the elites and the gradual disappearance of the self-representation of the popular sectors.References
Beck, Ulrich (1998), La sociedad del riesgo. Hacia una nueva modernidad, Paidós, Barcelona.
Bobbio, Norberto (1989), Estado, gobierno y sociedad, Por una teoría general de la política, México, FCE.
Castro Leiva, Luis y Anthony Pagden (2001) “Civil society and the fate of modern republics of Latin America”, en Sudipata Kaviraj y Sunil Khilnani (eds.), Civil Society, History and Possibilities, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Foucault, Michel (1991 ), “La gubernamentalidad”, en Espacios de poder, Genealogía del poder núm. 6, Ed. de la Piqueta, Madrid.
Laclau, Ernesto (2000), La guerre des identités. Grammaire de l’émancipation, La Découverte, Paris.
Lefort, Claude (1981), L’invention démocratique, Paris, Fayard.
Lipset Seymour, Martin y Aldo Solari (1967), Elites in Latin America, Oxford University Press, New York.
O’Donnell, Guillermo (1988), “Accountability horizontal” en La Política, núm. 4, 1988, octubre, pp. 173-174.
El País Semanal (2003), “Rebelión en la calle: todo empezó en Porto Alegre, la sociedad mundial se organiza y toma las ciudades”, 16 de marzo 2003, España.