À contre-courant du progrès : une esquisse de la pensée de Christopher Lasch

En retraçant le parcours intellectuel de l’historien, moraliste et critique américain Christopher Lasch, ce mémoire vise à mettre en exergue la pertinence et les subtilités de sa pensée politique. Sur la base d’une analyse de ses principaux textes, nous démontrerons, qu’au-delà du pessimisme et du catastrophisme qui lui sont généralement attribués, Lasch porte un regard fécond sur la singularité de l’époque contemporaine. Nous soutiendrons que ses critiques acerbes sur la société et l’individu sont faites, avant tout, dans le but de remédier aux carences morales et sociétales qui auraient engendré un certain idéal libéral progressiste. Selon Lasch, le déploiement continu et illimité de cet idéal est en dissonance avec le caractère essentiellement contingent et conflictuel de la condition humaine. Parallèlement, nous présenterons les incidences psychiques qui se traduisent par une « culture du narcissisme » suscitée notamment par diverses composantes de la société contemporaine. À travers une relecture de la condition humaine, Lasch préconise un correctif idéologique qui est axé sur les notions de limites et d’espoir et qui se trouve au sein de la tradition agraire populiste américaine du 19e siècle. Nous démontrerons ainsi comment ce retour en arrière est entamé dans le but de susciter un renouveau politique et identitaire au sein de la société. L’étude se conclura par une discussion sur la plausibilité de l’idéal populiste, tel que l’entend Lasch, à l’ère du 21e siècle.

Making the Men of Tomorrow: American Science Fiction and the Politics of Masculinity, 1965 – 1974

Suggesting that the political diversity of American science fiction during the 1960s and early 1970s constitutes a response to the dominance of social liberalism throughout the 1940s and 1950s, I argue in Making the Men of Tomorrow that the development of new hegemonic masculinities in science fiction is a consequence of political speculation. Focusing on four representative and influential texts from the 1960s and early 1970s, Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, this thesis explores the relationship between different conceptions of hegemonic masculinity and three separate but related political ideologies: the social ethic, market libertarianism, and socialist libertarianism. In the first two chapters in which I discuss Dick’s novels, I argue that Dick interrogates organizational masculinity as part of a larger project that suggests the inevitable infeasibility of both the social ethic and its predecessor, social liberalism. In the next chapter, I shift my attention to Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as a way of showing how, unlike Dick, other authors of the 1960s and early 1970s sought to move beyond social liberalism by imagining how new political ideologies, in this case market libertarianism, might change the way men see themselves. Having demonstrated how the libertarian potential of Heinlein’s novel is ultimately undermined by its insistent and uncompromising biological determinism, I then discuss how Le Guin’s The Dispossessed uses the socialist libertarianism of the moon Anarres to suggest a more egalitarian form of masculinity, one that makes possible, to some extent at least, a future in which men might embrace not only the mutual aid of socialism, but also the primacy of individual rights that is at the heart of all forms of libertarianism and liberalism.

Retro-Neoliberalism: Elite Counter-Protest in Latin America, 1940-1975

This research challenges the origin story of neoliberalism in Latin America. Drawing on archival data from the Mont Pèlerin Society and the personal archives of leading but neglected figures in the post-war push to rebuild economic liberalism, I present a historical geography of elite counter-protest that both predates and broadens the generally accepted “birth” of neoliberalism in 1970s Chile. Beginning in the 1940s, Latin American elites found common cause with key figures from economic liberalism’s most radical wing: the Austrian School. While existing literature links the onset of neoliberalism in Chile to the Austrian School, particularly with respect to the School’s influence on the early Mont Pèlerin Society, this dissertation is the first comprehensive inquiry to place the Austrian tradition in the ideational and organizational landscape of Latin America. Embracing a new mission that promised to save the soul of Western civilization, Latin America’s retro-neoliberal leaders collaborated with transnational actors to build a network of Austrian-inspired think-tanks and institutes of higher learning in the region. These organizations, in turn, served as recruiting mechanisms to found the Hispanic quarter of the Mont Pèlerin Society, which was dominated not (as might be assumed) by Chileans, but rather by retro-neoliberal elites from Mexico, Argentina, Guatemala, and Venezuela. By 1975, when scholars began analyzing how a run-of-the-mill economics department had been transformed into a bastion of free-market thinking in Chile, an entire neoliberal university was up and running in Guatemala, exposing all students, regardless of discipline, to the Austrian tradition – the crowning achievement of Latin America’s retro-neoliberal network. Investigating, and accounting for, the development and impact of this initiative sheds new light on the neoliberal landscape in Latin America, and raises important questions for the study of neoliberalism more broadly.

Through Eurocentric logics : The construction of difference in foreign news discourse on Venezuela

This study aims to explore the construction of difference in foreign news discourse on culturally similar but politically different non-Western subjects. Applying critical discourse analysis (CDA) together with a critique of Eurocentrism, the study examines difference in newspaper constructions of government supporters and oppositional groups in Venezuela. Discursive differences are evident in the strategies used for constructing the two groups with regard to political rationality and violence. Government supporters are associated with social justice, Venezuela’s poor, dogmatic behavior, and the use of political violence. The opposition, in contrast, is constructed as following a Western democratic rationale that stresses anti-authoritarianism. This group is primarily associated with victims of violence. While the opposition is conveyed as being compatible with Eurocentric values and practices, government supporters to great extent deviate from these norms. Such constructions serve to legitimize politico-ideological undercurrents of Eurocentrism, as the defense of liberalism.

Sustainability or climate change? An ecocritical analysis of Ian McEwan’s Solar :

This essay is an ecocritical literary analysis of the novel Solar. The aim is to investigate the effect on the reader of the main characters, place, symbols and satire with focus on climate change and sustainability. The protagonist Michael Beard, a despicable, selfish antihero, consumes everything and everybody whereas Tom Aldous, the heroic character, is devoted to a life of sustainability. Beard represents the greedy capitalistic Western consumer society and its male leaders who close their eyes to the warnings of a changing climate, and Aldous represents the sustainable and alternative lifestyle. Humor and ridicule exhibits the weaknesses and greed of mankind in a satirical way. Symbols like cancer and the Co2 emitting transport system symbolize overconsumption and a stressed globe. The effect on the reader is a reflection about the ongoing struggle between climate change and sustainability and the demand for a change towards a sustainable lifestyle.

Australian multicultural policy: social cohesion through a political conception of autonomy

This article provides an account of the governance discourses informing Australia’s multicultural policy history. The article problematises the liberal ideologies informing these discourses – as essentialising the cultural identity of minority groups within exclusionary values about what constitutes the common good. Highlighting the ongoing imperative of questioning current frames for understanding and approaching multiculturalism, the article strengthens existing research that calls for alternative models that support a political conception of autonomy. The key argument is that social cohesion, unity and solidarity can be engendered through this conception where a situationally defined, rather than essentialised, view of culture enables recognition and legitimising of a proliferation of voices and versions of national identity and the common good.

Japan and the liberal global-order project: a time to stop and stare

Authority and sovereignty disappeared in the West long ago, when power absorbed them both. The effects of this artifice have become particularly noticeable since the fall of the “bipolar” system. The post-political strategy pursued by universalized liberalism has indeed voided local government through an emphasis on global governance, in so endorsing the substitution of politics with administration. This paper argues that Japan is not affected by this totalizing phenomenon notwithstanding the official transplanting of libero-juridical policies and doctrines within its polity. Through a neorealist contextualization of the Japanese “authority-power” dichotomy and comparison between Western and Japanese “output” schemes of legitimation and accountability that will transcend the boundaries of purely cultural or socio-legal accounts, I contend that the reason why Japan is not part of the liberal scheme is that it is politically governed rather than managerially administered.

Richard Yates: re-writing postwar American culture

This thesis explores the fiction of American author Richard Yates to propose that his work provides an insistent questioning and alternative vision of postwar American culture. Such an approach is informed by a revisionist account of four distinct yet interconnected areas of postwar culture: the role of the non-heroic soldier stepping in and out of World War II; suburbanisation and fashioning of anti-suburban performance; demarcation of gender roles and unraveling of sexual conservatism in the 1950s; consideration of what constituted the normative within postwar discourse and representations of mental illness in Yates’ work. These four spheres of interest form the backbone to this study in its combined aim of reclaiming Yates’ fiction in line with a more progressive historical framework while shaping a new critical appreciation of his fiction. Such analysis will be primed by an opening discussion that illustrates how Yates’ fiction has frequently been ensconced in a limited interpretative lens: an approach, that I argue, has kept Yates on the periphery of the canon and ultimately resulted in the neglect of an author who provided a rich, progressive and historically significant dialogue of postwar American life. This PhD arrives at a point when Yatesian scholarship is finally gaining momentum after the cumulative impact of a comprehensive biography, a faithful film adaptation of his seminal text Revolutionary Road (1961), plus the recent re-issue of his catalogue of work. An assessment as to why he remained on the margins of success for the duration of his career is therefore of pressing interest in light of this recent critical and commercial recognition.

Para una crítica de la educación democrática

El propósito central de este trabajo consiste en hacer un análisis crítico de la idea de educación democrática. Como hilo conductor se discute la tesis desarrollada por Amy Gutmann, según la cual, la educación democrática tiene como fin garantizar la reproducción consciente de la sociedad. En este contexto, la tesis que se defiende afirma que la educación democrática exige, además de los principios de no represión y la no discriminación desarrollados por Gutmann, un principio de reconocimiento, que articule la orientación de las acciones educativas a fuentes de normatividad asociadas con una interpretación intersubjetivista de la autonomía, de manera que se puedan generar más elementos de juicio, sobre todo, aquellos incorporados en las dimensiones moral, ética, política, legal y social de la persona, al momento de proponer prácticas educativas encaminadas a la formación de una ciudadanía participativa y crítica. Para esto se propone una interpretación que integra las perspectivas deliberativa y agonal de la democracia, se defiende que la expresión clave del ejercicio de la ciudadanía democrática es la participación, que el ejercicio de la participación tiene por condición la realización de la autonomía personal, por lo cual, en la parte final se elabora una lectura intersubjetivista de la autonomía, a partir de los trabajos de Axel Honneth y Rainer Forst.

La educación democrática: El juego limpio como posibilidad en la escuela

En este texto procuro vincular el principio del deber del juego limpio (Duty of fair play) enunciado por John Rawls a la formación ciudadana. Considero que el juego limpio aporta elementos significativos a la construcción de ciudadanía, como la autonomía y el sentido de justicia. El desarrollo del trabajo se da a través de un recuento breve sobre la escuela y su vínculo con la formación ciudadana en el contexto colombiano. Seguido de esto se revisa la génesis del término competencia y posteriormente se expone de manera crítica el modelo de competencias ciudadanas implementado por el Ministerio de Educación Nacional de Colombia. Se concluye estableciendo una concordancia entre el juego limpio y la formación ciudadana, teniendo como marco las competencias ciudadanas.

Intención de emprendimiento y liderazgo en Colombia

La relación entre el liderazgo y emprendimiento es un tema de estudio y análisis relativamente nuevo. El término de liderazgo ha sido estudiado y enfocado a otras áreas de estudio, pero en cuanto a la relación existente con emprendimiento se presentan aún carencias conceptuales. A lo largo del presente estudio, se hace una revisión de la literatura la cual permite identificar y analizar estos conceptos y su relación en la última década en Colombia, consultando literatura comprendida en bases de datos en línea tales como, Redalyc, Scielo y Dialnet. En este documento, se destacan los atributos de un emprendedor y de un líder, igualmente se recogen los modelos de emprendimiento, las teorías de liderazgo, y los elementos que caracterizan cada concepto. Finalmente, se evidencia una dicotomía entre el líder y el emprendedor y se concluye que el liderazgo es una característica intrínseca del emprendimiento; sin embargo, el liderazgo no es por regla utilizado para emprender.

Ética y políticas de salud en Costa Rica

Este artículo se ocupa de examinar la articulación de conocimientos que llevaron a la construcción del modelo de Reforma del sector salud costarricense durante la década de los noventa, para comprender y develar la ética que subyace en la propuesta, lo cual es necesario también para mostrar que la distribución y asignación de recursos en la salud pública no es una cuestión lineal ni su comprensión simple. En las cuestiones teóricas que envuelven la discusión sobre la distribución de recursos en la Reforma se constata la existencia de concepciones éticas antagónicas: la utilitaria, la del mercado y la del liberalismo igualitario, las cuales presentan como pilar conceptual discursos distintos. Para que el Estado ni intervenga, ni regule, ni distribuya los bienes en la asignación de los servicios de salud, que deben estar sometidos a la lógica de la oferta y la demanda. Para una de las versiones del utilitarismo es importante la intervención de un Estado paternalista, que asegure un nivel mínimo de seguro obligatorio, con lo cual toda la sociedad contribuye en externalidades positivas, haciendo converger el interés personal que se supone orienta las motivaciones de los individuos, con el principio de maximización del bienestar colectivo que tanto les importa a los utilitaristas. La vertiente del liberalismo igualitario sostiene que el Estado debe intervenir empezando por mejorar las condiciones de salud de los grupos más vulnerables en un orden lexicográfico sin invisibilizarlos en criterios maximalistas. Por consiguiente, en este artículo se toma en cuenta como se ha dicho, las principales corrientes en el debate sanitario, mediante una investigación, teórico documental y oral, para lo cual se debió evidenciar en que medidas las discusiones sobre el objeto, Caja, mostraba grandes incoherencias sobre lo que se dice y lo que se hace.

El impacto del desarrollo del café en un territorio no cafetalero: Conformación del municipio de mozos de Colotenango en Guatemala, 1877-1947.

ResumenEste artículo analiza cómo un territorio mam en el marginal altiplano guatemalteco, Colotenango, se articuló en el siglo XIX con la economía liberal, como municipio de mozos para las fincas agroexportadoras de café ubicadas en la bocacosta. Siendo un territorio no apto para el cultivo del café, la política estatal de impulso de la economía vinculada a ese producto tuvo efectos devastadores para los municipios del altiplano indígena, como fue el caso de Colotenango. Especialmente, se explora el papel de la Municipalidad en el sistema agroexportador, sustrato de los permanentes conflictos jurisdiccionales que existen en la zona.AbstractThis article analyzes the way in which Colotenango, a mam territory in the impoverished Guatemalan highlands, became a part of the liberal economy in the nineteenth century by constituting a municipio de mozos for the coffee export plantations located in the coastal region. Since this land had traditionally been considered not apt for coffee-growing purposes, the governmental policy aimed at boosting the economy based on this product, had devastating effects on the municipalities of the indigenous highlands, such as the case of Colotenango. Particularly, this article delves into the role played by the Municipality in the agricultural export system, which became the essence of continuous jurisdictional conflicts in the region still present today.

La privatización de los baldíos nacionales en Costa Rica durante el siglo XIX: Legislación y procedimientos utilizados para su adjudicación

ResumenAnaliza los mecanismos creados a partir de la legislación vigente para la apropiación privada de los baldíos nacionales, entre 1821 y 1900. Enfatiza los criterios utilizados para legitimar la propiedad privada y el fomento agrícola, como eje del desarrollo económico nacional. Detecta manifestaciones del pensamiento liberal clásico y positivista desde principios del siglo XIX.AbstractIncludes a discussion of legal means of acquiring private ownership of government lands, from 1821 to 1900. Study stresses criteria used to legitimate property and promote agriculture as the key to national economic development. Identifies manifestations of classical and positivist liberalism since the early 19