A while ago I was speaking with a person who I greatly admire about the value of society’s free initiatives to respond to people’s specific needs: entrepreneurships, companies, associations of various kinds, social and community development organizations, etc.; It is something of which I am a 100% believer and practitioner.  These are concrete ways of educating people in greater responsibility, rescuing leadership as well as valuing each human being and their work in community. I am convinced that they are the most effective ways to generate development and any instance of power should favor their existence and growth.

However, facing suspicion of my contempt for any attempt to change things only from realms of power, this person made me notice their complementary value. It is possible that having lived in a Latin America full of totalitarian systems that manipulate people from political or economic power, I have become a bit skeptical, but it should not be like that.

Partisan political participation and healthy interest in having access to power understood as a service is healthy for any country. Even participation in democratic processes should be massive and natural, because they stem from the fact that we choose those who are going to represent and serve us, in a context that guarantees freedom and dialogue of ideas and proposals. Excuse me if these words sound very naive and if reality is far from this scenario, but we cannot give in to its existence.

There are numerous historical and contemporary references that document the importance of politics, and how its exercise from power should be at the service of a greater role for civil society. Even with Hobbes’s response to the danger of “homo homini lupus” with his Leviathan, shortly before Althusius had already spoken of the limited power of public instances; But let us also add the contributions of Tocqueville when he affirms the value of the “intermediate” bodies and civil society as mediators with the State, or the entire value of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church, a precursor among others of the principle of subsidiarity.

In his most recent encyclical “Fratelli tutti”, Pope Francis affirms that “an individual can help a person in need, but when he joins others to generate social processes of fraternity and justice for all, he enters”the field of broader charity, political charity”.

“Good politics looks for ways to build communities at different levels of social life, in order to rebalance and reorient globalization to avoid its disintegrating effects.” What a great provocation to ask ourselves how we seek to build a community at the level of social life in which we are and how we live this necessary “political charity.”