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

During the first years of Argentina´sdemocratic transition, an intense intellectual debate took place in the journalon politics and culture ?Punto de Vista?. Important left-wing intellectualsstarted there a critical revision of projects of revolutionary socialtransformation that had predominated in the Argentine left-wing thought of the´60 and ´70. On the one hand, they considered it necessary to identify thetheoretical aspects of these projects that contributed to the failure of theattempts to bring them into practice.  Atthe same time, they wanted to establish a link between socialism (or whateverwould remain of it, after the critical revision) and a category which becamecentral in the new context and has been dismissed until then as an invention ofcapitalist and bourgeois ideology: democracy. The purpose of the paper is toexplore this debate focusing on a concept which expresses theoretical tensionsand unresolved questions: the concept of citizen. In contrast to the radicalismof the sixties and seventies, the figure of the committed citizen appeared tothe intellectuals of Punto de vista as a promising starting point for thereconceptualization of political agency.Taking this in to account, the paper presentstwo hypotheses. First, it will intend to demonstrate in which extent theconceptualization of ?the figure of the committed citizen? in Punto de vistawas indebted  to European theories  concerning social movements. These movementsemerged in the 1960s as an auspicious phenomenon of the European and Americanpolitical scene and gave rise to a new way of conceiving political agency. Itwill be shown that certain traits of this phenomena, as it were understood andtheorized by many Europeans thinkers, were recovered by the intellectuals ofPunto de vista for the criticism of several aspects of local Marxist andleft-wing peronist theories. Among others: avant-gardism or personalism,authoritarianism, a certain conception of violence, ?movementism? and a toonarrow conception of political subjects. Second, the paper analyses oneimportant limit of this creative task of conceptual revision and criticism.According to our second hypothesis, the new theoretical perspectives of Puntode Vista displaced "the social question?, which was detrimental to thereach of their perspectives. For, neglecting ?the social question? theynecessary dismissed the way in which political actors in Argentina hadhistorically configured their practices and identities. Thus, the revision oflocal revolutionary traditions was done at a high price: the impossibility ofidentifying the concrete political actors capable of satisfying the high theoreticalexpectations deposited in the figure of the citizen. The result was that thefigure of the citizen, around which much of the intellectual creativity of thisdebate was deployed, became a hope and at the same time a place which remainedas a vacant position.