1968 and the modernity's crisis: The Brazilian students movement as a new "social actor"

In "From Violence" Arendt (2009:18) points out that the common thread to the different student uprisings around the world was "contempt" for the traditional forms of participation and political practice - which for her meant the process of emptying political action, a situation common to Western society since the second quarter of the twentieth century. The critical feature of the student rebellions is that they were directed against the ruling bureaucracy: the youth revolt in Eastern Europe claimed the freedom of speech and thought as elementary condition for political action, while young people of the West, most of whom were living in freedom of expression and thought, revolted because such conditions were no longer able to open the channels for action, and the exercise of true freedom. From this perspective, both students who lived under socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, and those living in liberal democracies (and also those who had lost the democratic condition, such as Brazil and Mexico, for example) fought through direct action, without intermediaries, that is, participatory democracy. But it was a revolutionary movement? Arendt's theory points to the rising violence in the anti-establishment movements of 1968 and condemns the violent action as a political tool. But what is the explanation for violent social upheavals occur simultaneously around the world? Some lines of research on this question work essentially with the question of the role of the subject in modern society - the possibilities and limits of its action in the political arena. A "new" concept of the subject emerges in industrial societies considering political participation other than that defined by liberalism, dating back to the classic definitions of democratic constitution, putting into question the model of representative democracy