Towards the idea of the «Extended Country”. An essay for the analysis of political representations

Abstract

The concept of “political representation constituents” is built as expression of the “cultural and social imagination” brought from the contemporary sociological theory in its dimensions of myth, ideology, utopia or idea.  In parallel, an analysis of the representation of the “Extended Country” considered is proposed, as a “social representation” with pretensions of universality, contradictory and polysemic, which permits a great heuristic flexibility and a variety of functions which make it operational for investigation, but also, surrounded by a great confusion.  Finally, Extended Country is interpreted as an idea of a universal history with a cosmopolitan plan, oriented towards the aforesaid perpetual peace at the moment of the illustration and the independence of the Latin-American republics, as critical alternative to some reduccionist thesis of the contemporary political analysis.