Are we to dismantle “liberal democracy”?

Abstract

In this paper I analize the contemporary democratic crisis as a credibility crisis triggered by the “burocratic solidification of politics” in the prevailing elitist model and the disappointment of the expectations set forth in it by those who passed from dictatorships to democratic regimes in the eighties, both in Latin America and in Eastern Europe. Some features of the democratic political-administrative regime are explored in connection with the debates about value neutrality among liberals, feminists, socialists and communitarians during the last four decades. Displacements in the concept of the political and in the redefinition of the gravity center of democracy are analyzed —from the political regime to the practices of the common in the “public sphere”, from the “institutional/insituted” to the “social/instituting”