Resistance or surrender: Notes on intellectual work in Latin America

Abstract

The article offers some general comments on two discourses found in Latin America and the beginnings of a debate that confronts two different types of intellectual: the optimistic-reformist intellectuals who have confidence in democracy and capitalism in spite of its neo-liberal content, and the critical-revolutionaries who look for a radical change in the political and economic order that now prevails in Latin America. This descriptive exercise does not eschew a critical perspective when it comes to evaluating the ideological contents of both discourses.