Abstract EN:

From Mexico to Chile, politics is no longer a question of certainty, of clear views and visions of the future. In these two countries, the emergence of a political temporality involving a fixed horizons of expectation, and a renewed focus on the present, all bear witness to a reconfiguration of political discourse and action, a new vision of the world. The transformation in perceptions of time conceals a more essential change. In fact not only a whole vocabulary but also a grammar is disappearing. The political phrasing which existed in past decades, and which revolved around terms that referred to revolution and to the state, is being replaced by a language whose primer is made up of democracy and the market, concepts that involve a fixed temporal horizon. Without forgetting significant nuances and contrasts between individual cases, one can see the emergence not of a new paradigm but of a politics of the possible, that is more concerned with an ethics of consequences than an ethics of convictions. The contrasting political paths of Mexico and Chile demonstrate both the importance and the limits of the transformations taking place in Latin America. They bear witness to the disappearance of the grand maximalist, historicist and utopian theories and their replacement by more pragmatic and possibilist policies. Politics is ceasing to be a utopian technique and becoming a fragmentary one, a kind of discourse and action that no longer refer to teleological models but rather remains open to the play of possibilities. Economic policies, buttressed by paradigms that were conceived as modelos para armar, have given way to less rigid approaches. The trajectories of the countries examined here confirm that the transformation currently under way cannot be reduced to a simple paradigm-shift that could be summarised as simply a passage from the noble savage to the good democrat or from the good revolutionary to the good free-marketeer.