Liberalism as a conservative reaction to republican democracy: The case of Chilean neoliberal institutional design

Abstract

Liberalism is generally portrayed as a progressist political thought. Nevertheless, as we propose here, liberalism has actually performed a reactive and reactionary role in history, by permanently opposing the institutional designs promoted by either republican or egalitarian democratizing mobilizations. In order to expose this argument, we present the differences between republican, republican-democratic and liberal thought and try to recover the meaning of classical and historical notion of republicanism. Republicanism itself has been overshadow and subsumed by contemporary hegemonic liberal rhetoric and its institutional design, being neoliberalism the clearest example of this fact. In this line, we also try to understand the relation between conservative and oligarchic thought with liberal (and neoliberal) institutional design, to finally present the case of Chilean Constitutions of 1925 and 1980 as opposed juridical expressions of these different normative and philosophical positions over the meaning of freedom.