Citizens or people? Competing meanings of the political subject in Latin America

This chapter argues that Latin America appears trapped between on the one hand understanding politics in liberal democratic terms as the construction of the common good through the collective will of the people. On the other hand, neither ‘citizen’ nor ‘people’ have enabled a democratising political subject to address the many deficits in Latin America’s formally democratic systems nor to prevent authoritarian outcomes when popular energy is channelled from ‘above’. However, Latin America could look for democratic renewal to its humanistic thinkers on conscious agency for change, to its history of social activism as a knowledge producing process and to its participatory experiments.