On Democratic Politics: A Selection of Essays by Norbert Lechner

The German-born, Chilean author Norbert Lechner remains one of Latin America's most prominent and creative social scientists. His work is indebted to the intense debates regarding theories of modernization, developmentalism, and dependence that took place in Latin American intellectual and political circles. These theoretical sources were present as a cognitive horizon in his essential writings, and many of the central concerns that enlivened his oeuvre arose from his intellectual immersion in these deliberations. If the confrontations with the revolutionary discourses of the 1960s informed his vision of the Latin American state, his experience with authoritarianism led him to pose a question that would become central to all his career: What does it mean to do politics, and what does it mean to do democratic politics?

This anthology, which includes the first translations into English of three of his most outstanding works can guide our readers, like Ariadne's thread, through the intellectual output of this great thinker. It should also be said that these writings contain some of the most intellectually stimulating approaches to political sociology written in Latin America.

Published between the 1980s and the first decade of the 2000s, the texts cover a span of more than thirty years during which the author developed a very personal vision as he sought to understand politics in a different way.

Norbert Lechner (Karlsruhe, Germany, 1993-Santiago de Chile, 2004) was a German researcher and political scientist who became a Chilean national. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Freiburg and went on to become one of the most outstanding theorists of his generation. He lived and worked in Chile starting in 1971, where he presented his ideas as a professor and researcher both at universities and international organizations such as UNESCO and UNDP.Lechner was director of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (1988-94) and author of numerous articles and books that have left a deep mark on the social sciences of Latin America, including La crisis del Estado en América Latina (1977), La conflictiva y nunca acabadaconstrucción del orden deseado (1984), Los patios interiores de la democracia (1990), and Las sombras del mañana. La dimensión subjetiva de la política (2002), for which he won the Santiago Municipal Prize in the essay category in 2003.