Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

All power carries along elements of corruption. This article pretends to establish historical comparisons showing political perversions in different periods of our republican past. There is no doubt that Pinochet´s tirany will be remembered as the most criminal and abusive in Chilean’s history, but brutality and lack of honesty has existed on a lesser scale in our country throughout history. This investigation pretends to eliminate the vision of an honest republican Chile, free of illegal lobbying and fraud.  The myth of Chile´s exceptional honesty is a creation of its conservative historiography that magnifies the Portalian governments authoritarianism, misrepresenting the democratic advances of the twentieth century. The author intends to prove the lies behind this vision: for even though it is true that in our history there have existed periods of major political corruption as is the case of Chile’s parlamentarism between 1891 and 1925, so similar to the actual transition of 1990-2005, the same relationship exists now, between individual business and politics, the same absolute power of political parties, the same voting system, and the same lack of politician’s prestige.

The author argues that the creation of the National Health Service in 1952 was a landmark project of founding a new institutional health in Chile, whose formal origins seem to go back to the previous decade, and whose original draft was submitted by the Minister of Health Salvador Allende ten years earlier. He argues that the fifties are the culmination of the Chilean political system’s tolerance to the pressure and thrust of popular organizations. The article discusses the origin and transformation of health institutions, which range from the Superior Council of Public Health to the Department of Health, through the influence of welfare, and delves into the contradictions of the welfare state, until its crisis.

From the plight of modernity, the author states that every human being insightful and lover of life anxiously wonders for our collective destiny. As an answer to this question, this article examines several broad evolutionary perspectives universal time scale, relying particularly on the approach of the Baha'i Faith, from which an analysis of the role of religion, to address those processes finally that could guide a global civil society towards spirituality embodied in social processes, from our present conceived as the time of the great divide and the era of the communities.

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This text in which Augusto Bolivar interviews Norbert Lechner, deepens over a range of issues such as those of "structural heterogeneity" and "foreign hegemony," the distinction between modernization and modernity, "normative rationality", the tension between will and necessity and between action and conditioning, self-production as community in modern society, the distinctions between the political, state and the public sphere, leading to an analysis of the new citizenship, and finally addresses the challenge of processes of modernity and modernization in the Chilean case, addressing both the tensions and the proposals to solve them.

From the identification of nonviolence with certain historical processes and specific characters of history, the author proposes to establish what it is and how we can properly define it as an analytical tool in itself, and in relation to what is called social change in the social sciences. Finally proposes social sciences to recognize that social change springing from nonviolence is a category of historical process and not an abnormal event in it.

This article considers a more inclusive view in regards to the concept of Environmental Racism, questioned both by orthodox marxists -who consider it a denial of class struggle- as well as by a most of the black movements –who think of it as an attempt to minimize the fight against racism in itself. Starting up from some examples linked to brazilian reality, it shows that racism and preconception exceed the colour of our skins and are clearly connected to a model of development that depends on inequality and negation of citizenship as essential to its perpetuation.  Without leaving aside our specific fights and their inherent conquests, the concept of Environmental Racism defies us to enlarge our world visions and to fight for a new civilizatory paradigm, for a new society, both equalitarian and just, in which full democracy and active citizenship are not rights just for a few privileged ones, independent of colour, origin or ethnicity.

The artistic phenomenon has shown the complexity of  its reality, bringing up explicitly the thinking and construction of Modernity. Modern art, with the consequent double spin that the historical vanguar’s opened, has brought up the expansion of the theories and aesthetic forms with the same plurality with which the new social sciences opened the positive indagatory that occupied the transition to the 20th century. The vanguards criticism to classicism, in its radical autonomy, shows the latent reality of implying a subjectivity of things that shows the nature of the work in the immediaty of the value of its language and of an aesthetic which engages in a critical representation strange to the original subjectivity of the world. Classicism, aesthetic thought and critical reply to Modernity, open a dialogue where art in its poetical memory, increases the imagination’s desire in the construction of the world and the comprehension of the given effects. The cultural contexts are essential in this deployment, with a particular crossing point between the aesthetics and the ethics, which in the natural seek for the opening to value,can’t ignore the practice of contemporary educational aesthetic.

This essay is based on the work of the italian philosopher, G. Agamben´s works, and argues that the Aristotele´s figure of prudence constitutes the place of sovereignity and, in itself, it may have a strictly biopolitical status, because it “produces” the “humanity” of the human being, as zoon politikon (zoon lógon ekhon). So, the present text, shows an aporia present inside the occidental politics and its concept of justice which, located in the Aristotele´s prudence –as the place of sovereigns “decision”- has to produce the “humanity” of the human beings, isolating, at the same time, something like a naked life.