Human Dignity: Conceptual, Normative and Political Tensions in the Contemporary Context.

This research examines the conceptual, normative and political tensions of the concept of human dignity, from its historical development in social theory and its potential to express contemporary political aspirations. The analysis is motivated by the October 2019 Social Outburst in Chile, which provoked two failed constituent processes and a social, political and economic reordering. During this event, ‘dignity’ emerged as a central slogan and demand of social movements, challenging the political-institutional system and becoming a key normative principle of the protests. Dignity, loaded with symbolism and multiple interpretations, organised other social demands, to the point of renaming the epicentre of the demonstrations as Dignity Square, giving the slogan ‘until dignity becomes customary’ a determining role in the social crisis.

Following Koselleck, the paper historically characterises the concept of dignity, highlighting its various dimensions and complexities, identifying fundamental aspects and strategies for its materialisation. The analysis draws on the work of key thinkers in Western political and social thought, such as Cicero, Augustine of Hippo, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum, who placed human dignity at the centre of their normative postulates.

The study also explores the tensions that the concept entails in its Western formulation, marked by the exclusion of otherness, including women, the poor and invisibilised groups. However, it is the search for its legal and institutional concretisation that has energised the contemporary debate. It is concluded that the necessary transformations should not be limited to the symbolic or merely redistributive, but should address the dynamics of social, semantic and material exclusion, and open up space for its redefinition in the face of new normative challenges.