El Ciudadano
Original article: «Malestar social y crisis política»: Nuevo ensayo de Alberto Mayol reflexiona sobre la descomposición del poder en Chile y el mundo contemporáneo
Social Discontent and Political Crisis: Alberto Mayol’s New Essay Explores the Erosion of Power in Chile and the Modern World
What happens when a society begins to strip meaning from its own mechanisms of authority?
Starting from this and other questions, Alberto Mayol’s new book addresses social discontent not merely as a collection of grievances or protests but as a profound historical transformation capable of delegitimizing elites, altering traditional political axes, and creating uncertain scenarios.
The sociologist proposes a new conceptual framework to explain how institutions and discourses become deformed and replicate pathologically, tainting public life with barren forms of power.
Mayol also offers a theory of discontent that goes beyond the cliché of anger or protest. It’s not simply about people being upset or a sum of sectoral conflicts. Social discontent represents a specific kind of historical transformation, whose primary ‘product’ is the destruction of the previous order, with no guarantee that what follows will be better.
“When the balances of a society give way, authority becomes irrelevant or grotesque, and the political axis of left/right is replaced by the fracture of up/down,” the author suggests.
Additionally, the text explores interregnums where “the old doesn’t finish dying and the new can’t manage to be born,” reflecting the emergence of political monstrosities during times of decomposition and the rise of ‘prionic’ forms of power.
“Configurations that seem functional only replicate dysfunctionality and deform institutions from within. From philosophy to real politics, this book combines classic thought (Gramsci, Weber, Arendt, Benjamin) with empirical analysis of the present, illustrating how Western democracies are facing a process of symbolic degeneration comparable to a systemic disease,” notes the Catalonia publishing house, which handled the publication.
Thus, “Social Discontent and Political Crisis” serves as an invitation to think, with starkness and rigor, about what we are destroying, what we aim to establish, and what minimal conditions any project aspiring to manage transformations would need to avoid being consumed by them.
The book is now available in both print and eBook formats in bookstores across Chile.
El Ciudadano
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