Spurious modernity, perpetual childhood and emancipation projects in Latin America

Abstract

This essay tries to offer a historic outlook of the emancipatory impulses that go through Latin America, from its independence movements until the different ways to understand emancipation in the last four decades. From the ambiguities of origin (between republicanism and caudillismo, first and second class citizens, popular ethics and the de facto power of the estate) to the enlightenment of the left in the 1960s and 1970s, the region has been looking for its own ways of redeem colonialism or inequality. Today the big stories are overshadowed by the postmodern disenchantment and the ri-gors of globalization, but new libertarian faces continue being reworked from the discourse of identity and difference and from the denaturation of liberal democracy for the purpose of opening the history toward new possible ways of collective order.