The local sphere in theory and politics

Abstract

In this article it is supported and it promotes the need for comprehension the ‘local’ as scale of the ‘social’, and as a resultant social production of the action and interaction of agents who act from different scales, interests and objectives.  It also argues that it has been an analytic field of low development in Chile and Latin America, although several approximations can be inventoried that direct or indirectly have been referred to it in the past.  On the other hand, a political orientation is encouraged and is made problematic that within a level of “styles of development”, would value local endogenous dynamics, that is to say, with local agents as protagonists.  This is supported in the necessity of making visible and to project peripheral powers shadowed by an”intellectual centralism”, because of the importance that local territories have in our lives, because of the need to settle counts with the construction of “the national” which opressed diversities and, finally, to avoid the imposition of rationalities and global agents who, under a speech of universality, will impose private interests.