The reform of democracy as a restructuring of the State in Uruguay

Abstract

In this article, we study how the liberal projects of restructuring of the State hide the real process of elitist reformulation of democracy set in motion in post-dictatorship Uruguay. The technocratic liberalism has worked in the construction of a legitimacy of democracy as a procedure based on four rules of iron play; the reduction of the notion of citizen in that of voter; the conversion of the theory of representation into a mere delegation of sovereignty; the loss of positive contents to reason the State and the translation of them to the market; the revision of politics as the maker of a virtuous order to politics as a technique in search of modernizing achievements; the substitution of the social character for a man without qualities outside the plot of history and society; the conversion of the previous ethical and solidarist ideals in an efficiencyist pragmatism that tries to recompose the idea of ​​"neutrality" of the State against its recent totalitarian behavior. In this article the successive reformulations of the State-society relationship are analyzed; State-State; State society; society-society, contained in the liberal project of "minimal" State and the necessary approach of the State as concentrated power and political will of class that, in the recent past, made the old paternalistic State the great Leviathan of the dictatorship