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Átomo N.4

Violencia

All the articles

Editorial Á – N.3

Since 2008, the West has experienced turbulent times. The financial crisis, the European debt crisis, and the explosion of social media have jeopardized the political balance of the postwar period, and even, according to many analysts, liberal democracy itself. Doubtless, we are living through the dissolution of the relative political and economic stability that has […]

Átomo

Populism, A Deadly Disease

The death of democracy in Venezuela is an extreme example. But the weakening that various democracies in Europe and the Americas are suffering is evident, with the growth of populist parties both of the extreme right and the left. The democracies of Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Sweden are threatened by populist […]

Sylvia Eyzaguirre

Almost everything about populism

In times of structural crisis, populism seems to appear with offers specific to the needs of voters that feel excluded or forgotten by the traditional political class. These two recent books, with different levels of depth, help clarify a contingent phenomenon, although it borders on irrationalism and messianism.   The following reading of only two […]

Ernesto Ayala

Who has the right to rule?

Title: Against Democracy Author: Jason Brennan Year: 2016 (2018 in Spanish translation, Contra la democracia). Princeton University Press     Not long ago, during the last decades of the twentieth century, democracy seemed like the unbeatable political ideal, the one that would expand in a rapid and irresistible way throughout the whole world. Samuel Huntington […]

Mauricio Rojas

Populism and our internal weakness

Populists know that there’s nothing more powerful than ideas. When a culture forgets its history, its values, its institutions and their bases, it’s condemned to be intellectually colonized. A society far from its essence can be convinced that its values are the mother of all evils. Western society has systematically been forgetting that it has […]

The Return of Political Liberalism

The ideals of liberalism often present themselves with a tinge of enmity toward the world of politics. We can explain this situation by analyzing various factors, following Hannah Arendt’s perspective.

Vanessa Kaiser

Freedom of Expression, Populism, and Universities

Until 2005, according to data from Freedom House, civil and political rights were growing. Democracies had consolidated worldwide, in an advance without precedent since the mid-80s. It seemed to be an irreversible trend.

Harald Beyer.

Media and Populism

Prone to emphasis and simplifications, populism uses the opportunities offered by the mass media and social networks with obvious advantages and deformations, including the spreading of false news. Anti-intellectual, anti-elitist, and disdainful of debate, this political modality claims to represent the real, common citizen, in the face of what it sees as the conspiratorial machinations […]

M. Magdalena Browne Mönckeberg

Jason Brennan: “The world is moving toward becoming more liberal”

Jason Brennan is a rising star in the American liberal world. Under forty years old, he became the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business of the University of Georgetown. Charismatic, lover of metal and provocative, Brennan is the author of dozens of books and articles published in […]

Axel Kaiser

The Unpopularity of Populism

Populism emerged as a mass phenomenon that challenged the political system. It has been grouped by some with those processes that broaden democracy; by others, stamped as an enemy of democracy.

Francisca Rengifo

The People Against Science

Populism invariably creates a mythology of the common man, who is assigned superior moral values and sense of reality, which is invoked to justify policies, decisions or general frameworks.

Cristóbal Bellolio

A Look at Both Sides of Contemporary Populism

Many “Europhiles” felt relieved when they heard the results of the recent European parliamentary elections. The populist parties did not get the results they hoped for.

Paulina Astroza Suárez

Chilean Populists, Then and Now

Chilean populism reached its apex in the middle years of the twentieth century, in the different styles of Arturo Alessandri and Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, both formidable crusaders for the People against the actions of the powerful. Or so they claimed to be. Below, the historian Sofía Correa Sutil writes a short and precise review […]

Sofía Correa Sutil

Werner Herzog in Chile

Possibly among all the writers, artists, filmmakers and thinkers that have come to Chile in recent years, no one has generated such interest and expectation as Werner Herzog last January. The author of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, two of his most famous works, is more than an important filmmaker. He is also […]

Héctor Soto

Sol Serrano: The Hands-on Historian

Sol Serrano, Chile’s 2018 National History Award winner, has dedicated her life to her chosen field—history—by way of exemplar teaching and thorough original research. In her pedagogy and in her writing, she has shown both personal focus and an inarguable talent for teamwork. Her most recent book, El liceo (“High School”), analyzes the role said […]

Macarena Ponce de León

My Stance on Accusations and the Rule of Law

Drawing from Mexican author Marta Lamas’ book, attorney Paula Vial reflects on the puritanical, moralistic, and victimizing rhetoric used to discuss women’s issues. She goes on to analyze how this rhetoric negatively impacts the right of the accused to respond to accusations made against them—and even defend their own dignity, the right of due process, […]

Paula Vial Reynal

The Social Liberalism and Feminism of John Stuart Mill

For John Stuart Mill, the most radical of England’s 19th century thinkers, individual liberty was the highest ideal. And that liberty stood athwart oppression not only from state power in general, or any specific government in particular, but from society as a whole. In this schema, Mill found women to be doubly oppressed.     […]

Benjamín Ugalde

Eugénie Bastié and Feminism’s Blind Spots

With two incisive and clearly written books published in the last few years, Eugénie Bastié, a young journalist, has earned herself a permanent place in France’s media landscape as the country’s foremost critic of the contemporary feminist movement and its underlying principles.     Until not long ago, Eugénie Bastié spent her time writing articles […]

Patricio Domínguez

Thoughts on African Feminism

The novels and essays of Adichie, the famous Nigerian writer, showcase a distinct feminist worldview. Her African experience and her noncomformist tendency to reflect produce a feminism characterized by how it values diversity, humor, and tolerance. With an international readership that’s steadily rising, Adichie fights not just Western stereotypes about African life, but also against […]

Isabel Aninat

The Death of the Patriarchy

With the intent of fighting misandry, the academics who put together this book review the last two thousand years—without very many intermissions—of human history. From the point of view of man, and the social utility of his body, they try to carve out a place for men in the complicated world of gender equality.   […]

Carmen Gloria López

Liberum sex, clausum sex

The case for freedom of the seas is fairly analogous to the case for sexual freedom, they are both about eliminating restrictions. But as Grocio, the seventeenth century Dutch jurist stated, the seas belong to no one and their commercial use should be unlimited, whereas in prostitution, the human body clearly belongs to someone and […]

María Blanco

Memoirs of a Proto-Feminist

In the practically colonial Santiago of 1872, Diego Barros Arana’s niece decided to translate John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, and in a bout of insolence, changed “subjection” to “enslavement”. She was repudiated by nearly all of Santiago’s high-society, but she carried on and lived to witness the first time women got to vote […]

Elena Irarrázabal

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Somali activist and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali is both respected and despised, it just depends on who is doing the judging. Classical liberals make note of her audacity and intellectual rigor while the Islamic world accuses her of spreading hate and intolerance. Having personally suffered the wages of fundamentalism, she is quite willing to take […]

Sofía García-Huidobro

Irene, Lina, and Svetlana

The twentieth century, with its two world wars, the Cold War, its revolutions, and its struggles, was an age of unimaginable technological advances during which the world saw totalitarianisms of various stripes come to be, leading to the suffering and exile of millions of human beings. What follows are the stories of three women who […]

Monika Zgustova

Neither pleasure not reproduction

Very recent scientific studies have taken the clitoris away from the haze of indifference that impeded its visibility and understanding. With no apparent function other than pleasure, it traditionally didn’t have the scientific relevance of the penis. According to the author of this text this cultural phenomenon projects social practices that are profoundly rooted in […]

Virginia Gutiérrez

Unconscious biases, general rules

The differences in salaries and the career expectations between men and women can’t be explained with just one variable. There are many factors –cultural, psychological– in the nucleus of the economic life of societies, an evident inequality. In the following text the detail of the conditions of this reality are revised.   Women’s salaries are […]

Francisca Dussaillant

Deirdre McCloskey

Between her impressive and passionate intellectual work and her unique personal history, Deirdre McCloskey (b. 1942) makes an impression on everyone. After earning a master’s degree in economics from Harvard, she went on to teach at the University of Chicago, where many students remember her as the best profesor they ever had—though they remember her […]

Axel Kaiser

Biology is not destiny

From the Enlightenment to Simone de Beauvoir, from Stuart Mill to the current feminist manifestations: the underlying idea that transcends time is that no biological condition can justify the hegemony of one collective over another in the network of social life.   Just as with other waves of thought, feminism can be defined in different […]

Valentina Verbal Stockmeyer

Chauvinism by the Numbers

Is it a man’s job is to earn money and a woman’s job is to look after her home and her family? So reads one of the questions asked of Chileans (and citizens of 40 other countries as well) by ISSP pollsters, working, in the former’s case, with the Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP). The […]

Loreto Cox

Bad Reputation

Almost two years ago in August 2017 I wrote an article that I titled “Antifeminism”. It was triggered by a case that, as far as I know, caused the cup of the cause to overflow. A candidate of the Frente Amplio Party confronted a contender for having treated her badly, which was “more” serious considering […]

Marcela Fuentealba