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This paper aims to recognise the transformations in the concept of quality as formulated by Chilean educational policies between 1985 and 1990, at the beginning of the educational privatisation process. Using a conceptual history approach allowed us to analyse the meanings attributed to the concept of quality in the design and implementation of two evaluation systems: The Educational Quality Assessment System (SECE, Spanish initials) and the Educational Quality Measurement System (SIMCE, Spanish initials). The findings show a transformation in meaning for the concept of quality. It moved from the operationalisation, management, and improvement of school systems to equating quality with the results of educational evaluations. This new definition of quality resulted from decisions by the Chilean State, which simplified its complexity and helped manage the new school system. An implication of this semantic transformation is the understanding of quality as a tool used to rank schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The criticism of neoliberalism is omnipresent. The term is seemingly self-explanatory, but its original use in public has been forgotten. Its form originated in the international movement of ordoliberalism in the 1930s, which used neoliberalism to describe its distinction from laissez-faire capitalism. This conceptual confusion has created considerable consequential problems that overlay today's debate on the future of the market economy. The fact that the neoliberalism of the ordoliberals is today equated by its critics with the capitalism of the libertarians raises questions. Since the economic dogma of Milton Friedman, who was the inspiration for the so-called Chicago Boys in Chile, whose economic policy was first captured by today's negatively connoted term neoliberalism, this approach needs to be looked at more closely. Should the ideas of the Chicago school of thought substantially distinguish themselves from the other currents of economic liberalism, a solution to the confusion of terms could be possible, giving a new twist to the debate on the market economy. Such a clarifiation would be of fundamental importance for the ethical question of the social orientation of the economic order, since ordoliberalism was in turn the godfather of the social market economy. Furthermore, this would have consequences for applied political ethics in the context of political theories of justice, whose theoretical constructs reflect the existing economic order as a fact of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing conceptual boundaries is one of the defining features of constitution-making processes. These historically situated operations of boundary making are central to the definition of what counts as "constitutional" in a political community. In this article, we study the operations of conceptual delimitation performed by the Constitutional Commission (1973–1978) that drafted the 1980 Chilean Constitution, the trademark of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Using the eleven volumes of the Commission's Official Records as our textual material (10,915 pages and 80,005 distinct words), we apply vector semantics, spectral clustering and bigram graph-based analysis to explore conceptual boundaries and the behavior of specific keywords shaping the space of constitutional meanings. Our results identify the ways in which the Commission defines the normative horizon of the new social and political order by transforming old semantic references into a renewed conceptual framework. This analysis shows the immanent relations between political action and conceptual elaboration that underlie the creation of constitutional texts, as well as the potential of computational methods for the study of constitutional history and constitution-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution we develop a historical reconstruction of the theoretical tensions and innovations promoted by the circulation of the legal category of the social function of property. We trace the conceptual history of this category considering as a focal point its application in the processes of social transformation that took place in Chile between 1930 and 1973, mainly from the theoretical work developed by the Chilean jurist Eduardo Novoa Monreal. We argue that Novoa's theorizations on the social function not only dispute the classical sense of the concept of property predominant in the national legal culture, but also account for an important break with the mechanistic reading of law preponderant within orthodox Marxist thought. In this sense, this work of conceptual appropriation and innovation represents a particular case of cultural translation of normative knowledge that contextually situates the global circulation of justifications aimed at disputing the concept of private property as an absolute and inviolable right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives / Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas / Arquivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas is the property of Educational Policy Analysis Archives & Education Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article contributes to the production of a genealogy of the concept of discrimination by reviewing some of the lineages that make up its biography. To that end it focuses on its absence from Chilean constitutional thought during most of its history, identifies the emergence of its two senses -"arbitrary" discrimination and "structural" discrimination- in 19th century United States, and examines the way that it was inscribed in the text of the 1980 Political Constitution of the Republic of Chile where it was employed as a means to codify the economic rationality of market decisions and to protect an understanding of human nature based on Catholic natural law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Cultura y Religión is the property of Miguel Angel Mansilla Aguero and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyzes the uses and semantic variations of the concepts of socialism and communism during the nineteenth century in Chile. Based on a systematic review of the controversies in the Chilean public sphere over these terms, is examined the conceptual shift from predominantly negative notions in the 1840s to a positive assessment of them by the end of the century. As a result of a variety of social and political transformations, both locally and transnationally, the concepts of socialism and communism were cdefined as an exacerbation of the democratic ideology which led to radical projects of social equalization and disruption of the property regime, or as irreligious doctrines that undermined the established social order. Only at the end of the nineteenth century it is possible to observe an effort of conceptual resignification when the first movements that openly adopt socialism as an ideology appear and identify partisanly with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the twentieth century, democracy became a central concept when grounding and legitimizing political action. The Chilean Marxist Left was not alien to this phenomenon. Based on periodical, doctrinal journals, memoirs and public discourses, in this article we study the political and conceptual trajectories of democracy in the doctrinal and strategic elaboration of the main left-wing parties and movements between the 1950s and the 1980s. In that period, democracy and revolution became conceptually decoupled. While the conflictive construction and application of a transition project to socialism incorporated the democratic ideal, the 1973 defeat forced a general restructuring, marked by the choice to reconstruct a representative democracy rather than aspire to revolutionize social structuress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the use of analytical tools inspired in conceptual history, this article attempts to reveal semantic continuities and transformations of the concept "people" from the last decades of colonial rule to the protest demonstrations organized by liberals against the conservative regime by mid-nineteenth century. Based on the analysis of the fundamental aspects of contingent political texts, the article shows the double conceptual process that characterized the use of the word "people" by thinkers and public opinion during the one hundred years considered in this study. On one hand the persistence of a menacing notion of dispossessed population under the binomial relationship between charity/police. On the other the elaboration of liberal and enlightened meanings defined under notions of sovereign legitimacy and political regeneration that popular citizens had to represent [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]