Differentiation and Political De-Differentiation in the Periphery of the Modern Society

Abstract

This work wants to analyze, from the theoretical-conceptual architectural frame of the General Theory of Social Systems (TGSS), and problematize the relationships and the logical articulations between the system of politics, economics and law to observe what have been the hetero-descriptions of the democratic state in the periphery of modern society (1).

The processes of functional differentiation characterizing the institutionalization of structures and expectations –normative, cognitive– in the evolutionary becoming of the State-nation, in Latin America, stabilized the logic of the patrimonial political centralism, so that the history of innumerable legal-political and economic reforms have been used rather to perpetuate the status quo than to change something (2). It's interesting to observe, for this reason, the developing of many forms of coordination and social development to achieve the desired modernity in the continent, from the presidential caudillism, Cepalian developmentalism (1950), military praetorianism (1970), till the forms of economical laissez faire (1990). These models have basically revolved around the valorization of the clientelistic political regime as a central space for the construction of democracy and the market (3). In this context, cognitive and normative expectations (law) have not managed to generate lasting political accommodations that facilitate sociopolitical evolution, where corporations, families and clientelistic caudillism continue to prevail, except the institutionalized expectations (4). The question then is not how ‘democracy should be’, but how is this possible in this periphery of modernity.