Popular religion and political culture in Latin America. An essay on the complex links between conceptions of just ordering and modern pluralist democracy

Abstract

This text is a critique of present theories which postulate the incomparability of the civilizatory projects in the Third World, for it is assumed that it would be a so wide and deep difference of cultures that it should be impossible to ascertain an historic metacriterion, from which we could judge positive and negative aspects of themselves. In reality this means to overlook the authoritarian aspects of many social and cultural models. Some examples of the Islamic world and the Andean area of South America are therefore analyzed.