AUTHORITARIAN THEORIES OF JUSTICE: FACIES HIPPOCRATICA OF LIBERALISM
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36517/2025n38id96519Keywords:
Political philosophy, Theories of justice, CriticismAbstract
The aim of this preliminary study is to demonstrate, through a dialectical analysis, the fundamental contradiction of political liberalism, namely, that between freedom and authority. However, far from there being a balance between these two poles, in the era of advanced capitalism, freedom has degenerated into submission and authority has been distorted into authoritarianism. As a result, citizens are reduced to the passive and atomized condition of clients of precarious public services, whose potential for resistance is neutralized by the command of leaders in the state apparatus. In this context, conceptual arrangements emerge to justify the position of this minimal citizen, as is the case with certain theories of justice, which, by subjecting the idea of popular sovereignty to the logic of the economy and parties, can become authoritarian theories of the market, tradition, politics, or the administrative state, to the detriment of the idea of freedom. This is when liberalism becomes the antechamber of fascism.
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