Monthly Archives: December 2010

The economic crisis of the last few years could hardly have arrived at a more ominous time for the old international order. The institutions, practices, and power relations that arose with the end of the Second World War and the agreements signed in Bretton Woods placed the U.S. at the center of the world and […]

In his 1990 Nobel Lecture, Octavio Paz affirmed that “History’s sun is the future and Progress is the name of this movement towards the future”. What is difficult is to determine precisely when it advances and when it recedes: what is progress, and how is it achieved. Although it is easy to observe the great […]

Democracy, according to Schumpeter, is a “method for making decisions”. This definition is so broad and pragmatic that it permits many forms of implementation and entails a key principle: the crucial part of democracy does not reside in compliance with certain forms, but rather, in the legitimacy that it enjoys among the population. The question […]

An old refrain says that the genius of democracy resides in alternation of parties in power, because it compels the opposition to take the situation seriously: as long as the possibility exists of arriving at power, it is condemned to worry about the future. We Mexicans are on the threshold of the possibility of experiencing […]