On this occasion, the Political Philosophy Working Group has set out to examine the current situation in Latin America and, retrospectively, the role played by the left over the last 30 years in democratic consolidation and the sustained activation of diverse emancipatory processes. Against this critically appropriated backdrop, the Working Group aims to identify the characteristics that an emancipatory, utopian vision would have to exhibit in the present. Such a vision would have to be capable of: 1) productively strengthening resistance against the "spell" of the conservative right to which the majority of several countries in the region seem to have surrendered; 2) reappropriating the best of the emancipatory struggles of the last three decades in Latin America; and 3) channeling emancipatory agendas unforeseen in those projects.

Certainly, the “spell” of the conservative right is not confined to Latin America and the Caribbean (Salmela & Von Scheve, 2017). The global political climate is saturated with reactionary, exclusionary, nationalist, racist, corrupt, fundamentalist, and elitist forces with a growing capacity to shape social, educational, and cultural agendas, as well as to influence binding norms and judicial rulings (Drolet & Williams, 2018). The expansion and increasing penetration of these forces seems to be explained by the global expansion of capital and, functionally coupled with it, by the media-organized convergence of citizens around a libertarian political culture (Windle, 2019). Such an explanation is undoubtedly correct. To this must be added elaborations that account for phenomena, partly unexpected, such as the expansion of prosperity theologies and their congregations, the corporate colonization of the imaginaries of responsibility and solidarity, the reconfiguration of political subjectivities in the new digitized social fields, the constructions of risk and the social production of fear (around issues such as migration, climate change, terrorism, among others) and, undoubtedly, the difficulties of our recent left-wing movements in reinventing, in these new social frameworks, deliberately distilled and emotionally binding utopias, as well as in keeping their moral force alive by sometimes engaging in illegitimate practices (De Sousa, 2017).

These phenomena operate today in various ways to legitimize reactionary positions and agendas. Under their influence, which this project proposes to trace and define, the majority comes to confuse security with authoritarianism, political virtues with Christian religiosity, privilege with equity, legitimacy with the tyranny of the majority, pluralism with chaos, the rule of law with state repression, and justice with the judicialization and criminalization of opposition or resistance (Mayorga, 2017). Faced with the dissolution of solid structures (work, social security, progress, family, and community), conservative right-wing forces offer the majority the promise (or rather, the allure), normatively distorted and media-constructed, of their restoration (Blühdorn & Butzlaff, 2018; Bauman & Donskins, 2016).

Meanwhile, despite the numerous democratizing achievements they have attained in countries like Ecuador, Brazil, and Bolivia, the left is becoming progressively less aggregated and more differentiated (Moreira, 2017). Less aggregated because progressivism has taken on so many faces that these do not necessarily coincide or cohere—social movements and civil society now encompass a wide spectrum of causes and banners that do not necessarily align or coalesce. Less differentiated because the popular political subjectivities that supposedly give them political legitimacy now seem capable of simultaneously embracing both progressivism and anti-progressivism without any experience of inconsistency. Added to this situation is the legal warfare (lawfare) waged against their leadership, with corruption charges brought against them, which in many cases has succeeded in undermining their public credibility (Romano & Tirado, 2018).

Under these circumstances, it is essential to consider the scope and limitations of emancipatory thought and movements in Latin America over the last few decades. We are interested in understanding, with transformative aims, the best way to define and reclaim the achievements of this democratizing project today, and at the same time, the reasons why this project proved insufficient for consolidating a genuinely democratic public political culture in Latin America (Sader, 2016). Examining these issues within a broad framework—one that allows for a comprehensive and integrative approach to the diverse economic, political, cultural, and religious questions involved, at various scales—is necessary to distinguish the characteristics that an emancipatory project should possess today at the normative, critical, and programmatic levels, as a creative response to the prevailing regressive forms of power.

The comprehensive and critical analysis project—which examines 1) the best paths for reclaiming the achievements of the democratizing project embodied by the Latin American left over the last three decades; 2) the reasons for the inadequacy of the recent Latin American left's emancipatory commitment to forging a political culture that would have immunized the majority against the "spell" of the conservative right; and 3) the (some previously unthinkable) characteristics that an emancipatory project should possess today (reinventing utopia)—unfolds from diverse theoretical perspectives applied to the examination of various social texts. The first of these perspectives are anchored in various critical-normative traditions—critical theory in its neo-Kantian, neo-Hegelian, and neo-Marxist versions, Foucault's analysis of power, critical feminisms, decolonial theory, the sociology of risk, and political ecology. The social texts that, on the other hand, will be subject to critical scrutiny are made up of press documents, statements from political organizations, agendas of social movements and civil society organizations, indigenous and Afro communities, audiovisual media and academic articles that have analyzed these sources in light of one or more of the purposes of the project.

The plurality of theoretical perspectives in dialogue promises a comprehensive and sufficiently sensitive analytical work to capture the tensions that must be addressed within the analysis we propose to carry out. This type of theoretical approach offers several novelties compared to work developed in the region. First, the project integrates three readings that have not only been addressed separately but have often been done so within the framework of approaches to populism (García, 2019). Studies on the reasons for the “enchantment” of the (ultra) conservative right, linked to the weakness of the left, have not been coupled with an interpretation explicitly aimed at considering the paths for a public reappropriation of the emancipatory achievements of the Latin American left as part of a critically ordered reformulation of the emancipatory project itself (Grugel & Riggirozzi, 2018).

Secondly, the project proposes an approach to the reasons for the neoconservative “spell” that does not settle for globalist, situational, or locally contextual answers, nor, as is often the case, for answers that ignore the role that the left itself has played in its emergence in our context (Munck, 2018). On the contrary, it strives to thematize this role as a critical input for the very reformulation of the emancipatory project, while also elaborating the problem from a perspective that takes into account the ways in which population, cultural, religious, political, and economic dynamics, coupled glocally, mutually implicate one another (Sassen, 2016).

Third, the project of considering ways to reclaim the achievements of the democratizing project promoted by the Latin American left over the last three decades does not, as is often the case, simply focus on highlighting and designing a public communication strategy for the gains made in various social areas (education, health, infrastructure, food security, employment, pensions, etc.). Instead, it problematizes the very conditions of social appropriation of the democratizing project, for example, of Constitutional Charters, in order to rethink the very paths to the social internalization of said project in profoundly democratic ways (Corrales, 2018).

Finally, at a more strictly metatheoretical level, the project integrates and brings into dialogue diverse theoretical perspectives that are often oriented either toward the explanatory reconstruction of the historical apparatus responsible for a given social configuration, or toward the normative critique of the social configurations themselves with transformative aims. These two ways of critically elaborating social reality, irreconcilable for some, find in this project modes of mutual enrichment that allow us to rethink the very political function of social theory. This is undoubtedly a contribution from Latin American social sciences to similar efforts taking place in Europe (Honneth, 2014; Forst, 2017).