Latin-American reading of Hannah Arendt in Norbert Lechner’s early works (1970-1984)

Abstract

The decade that goes from the military coup in Chile (1973) to the democratic recovery in Argentina (1983) draws symbolically a broad territory of new political visions between the “progressive” sectors in Latin American. During those years the idea of “revolution” was losing ground facing a renewed estimate of the virtues of the democracy as axis of the political field. These notes concentrate on analyzing the suggestive reading of Hannah Arendt introduced by Norbert Lechner in Latin American debate on democratization. Our hypothesis says that Lechner maintained a critical permanent dialogue with the German classical and contemporary thought. In particular, the appropriation, adaptation and recreation of Arendt’s work, was fundamental in three planes. At the discursive level, Lechner recreates elements of Arendt’s vision of politics, allowing understanding it as a human activity inherently conflictual and plural. At the institutional level, both authors develop a reflective record halfway between philosophy, social sciences and literature. Finally, at the socio-professional dimension, Lechner finds in Arendt’s figure a promising model of autonomous intellectual, as opposed to the “organic” intellectual, and to the “neutral” expert.