Critical Citizenship and Inclusive Democracy

Germán Zuluaga Ramírez is a philosopher and lawyer in training at the Universidad del Atlántico. He belongs to the Chronotopías research group and is a member of the Colombian Association of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. He was a young researcher of Colciencias in the 2015 season, with the project: Citizen Training Schools in the Atlántico.

One of the most recurrent themes in the history of philosophy is to rethink democracy, especially at times when its pillars are on sand platforms, in which sustaining itself is a major problem. Reality has shown and demonstrated that democracy as we know it is in a great crisis of foundations, values and theoretical/practical articulations. Participation and active discernment is a sine qua non condition for the legitimization of democracy. Such a democratic society could be conceived as one where citizens have access to the means and knowledge by which they can defend their rights against their leaders, and in the same way can make proposals for the development of society. However, contemporaneity brings with it new ways of interpreting the needs and public wills with which these rights can be defended. Thus, the notion of citizen is reinvented in order to approach the real-valid today. The research is a critical reading of several texts, qualitative and of philosophical hermeneutic cut, used in a critical way.