Can the state learn to live well? Álvaro García Linera as an intellectual of the state and interpreter of history

Abstract

The election of Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism in Bolivia in 2005 forms part of a general left turn in Latin America in which, in the Andes in particular, the resurgence of political claims based on the right to indigeneity in the public, national sphere has been an important element. As I argue, the political project of ‘refounding’ the State that the Morales administration has carried out, culminating in a change of constitution in 2009, has adopted an internal tension between national-popular and popular-indigenous elements. This essay analyses the ways in which the current Vice President of Bolivia and public intellectual Álvaro García Linera deals with this tension in his writings on the State. The argument will explore how his writing fails to escape a certain logic that reproduces a classical model of sovereignty, in which it becomes García Linera's role as an intellectual of the State to interpret Bolivian history and develop political proposals with this historical interpretation as its base.