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In this text, we intend to develop the elements that make up the criticism that Hannah Arendt presents at the end of the interview granted to the German writer Adelbert Reif in the summer of 1970 to the concept of state and modern government, and that are not developed by Arendt at that moment. To this end, we will initially expose Arendt's criticism of the emptying of public space and the attempt to reduce political participation to the electoral process. To counteract these problems inherent to the modern concept of state and government, Hannah Arendt mentions, even slightly, the possibility of a council-state. However, in this text Arendt does not explore these concepts and experiences, but only relates them to the need for transformation of the modern concept of state and government, i.e., it allows the perception of the actuality of her previous reflection. In view of this, the hypothesis explored in this text is that this 1970 interview serves as a reading key to understand the relevance and actuality of the parallel between parties x council developed by the author in On Revolution in 1963 and adds a new element, namely, the theme of the need to institutionalize a forgotten experience: the councils.

Currently, republicanism is accused of thinking of civic virtue as linked to an ideal of the good life and, therefore, impossible to be realized in modern, plural and neutral societies. On the other hand, liberalism is accused of basing its argument on the ideal of individual autonomy, leading to political fragmentation. Faced with this clash, we intend to present the republican civic virtue as one of the political virtues required by political liberalism. The adequate foundation of this hypothesis will allow us to make sense of the recent proposals of a liberal republicanism as an answer to some of the current problems of liberal democracies.

In 'Democracy against capitalism', Ellen Wood defends two important theses: capitalism inaugurates a new kind of exploitation and extortion of the working class that is not directly dependent on state extortion; this makes it possible for some political rights to be extended to a larger number of people through the establishment of "representative democracy". On the other hand, workers' political participation is limited: by identifying democracy with political representation, the ruling classes have created an illusion of popular political participation that is, in fact, extremely limited, or almost nil. In this article, we intend to show some of the main limits of representative democracy, and how this "democracy" atomizes citizens and keeps them away from effective political participation. For this, we will use other influential theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bernard Manin, Hanna Pitkin, Noam Chomsky.

This article intends to analyze the implications of a hypothesis that extends Foucault's analysis of neoliberalism from its effects on modern democracy. For this purpose, Wendy Brown's recent work examines how neoliberal rationality affects democracy, transforms its imaginary and even its main subject, namely the demos. Brown points to two problems of the "neoliberalism's stealth revolution," namely that the neoliberal rationality transforms and undoes democracy by directly affecting its fundamental principle of popular sovereignty. Such transformation is made from the change produced in the democratic imaginary and, mainly, from the transformation of the economic subject from a subject of interest to human capital, as well as the political subject, relegated to the background. From this first problem, we examine how they happen and what are the consequences of changing the democratic imaginary and its central political subject. The second problem pointed out by Brown deals with the interference of neoliberal reason in sovereign autonomy. The second part of this article seeks, therefore, to analyze the relationship between the sovereignty of the nation-state and the notion of popular sovereignty from the problem of the expansion of capital and the vulnerability of the frontiers and territory where citizenship is exercised.

The notion of public opinion as a process cannot be limited solely to the empirical basis of a theory, it must also focus on the position that this notion occupies with respect to the interpretation of society. Jürgen Habermas's approach to public opinion stems from his classic work on Bourgeois Advertising. Habermas constructs the Normative Theory of Democracy, which is based on the communicative conditions in which a Discursive Formation of the Opinion and Will of a public formed by the citizens of a State can take place as an unfolding of the analyzes about the public opinion. In this argumentative way, Habermas takes up the historical-philosophical project of modernity, attributing to the public opinion the function of legitimizing the political domain through a critical process of communication based on the principles of a rationally motivated consensus. The scope of this article is to make explicit the constitutive elements of the habermasian reflections on the Rational Formation of Opinion and Will, since it is from this primordial concept that we can understand the legitimation of the Rule of Law. We will trace what led the habermasian reflection to seek the conditions of an authentic participation of individuals in a public space, where there is responsibility and solidarity in the execution of the solutions of the problems of a community, and its consequent unfolding that leads to the theory of political power.

O presente debate pretende evidenciar a importância da dimensão cultural para o desenvolvimento de uma nação. Procura-se realizar um breve apanhado histórico sobre as particularidades do Brasil e da América Latina que na geopolítica global estão inseridas sob o signo da dependência, do subdesenvolvimento e na periferia do capitalismo sob o ponto de vista, principalmente, dos teóricos Celso Furtado e Amartya Sen, sob o método de revisão de literatura. Evidencia-se, então, que os governantes precisam descartar a imitação de padrões de consumo próprios do capitalismo, além de fomentar a diversidade cultural existente no próprio território e promover um desenvolvimento que, primeiramente, esteja ancorado nas liberdades individuais dos cidadãos.

Through an analysis of the transformations and persistencies in the image­-power­-knowledge relationship that result from the spread of digital communication's technologies, our goal is to characterize the emergence of a conflict that, in the politics of visuality and the cyberspace's techno­political configuration, reflects similar tensions that constitute the actual power relations diagram. The research begins with an investigation of the historical background that influenced Thomas Hobbes Leviathan's images production, where a given visual order corresponds to a new power order. Then, we analyze the changes of this specific configuration – that is perceptible as the Leviathan image regime's metaphor - in face of the analog and digital image production technologies. Our hypothesis is that the disputes (aesthetic, legal, economic) that attempt to regulate the image within the digital media domain and that shape a particular politics of visibility, are similar to those tensions that affect the cyberspace conditions to become a different 'sensible' surface (medium), that potentially mobilizes other forms of knowing, other models of organization and production. To examine this issue, we analyze the ongoing conflict between different social forces that point out both for new practices and meanings that emerge in the cybercultural arena, and for the trends that attempts to impose over the digital medium the regulatory mechanisms established in the context of analog medium. At the end we characterize the current power diagram, and we argue that cyberspace aesthetic and political configuration depend upon a capacity to intervene over the very fundamentals that regulate its field of enunciation and visibility. Finally, we take it as a struggle for others modes of thought and social organization models, as a war over the virtual and imaginary production, therefore a war that is oriented to the future.

This article aims at comparing the similarities contained in criticism of liberal democracy present in some selected works of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and Robert Kurz (1943-2012). In spite of the close association of the first author with the Nazi regime after 1933 and of the second being normally characterized as a Marxist thinker (although very critical to "orthodox" Marxism), numerous similarities between the two are verified when they attempt to analyze the characteristics of parliamentarian liberalism in twentieth-century democracies. One hypothesis that might explain such similarities would be the influence exercised by Schmitt on Frankfurt School theoreticians, from whom Kurz often draws inspiration in his writings - in particular, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, although Schmitt also influenced Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Karl Korsch and Herbert Marcuse. Another interpretation addressed here refers to the possibility that Schmitt found, in his theories about the State and about law, the epistemological limits of modern liberalism, which constitutes Kurz's main research subject and was a recurring theme in the writings of the Frankfurt theorists.

György Lukács, diante da possibilidade de influenciar positivamente nos rumos da democratização do socialismo real, especialmente da União Soviética, nos anos 1960, interrompe seus escritos da Ontologia e redige um ensaio sobre a democratização, que levou o nome de Demokratiesierungschrift [Escrito sobre a democratização], e que foi submetido ao Partido Comunista Húngaro com sua consequente censura e indeferimento para publicação. Não obstante a crítica lukácsiana ao socialismo realmente existente e sua evocação a uma virtual democracia socialista, sua posição em relação à transição socialista no Leste Europeu é demasiada branda e desconsidera a factual não ultrapassagem do modo de produção do capital nas sociedades de transição pós-capitalistas.