Rodrigo Cordero
Ph.D. in Sociology (Warwick, UK, 2011), MA in Sociology (PUC, Chile, 2003), BA in Sociology (PUC, Chile, 2001).
I am a Full Professor of Sociology at Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago, Chile). I have been a Member of the School of Social Sciences in the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton) for the 2018-2019 academic year, and also a visiting scholar at Birkbeck College (London) and The New School for Social Research (NY).
My research interests are situated at the intersection of critical theory, conceptual history, political sociology, and sociolegal studies, with a thematic focus on social crises, normative conflicts, relations between economy, law and juridical cultures, sociology of democracy, constituent moments and constitution-making. My most recent work explores normative controversies in social-ecological crises and the relations between law, democracy, and neoliberalism.
I'm currently working on my third book monograph, "The Political Imagination of Law"
Phone: 56 26768001
Address: Universidad Diego Portales
Av. Ejército 278, edificio B, segundo piso
Santiago de Chile
F. +56 226768476
W. https://sites.google.com/view/rodrigocordero
I am a Full Professor of Sociology at Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago, Chile). I have been a Member of the School of Social Sciences in the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton) for the 2018-2019 academic year, and also a visiting scholar at Birkbeck College (London) and The New School for Social Research (NY).
My research interests are situated at the intersection of critical theory, conceptual history, political sociology, and sociolegal studies, with a thematic focus on social crises, normative conflicts, relations between economy, law and juridical cultures, sociology of democracy, constituent moments and constitution-making. My most recent work explores normative controversies in social-ecological crises and the relations between law, democracy, and neoliberalism.
I'm currently working on my third book monograph, "The Political Imagination of Law"
Phone: 56 26768001
Address: Universidad Diego Portales
Av. Ejército 278, edificio B, segundo piso
Santiago de Chile
F. +56 226768476
W. https://sites.google.com/view/rodrigocordero
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CfP by Rodrigo Cordero
This special issue aims to expand our understanding of such “constitutional struggles” in terms of conflicts over the boundaries that define political belonging and exclusion. See the CfP attached.
Please send your abstract of up to 400 words to [email protected] and [email protected] by March 5, 2023. For queries and expressions of interest, please get in touch with us.
Books by Rodrigo Cordero
Based on this claim, this book reconsiders the place of the notions of crisis and critique as fundamental means to grasp the fragile condition of the social and challenges the normalization and dissolution of these ‘concepts’ in contemporary social theory. It draws on fundamental insights from Hegel, Marx, and Adorno as to recover the importance of the critique of concepts for the critique of society, and engages in a series of studies on the work of Habermas, Koselleck, Arendt, and Foucault as to consider anew the relationship of crisis and critique as immanent to the political and economic forms of modernity.
Moving from crisis to critique and from critique to crisis, the book shows that fragility is a price to be paid for accepting the relational constitution of the social world as a human domain without secure foundations, but also for wishing to break free from all attempts at giving closure to social life as an identity without question. This book will engage students of sociology, political theory and social philosophy alike.
Articles-chapters by Rodrigo Cordero
In this paper, I explore one of the most salient but less discussed aspects that emerges out of the 2011 student movement for “free public education” in Chile: the students’ critical engagement with legal rationality and the complex socio-legal framework that recasts education in an economic register as an asset rather than a right. My argument is that their struggle for free public education is not simply a moral protest against neoliberalism and market forces, but it entails a broader political problematization of the role of law and normativity in the economization of society. The inquiry thus explores the ways in which the critique of marketized education –deployed on the streets as well as in formal institutional settings (such as parliamentary commissions, Constitutional court and the like)– questions the monopoly of what may be called, to use the vocabulary of Foucault, the “economic rule of law”. In doing so, I contend, it is a critical response to a deep crisis of the educational system that also leads to a re-signification of the political meanings of law to empower other possible normative futures.
Drawing from this case, I place attention to three moments of critical engagement of the student movement with the law. First, the questioning of “debt” as the principle that defines student experience, insomuch as the concept enacts, through the juridical interplay of private loan contracts, a regime of valuation that credits and discredits students on their capacity to pay. Second, the questioning of the vocabulary of economic “freedom” as the normative bedrock upon which the educational system is supposed to operate, but also of the constitutional protection of such conception as it sustains an economic-juridical framework that guarantees profit-making rather than rights realization. Third, the questioning of the disempowerment of “democracy” produced by the self-insulation of the political system from those unofficial, subaltern, and nonspecialized forms of knowledge in the process of the constitution of norms (law-making).
Each of these moments of critique, as I wish to show, brings into focus the historicity of some key categories and devices that have facilitated the dissemination of market laws in Chilean society and in other places of the Global South too. The student revolt against neoliberal common sense not only raises claims that disturb the fictio iuris of the economic rule of law but also contributes to expand dominant understandings of juridical concepts and the normative imagination of society.
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What is a concept? By exploring this question, this article discusses the extent to which the study and critique of concepts is an unavoidable moment of the study and critique of society. Through a reading of Theodor W. Adorno’s lecture course on Introduction to Dialectics, it explores the dialectical critique’s cognitive utopia of using concepts to reach the material reality of social life. The article reconstructs three moments that articulate Adorno’s critical approach to the work that concepts do in society: i) the ‘pedagogical effect’ of concepts, ii) the life they mobilize, (iii) the ethnographic sensibility towards them. Within this framework, the article argues that working through concepts not only entails challenging the epistemic limits that divide philosophy and sociology, but also coming to terms with the ethical problem of making justice to what is not grasped by the existing conceptual order of society and thus may emerge as a possibility.
This special issue aims to expand our understanding of such “constitutional struggles” in terms of conflicts over the boundaries that define political belonging and exclusion. See the CfP attached.
Please send your abstract of up to 400 words to [email protected] and [email protected] by March 5, 2023. For queries and expressions of interest, please get in touch with us.
Based on this claim, this book reconsiders the place of the notions of crisis and critique as fundamental means to grasp the fragile condition of the social and challenges the normalization and dissolution of these ‘concepts’ in contemporary social theory. It draws on fundamental insights from Hegel, Marx, and Adorno as to recover the importance of the critique of concepts for the critique of society, and engages in a series of studies on the work of Habermas, Koselleck, Arendt, and Foucault as to consider anew the relationship of crisis and critique as immanent to the political and economic forms of modernity.
Moving from crisis to critique and from critique to crisis, the book shows that fragility is a price to be paid for accepting the relational constitution of the social world as a human domain without secure foundations, but also for wishing to break free from all attempts at giving closure to social life as an identity without question. This book will engage students of sociology, political theory and social philosophy alike.
In this paper, I explore one of the most salient but less discussed aspects that emerges out of the 2011 student movement for “free public education” in Chile: the students’ critical engagement with legal rationality and the complex socio-legal framework that recasts education in an economic register as an asset rather than a right. My argument is that their struggle for free public education is not simply a moral protest against neoliberalism and market forces, but it entails a broader political problematization of the role of law and normativity in the economization of society. The inquiry thus explores the ways in which the critique of marketized education –deployed on the streets as well as in formal institutional settings (such as parliamentary commissions, Constitutional court and the like)– questions the monopoly of what may be called, to use the vocabulary of Foucault, the “economic rule of law”. In doing so, I contend, it is a critical response to a deep crisis of the educational system that also leads to a re-signification of the political meanings of law to empower other possible normative futures.
Drawing from this case, I place attention to three moments of critical engagement of the student movement with the law. First, the questioning of “debt” as the principle that defines student experience, insomuch as the concept enacts, through the juridical interplay of private loan contracts, a regime of valuation that credits and discredits students on their capacity to pay. Second, the questioning of the vocabulary of economic “freedom” as the normative bedrock upon which the educational system is supposed to operate, but also of the constitutional protection of such conception as it sustains an economic-juridical framework that guarantees profit-making rather than rights realization. Third, the questioning of the disempowerment of “democracy” produced by the self-insulation of the political system from those unofficial, subaltern, and nonspecialized forms of knowledge in the process of the constitution of norms (law-making).
Each of these moments of critique, as I wish to show, brings into focus the historicity of some key categories and devices that have facilitated the dissemination of market laws in Chilean society and in other places of the Global South too. The student revolt against neoliberal common sense not only raises claims that disturb the fictio iuris of the economic rule of law but also contributes to expand dominant understandings of juridical concepts and the normative imagination of society.
----
What is a concept? By exploring this question, this article discusses the extent to which the study and critique of concepts is an unavoidable moment of the study and critique of society. Through a reading of Theodor W. Adorno’s lecture course on Introduction to Dialectics, it explores the dialectical critique’s cognitive utopia of using concepts to reach the material reality of social life. The article reconstructs three moments that articulate Adorno’s critical approach to the work that concepts do in society: i) the ‘pedagogical effect’ of concepts, ii) the life they mobilize, (iii) the ethnographic sensibility towards them. Within this framework, the article argues that working through concepts not only entails challenging the epistemic limits that divide philosophy and sociology, but also coming to terms with the ethical problem of making justice to what is not grasped by the existing conceptual order of society and thus may emerge as a possibility.
From social movements to the legitimacy of democratic institutions, from technological devices to the development (and disappearance) of scientific fields, from ordinary practices to complex legal cases, to say nothing about climate change itself, our ability to imagine futures that are both possible – or, at the very least, not impossible – as well as desirable is being challenged. In fact, it may well be the case that the very legitimacy of our disciplines may come to depend on their ability to elicit this kind of societal conversation about the intended and unintended consequences of our social orders, practices, and institutions.
It is against this background that the workshop aims to bring together a group of scholars from different disciplines and approaches to explore the question of how contemporary society depicts “normative futures”.
Indeed, while the notion of normative futures may trigger images of legalistic and formalist approaches to law and morality, in this workshop we seek to understand it, more sociologically, as the ways in which society itself is able to reflect on, and venture, future scenarios. The workshop is jointly organised by the Copenhagen Business School, Universidad Diego Portales, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez and Centro de Estudios Públicos, Chile.
Organisers:
Poul F. Kjaer, Professor, Copenhagen Business School
Daniel Chernilo, Professor, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez
Rodrigo Cordero, Associate Professor, Universidad Diego Portales Aldo Mascareño, Senior Fellow, Centro de Estudios Públicos
Es precisamente este desafío el que está al centro de este volumen. En él se reúnen las conferencias impartidas durante los años 2010- 2011 en el marco de la Cátedra Norbert Lechner de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales e Historia de la Universidad Diego Portales. En este libro confluyen destacados académicos e intelectuales, cuyas innovadoras investigaciones animan el debate contemporáneo en las disciplinas de la historia, la sociología y la ciencia política.
Los textos que aquí se ofrecen transitan por una serie de tensiones que invitan a problematizar y repensar nuestra relación con el presente: la ligazón entre procesos ecológicos y desarrollo capitalista; colonialidad y conocimiento; intimidad y dinero; políticas del riesgo y nuevas lógicas ideológicas; elecciones y prácticas de acción política; formas de subjetividad y ciudadanía.
como vocación”, pronunciado por Max Weber ante una multitud de estudiantes en München, Alemania. Teniendo como telón de fondo la
burocratización del trabajo académico y las perplejidades producidas por el progreso científico-técnico, Weber elaboraba una de las defensas más iluminadoras y extraordinarias de la “pasión” como el sentimiento del cual se nutre la vocación por el trabajo científico. La inquietud que Weber comparte con los estudiantes es de tamaña simpleza y profundidad: ¿Por qué empeñarse en el estudio especializado de fenómenos cuyo resultado no puede entregarnos respuestas a las preguntas que realmente nos importan: qué debemos hacer y cómo debemos vivir? ¿Por qué dedicar días, meses y años a trabajar arduamente en el análisis de un virus, galaxia, o toxina específica?