Who worries about us as citizens? Many parties and unions seem to be reduced to domes that distribute prebends. Since the expansion of video politics, television channels complaints and social criticism of those in power, reducing us to spectators. The networks promise horizontality and participation, but they tend to generate highly intense and short-lived movements.

Fake news, populisms, environmental risks due to the anthropocene are radiating signs of disconcerting crises in recent years. Which other questions should be asked in order to face the uncertainties and concerns that they open up to us? Which new approaches are being rehearsed in the social sciences to confront the challenges we face? Where can we look for more precise and alternative definitions?

This text ratifies that knowledge does not pertain to a particular discipline or region of the world. The Horizontal Construction of Knowledge refers to the vigor that social knowledge acquires when it is based on the disciplinary dialogue with the voices of the multiple knowledges possessed by those who live and overcome the social problems that afflict them. Research that responds horizontally to social questions contributes in two ways: it produces new knowledge, and new relationships between people.

The debate about the Social Security Reform, approved in December 2017, initiates the current political crisis in Argentina. The parliamentary process revealed strong tensions, which were heightened, a few months later, regarding the agreement with the International Monetary Fund. The text deals with the positions at stake and their inscription in antagonistic discursive formations, based on the ways of referring to the outside of the premises, the memories that are triggered and the semiotization of emotions.

In the context of the profound civilizational crisis that humanity is experiencing, there is also a severe crisis of the left in different parts of the world. The alternative proposals that were represented by the so-called progressive governments in Latin America fundamentally failed in terms of the transformative objectives they set for themselves.

This volume of fiar: forum for interamerican research, partly evolved out of the CALAS platform for dialogue "The Latin American Left in the 21st Century: Looking Back to the Future.”

Index:

Jessé Souza (Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), São Paulo): 100th anniversary of the death of Max Weber: Commemoration from the Americas (Introduction).

Wolfgang Schluchter (Heidelberg University, Germany): How Ideas Become Effective in History” Max Weber on Confucianism and Beyond