Utopian Political Projects (Tomás Moro)

Utopian political projects (Tomás Moro)

After the imaginary and different paradigms about development, you can identify a set of mobilizing ideas in a ‘utopian’ or ‘dystopian’ perspective that are in referents of modernity, as well as in the contemporary stage, and that are support from the constant ideas that mobilize many of the actions and practices that inspire the formation of the paradigms related to development in the 21st century.

Ethical development theories seek to give a normative answer, which implies an attempt to answer some questions, such as what should be raised by development? Or, what should be considered authentically human and sustainable development, that is, integral? Ideas and practices will be integrated into ‘development paradigms’ directly or indirectly inspired by Utopia, by Tomás Moro, at the beginning of the 21st century in Latin America, focusing on the ‘Ethical and Development’ relationship in its perspective of the History of Ideas.

In this process a link between the ethics and development that interests us regarding what the State, Community and Market relationship, in consideration of the fundamental ideas of Utopia, of Tomás Moro. In this sense, the relationship of the history of ideas and philosophy with social sciences, find in humanism and ethics a meeting point as assumptions of public policies and social mobilizations. The ethical dimension is not external but intrinsic to the same idea of ​​what we understand by development, that is, the dimensions that constitute it in integrality and transversality.

In the field of politics, Moro knew how. These sources led Moro to write the brief work in which he analyzes the fundamental social problems of England of his time. Thomas Moro considers that the sum of people’s happiness strengthens the constitution of the State. He imagines an island in which the social regime is based on the obligation of the work of six hours a day, because the rest of the time men must use to cultivate their minds and spirits.

• On the island there is no private property. Even precious metals lose their value on the island, as they are used to make latrines and chains for the convicted.
• With utopia he postulates the bases that the modern state must have, in a new political reality, as opposed to the monarchies and the world that came from the Middle Ages.
• Hierarchy of reason on passions and dialogue on force.
• Austerity and hierarchy of human values ​​about materials. Egalitarianism to avoid property and capital conflicts.
• Incorporation of Christian virtues such as charity, faith and hope in conjunction with the Greek classic virtues of democracy and reason.
• Dignity of work with six hours and basic income. Dedicate the rest of the time to studies and community.
• Cities on human scale with families not greater than six children.

The application of an ‘autonomous development’ by progressive governments can also be read taking into account the humanistic authors of the beginning of modernity, particularly on the challenge of articulating socio -political transformation projects with utopian horizons of change to more egalitarian, equitable societies and integrated. Both contain a negative diagnosis of what happens in their respective societies and pose the change with different visions and methods, although the idea of ​​a better society is more explicit in Moro, given its optimism, than in Machiavelli, given its pessimism. In modern political thinking, as it emerges in Moro and Machiavelli, there is an inseparable dialectic between the real and the ideal, what is and what should be, the pragmatic and the utopian, the political and the moral. The mission of both is to carry out a certain utopian project, that is, to build a certain type of state from a new plant.

Both authors are part of the anthropocentric turn that begins to assume the human dilemma in history and the exercise of power in polis. The destiny of men is not played in the space of nature, where laws pre -established by God govern, but in the time of history, where they face and combine chance of circumstances and freedom of human action. Machiavelo’s thought continues to look more rationalist, more secular, if not more pagan. Therefore, the past acquires an exemplary and paradigmatic value with respect to the present, because they consider that human nature is ultimately invariable.

To a central place. It is an anthropological, political condition and based on an ethical criticism of the socioeconomic situation of peoples in underdeveloped countries, of social relations of domination.

Indeed, Moro’s utopia is presented as a historically accessible goal, to which men can reach their own effort, although it has never been performed in the past. It had consolidated in the imaginary that a better society was impossible, the future was not a habitable place and it was not valid to dream and think about utopia. The theoretical study of the concept of utopia puts us to the need to analyze the relationship of this with other concepts such as the relationship utopia reality as concrete totality, and subject utopia. At the same time, the figures that utopia has had in the social thought of Latin America.

For some authors, the conversion of utopia into utopism implies the fetishist conception of the transcendence that attributes to that process an absolute factual determination, and to the idealized product, it takes it not as a human social form, but as a result, thing, instrument, etc. The antiutopic investment of utopia occurs when transcendental illusion is governed in idolatric institution. The utopia of the Latin American unity is the ideal that defines the sense of Latin America from its unity as an identifiable society and is the myth to face the forces that disintegrate from the outside and from within. In this sense, the utopian paradigm of the Latin American unit has had the unavoidable function of interpellation, while putting under suspicion the utopia that is sought to be imposed from the outside and emerges as an antiutopia of dependency. The Latin American unit appears in its contradiction today as a revolutionary utopia rather than conservative.

It is the utopia of unity in solidarity, for hope and defense of cultural identity. Critical and historical evaluation of this utopia, as a transcendental concept, is an unavoidable need when the reality that gestured has not yet been transcended. Since the end of the dictatorships of the eighties to date, the ways of reinstalling democracies generated a dissociation between economic and social development, with a lack of integrative political leadership, which showed its vulnerability both in the crisis of the crisis of the Last years, as in the design generated with the installation of the first and second generation reforms that supported false contradictions between State and Market, leaving devoid of social protection populations in the face of changes that globalization and regionalization were producing. The question of the exercise of power and the mechanisms of expansion in decision -making for social equality and integral freedom.

In this sense, it can be concluded that utopia in terms of a political project is that almost perfect model where there is an ideal balance of the idea of ​​power and its scope, it also seems an unattainable idea which the human being, in his idea of Looking for perfection, has tried to model in different political ideals throughout history. Although man is not apparently ready to achieve a balanced and perfect system, despite this he remains on the way to form a way of sticking common well -being and mutual benefit in a single order.