Sumario: | “Ahora Venezuela es de todos”; “Brasil, um país de todos”; “La patria ya es de todos” (Ecuador). The similarity between these slogans, now the official banners of some of Latin America´s new progressive governments, alerts us towards possibilities for new interpretations of concepts such as collective and public. But beyond these controversies over the frontiers that divide the public from the private, in the domains of public policy, the notion of the public sphere has raised graver concerns. New styles of leadership and their relation to “the plebeian emergency” in South America bring to light a growing trend towards “polymorphous sociability”, resembling some of the characteristics of the public sphere described by E. P. Thompson, Philippe Ariés and other historians of the preindustrial modern era.
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