“No army can stop the force of an idea when it arrives on time.” Victor Hugo.
The social idea is here to stay, but its strength has involved battles of victory and setbacks, advances and relapses, in the endless path of human history. Its modern time coincides with the Industrial Revolution, and its sequel in inequality and misery, which in the 19th century was called the “social question”. It is the century of the battles for the social against the individualistic excesses of the ascending bourgeois class, its ideology, liberalism, and the empire of the dominant ideas of private property, the freedom of the markets and the rejection of the intervention of the government. State in the domains of the so-called civil society or bourgeois society. The social and its banners of justice and equality confront, like an oxymoron, the idea of freedom, which Constant would call “freedom of the moderns”, protected by liberal constitutionalism, as opposed to the freedom of the ancients, together with the idea of participation in the affairs of the community, which would have its splendor in the democratic polis of the Athens of Pericles, in the 5th century BC. C. The 19th century is a century of confrontation, of antagonistic struggle between two great currents of thought, liberalism and socialism, which will end, in the 20th century, with totalitarian socialism on the one hand, which we call communism, an immense failure besides, it did a lot of damage to the social idea, and a liberalism “updated”which will imply a new synthesis, liberal democracy, with the incorporation of social liberties together with classical civil liberties, in the modern welfare state.
The strength of the social idea, expressed in our time in undeniable institutional contributions, such as the aforementioned social state (also known as the “welfare state”), social rights and their constitutional hierarchy, the successful “social market economy”, of Germanic root, the idea of equality of opportunities, as overcoming the formalistic equality before the law, the new concept of civil society, the “activist civil society”, together with new forms of manifestation of the social, such as the struggle for human rights, gender equality and the ecological issue, has represented a triumph in the historic struggle of the peoples for the recognition of the sacred principle of the dignity of the human being.
There will never be an end to the story, as the construction of the “new man” is a chimera, because as Immanuel Kant would say, in a famous statement, “with wood as crooked as the one from which man is made, nothing can be completely built.” straight”. I say this because although it is true that the social idea has become a core idea of the present, the battles for its objectives of reducing social inequality have not reached the level of acceptance that its defenders would have wanted. And this is demonstrated to us with scientific rigor by an author who has revolutionized contemporary economic theory, Thomas Piketty, and his conclusion that the battles to overcome social inequality require renewed impulses of creativity and liberating passion, which place us in a reality that is not very flattering as some would like to pretend.
The social idea experiences a black hour in our painful reality. We established beautiful social principles in our fundamental text, as well as developed an advanced bill of rights, where the social acquires an undeniable priority. However, never in our modern history has the social idea been so far behind, so abandoned, so debased, suffering and abandoning the most basic dignity to which Venezuelans are entitled. Rescuing the idea of the social, and giving prominence to the principles and values contained in the Constitution, will constitute a priority task of democratic enlightenment, which as an unshakable faith, will have to prevail in the new Venezuela, where, I have no doubts, the north will prevail. of freedom and social justice.
