SUMMARY

This article responds to the sincere, by no means rhetorical, concern about the human suffering. It is understandable for a journal embracing the Medical Humanities to be interested in such kind of political ideas, since Medicine is due to the care regarding the human suffering. Therefore, the medical humanism searches those interdisciplinary glances that focus on reforms that could lead us to a world with less suffering. At last, a world which is more human because of our right course at reducing the suffering that we are able to lessen through a proper policy, urgent and pragmatic, in agreement with the ethical requirements of our time.

The present essay defends five thesis that are exposed contextualized along the article.

The first thesis states that by the end of the XXth century and the beginnings of the XXIth, we have been living privileged times because a new social and ethical-utopical sensitiveness is coming to light. This has happened very few times in history. Actually, the last significant rises would be the modernity at the early XVIth century and the communitarism of the XIXth century. Our political philosophy establishes a range of conjectures and hypothesis to study this new sensitiveness that would arise from the confluence of modernity (personalism) and communitarism (solidarity), though in its own way, essentially pragmatic and deideologized.

The second thesis claims that as well as modernity and communitarism, from their sensitiveness, logically gave birth to a genuine project of common action, also the new arising ethical-utopical sensitiveness leads to its own: it is the “universal project of supportive development” (UDS project, in Spanish). This project is based on the ideal above mentioned that comes from the confluence of modernity and communitarism: pragmatism is not meant to turn the world upside-down, but to reform the liberal modernity from the principles of communitarism. Our political philosophy sharply explains the nature of the UDS project.

The third thesis refers to the strategy of political action oriented to carry out the project of common action; in our case, the UDS project. This one is probably the most important in the essay’s political philosophy: the social conjuncture could foster, for the first time in history, the rise of a new kind of autonomous organization of the civil society, at the edge of the political power, that would be an advance and a relevant, qualitative change compared to another current types of organizations like the citizen movements, the NGOs, volunteering, etc. The essay draws up an organizative design of the civil action movement that is called Nuevo Mundo (New World), whose aim would be that of controlling the political power until it got forced into the commitment of fostering the UDS project. It should be an internationally organized civil society the one promoting to carry out the development of the liberal and supportive reason represented by the UDS project.

The fourth thesis, consequent to the previous ones, is the postulation of the new emerging historical relevance of the civil society in order to politically manage its new ethical-utopical ideal through the UDS project. The muddle of the official policy and political parties within the domination plot devised many years ago regarding the international political and economical order requires the direct intervention of the civil society as the most efficient and pragmatic way to allow the breakdown of the domination and impose the ethical ideals of mankind towards a more free and supportive world. This new relevance of the civil society autonomously organized to face the political power would be about to be borne and would represent the great historical change of the XXIth century.

The fifth thesis of the essay has an eminently pragmatic sense. It would be difficult for the change that is meant to be detected in its early stage, given its own nature, to become a reality without the New World social action movement appearing internationally in every country, including the most important ones. In this sense, the essay resuggests the philosophy of the American History, of the United States, to conclude that, at the edge of arguable and probably wrong policies of the last century, the American civil society is rooted on a philosophy that makes its citizens specially sensitive to the philosophy of New World. This should, then, be extended to America, whose civil society should play a significant role in making able the new world order that is needed to fulfill freedom with solidarity. To positively count on America is not “politically incorrect”, but a signal of pragmatism that speaks in favour of making the UDS project a reality.

Therefore, the essay responds to a “feeling of our society”, clearly showed up by the movements of civil solidarity and proposals like the ATTAC and the Tobin tax, for instance. The proposals of Hacia un Nuevo Mundo (Towards a New World) go much beyond and suggest a much more complex and stable change, not revolutionary but reformist, that is possible because, in the end, philosophically reconciliating the modernity and the communitarism, plays in favour of all of us.