The Civil Sphere in Latin America

Description

Social thinkers have criticized Latin American development as incomplete, backward, and anti-modern. This volume demonstrates that, while often deeply compromised and fragmented, Latin American civil spheres have remained resilient, institutionally and culturally, generating new oppositional movements, independent journalism, rebellious intellectuals, electoral power, and critical political parties. In widely different arenas, dissidents have employed the coruscating language of the civil sphere to pollute their oppressors in the name of justice. In the 1970s and 1980s, political thinkers heralded the resurrection of Latin American civil society, envisioning a new world of freedom and stability. Corruption, inequality, racism, and exclusion become pressing and urgent 'social problems', not despite the promises of democracy, but because of them. The premise of this volume is that Latin American civil spheres are powerful, even as they are compromised, creating challenges to anti-civil culture and institutions that trigger social reform. It is the first of three volumes that place civil sphere theory in a global context.

Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University, Connecticut, is the author of twenty books and editor of twenty-five more. He is one of the creators of contemporary cultural sociology, founder and director of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, and co-editor of The American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Carlo Tognato is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He is the author of Central Bank Independence: Cultural Codes and Symbolic Performances (2012) and editor of Cultural Agents Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus (2018).

'To conclude, The Civil Sphere in Latin America approaches the right questions in order to produce a theory of Latin America's civil sphere. It also approaches the right cases, showing the tension between a civil sphere and political, patrimonial, economic and public security dimensions in Latin America.' Leonardo Avritzer, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology