Representation is a major and multifaceted concept of modern politics. Through open and regular elections, it shields the democratic character of representative governments, compelling politicians to pursue the interests of their constituencies and become responsive to their demands. But since the concept of representation is so embedded in the day-to-day workings of democratic regimes, it has largely lost significant traces of its history that shed light on its political dawn. The instrumentalization of the concept by representative governments in order to (...) assess their democratic legitimacy obfuscates its seminal ambiguities and the history of conflicts about its meaning and institutional functions. (shrink)

RESUMENEl trabajo presenta algunos de los rasgos básicos de la condición política moderna. Esboza así su génesis interna desde la sacralización del ámbito político hasta los inicios de la secularización en el siglo XIII. Para ilustrar ambos momentos de la filosofía política de Santo Tomás provee una argumentación básica que, aun siendo incompleta para reconstruir este tránsito, resulta significativamente clarificadora. PALABRAS CLAVEFILOSOFIA POLITICA MEDIEVAL-HISTORIA DEL PENSAMIENTO POLITICO- SANTO TOMAS DE AQUINOABSTRACTThe paper presents some of the basic features of the medieval (...) political condition. This, it outlines the genesis from the sacralization of the political realm to the beginnings of secularization in the XIIIth century. To illustrate both moments, Saint Thomas' political philosophy provdes a significant, though incomplete, argumentative basis. KEYWORDSMEDIEVAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY-HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT- AQUINAS. (shrink)

Wide analysis of "María Teresa López de la Vieja, La pendiente resbaladiza. La práctica de la argumentación moral . Madrid y México, D.F.: Plaza y Valdés, 2010, 288 páginas.".

This paper argues that liberalism provides democracy with the experience of civic reformism. Without it, democracy loses any tie-argumentative or practical-to a coherent design of public policy endeavoring to provide the resources for the realization of democratic citizenship. The case for liberalism rests on an argumentative reconstruction of the function it performs before the rise of a world economic order and, more specifically, in the creation of the welfare state after the Second World War. Accordingly, liberalism defines a reformist political (...) program: it is an emancipatory political project by virtue of its struggle for an egalitarian and universalist extension of citizenship rights. This is but a formulation of the modern idea of citizenship, conceived of as a universalizable contract of rights. At the same time, liberalism embraces a socioeconomic emancipatory project that endeavors to provide the conditions, within the institutional framework of modern societies, for the accomplishment of citizenship rights. (shrink)

Rooted in late seventeenth-century theories of rights, liberal ideas have brought forth since the nineteenth century a full-edged complex of traditions in moral, political, economic, social, and legal thought. Yet in historiographical debates such complexity is often blurred by presenting it under the uniform terms of a canon. Along with other methods, conceptual history is contributing to the rediscovery of liberalism's diversity. This group of articles compiles three conceptual studies on scarcely explored aspects of the history of liberalism in Denmark, (...) Finland, and Hungary—countries whose political past has only occasionally figured in mainstream accounts of European liberalism. This introductory article is a methodological discussion of the rationale and forms in which liberalism's historical diversity is rendered through comparative conceptual research. After reflecting on the limits of the Anglophone history of political thought to grasp the plurality of liberal traditions, the article examines how transnational conceptual histories recast the understanding of liberalism as a concept, theory, ideology, and political movement. (shrink)