Possibilities of democracy
Main Article Content
Abstract
The text aims to be, as its title indicates, a contribution to the elucidation of the possibilities of democracy. With this purpose, it reviews a series of controversies present in the modern and contemporary political and democratic tradition, paying attention to the way in which they allow us to read current Chilean democracy. The objective of such a journey is to address some dimensions in which the tension between possibility and impossibility is expressed, or more precisely, between real democracy and possible democracy. The dimensions mentioned are: utopia and the conditions of realism in politics; the problem of democracy as a regime of popular sovereignty and the constitution of the people as a political subject; democracy and the dilemma between consensus and conflict, and the consideration of conflict as an indispensable element of democratic politics; and, finally, the commitment to focusing on democracy as a paradoxical political regime. The objective of our intervention is, ultimately, to propose that it is in its paradoxical nature, as an expression of the tension between the possible and the impossible, where the critical and emancipatory potential of democracy lies.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0507-6015
