Abstract:
In Latin America of the 1960s, the “historical necessity” of a revolutionary rupture was imposed in such a way that, at times, even conservative parties found themselves compelled to propose a “revolution in liberty”. The assaults of the counterrevolution would provoke inversions: if, in the 1960s, the “revolution” was the hegemonic discourse, in the 1980s, the dominant motto was “democracy”. Being an ineluctable topic of debates in Latin-American intellectual circles and party organizations during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the “issue of democracy” belongs to the semantic field of an essential category for the study of political and cultural journals published in Latin America during that period, that is to say, democracy per se. In this context of transition, a significant fraction of the battle of ideas, in Latin America and other regions of the West, was centered on the notion of democracy, broadly claimed by almost all the ideological trends. Taking into account this context of transition, I propose to analyze, within the corpus of texts published in three political and cultural Latin American journals, the frictions and nexus between two major narratives of modernity: democracy and socialism.
Keywords:
democracy; socialism; political and cultural journals.