Políticas públicas y acción colectiva: el legado de Albert O. Hirschman en tiempos de pandemia

Abstract

Albert O. Hirschman invites us to take risks and assume possibilism as a way to social change. In this text, I explore this invitation coming from a self-subversive public intellectual, who built his point of view from the practical and theoretical lessons of the past to contribute to the public debate needed to face challenges and opportunities. Collective action is possible when citizens exercise their voice and embrace their responsibility to find temporal arrangements to solve distributive problems without renouncing to their differences, their own beliefs and expectations. The pandemic has brought to the light a standing problem in the region: inequality. We need collective action to overcome the apparent trade-off between health and economics in order to recover our right to decide and live lives worth living.