Democracy on the Periphery of Modern Society: Structures, Semantics and Expectations

Abstract

The problem of social order in the periphery of modern society is problematized on the conceptual architecture of the General Theory of Social Systems (TGSS), tracing the semantic and expectative forms of the structures’ institutionalization, and the reproduced and parasitized artifacts in those structures which, paradoxically, construct the functional and differentiated preeminent order in the modernity of modern society. The capture of the state apparatus by particular structures has been one of the characteristics that define the articulation of order in the region. Structures (family, group, clientelistic inclusion networks) that have been stabilizing, and even define the expectations that guide the assumptions of functional differentiation, operating factually with the logic of a stratified social order, promoting clientelist relations and practices and excluding exclusivity that, rather than weakening, strengthens the ‘citizen’ experience, promoting the permanent oscillation between ‘legality’ and illegality that permeates deeply the organic and structural interstices of the social order in this periphery.