Citizenship and Social Movements in Argentine´s Democratic Transition. On a Debate in the Magazine Punto de Vista (1983-1987)

ARESE, LAURA

Braga

Congreso; III Braga Colloquium in the History of Moral and Political Philosophy; 2018

Universidade de Minho

[Una versión española de este trabajo fue presentada en el Simposio Ciudadanía y Emancipación, donde fue publicada en un libro que reúne los trabajos de dicho evento, ver ítem correspondiente]. During the first years of Argentina´s democratic transition, an intense intellectual debate took place in the journal on politics and culture ?Punto de Vista?. Important left-wing intellectuals started there a critical revision of projects of revolutionary social transformation that had predominated in the Argentine left-wing thought of the ´60 and ´70. On the one hand, they considered it necessary to identify the theoretical aspects of these projects that contributed to the failure of the attempts to bring them into practice. At the same time, they wanted to establish a link between socialism (or whatever would remain of it, after the critical revision) and a category which became central in the new context and has been dismissed until then as an invention of capitalist and bourgeois ideology: democracy. The purpose of the paper is to explore this debate focusing on a concept which expresses theoretical tensions and unresolved questions: the concept of citizen. In contrast to the radicalism of the sixties and seventies, the figure of the committed citizen appeared to the intellectuals of Punto de vista as a promising starting point for the reconceptualization of political agency.