Between enchantment and disenchantment: approaching the current political scenario from the 2018 Costa Rican Elections

Abstract

This article discusses the results of the research project Discomfort, conflict, and contention: discourses from the "national community" about democracy in the electoral process of 2018, registered at the Center of Research and Political Studies (CIEP), and winner of the Stimulus Fund for Research 2019. Based on the entire corpus of interviews, three main themes are addressed. First, the scope of the rationalist narrative of the passage to Modernity, problematizing its apparent secular character once the permanence of the theological in the political is addressed. Second, Elias Palti's thesis of a "second disenchantment of the world", which supposes the loss of meaning and of a subject-agent of historical change, showing the limit of this approach once the findings found in the interviews are discussed: although there is a disenchantment of politics, religion continues to operate as an enchanted scenario that provides meaning and coherence to those who practice it. Finally, the local political scenario is discussed within the changes in the contemporary symbolic order.