Drawing on contributions from the theoretical and research tradition in the fields of sociology, philosophy, and
political history, this paper addresses the construction of social justice imaginaries relevant to Chile’s 19th-century
economic elites, exploring the economic-material, cultural-symbolic, and political-representative dimensions. It
thus observes the persistence, from the first decades of the republican period, of an exclusionary imaginary of
familial, religious, and authoritarian characteristic of the colonial process, aimed at consolidating the possession
of material resources in traditional families. This founding imaginary persisted notably in the first republican
century, rejecting the redistributive, recognition, and representation repertoires championed by emerging social
justice agendas. The fierce opposition to critical content present in intellectual, social, and labor circles reverbe-
rates in the characteristics assumed by the country’s development model, based on an abandoning, limiting, and
persecutory laissez-faire capitalism. The diagnosis is complemented by the adoption of a restricted liberalism as a
primarily economic philosophy, and for its preservation the Chilean State is called upon, capable of consolidating,
through the notions of order and social peace, a conservative-mercantile political economy.
Encina Acevedo, M. . (2025). Holy Family and Social Justice: Imaginaries of Social Justice of the Economic Elites in 19th-Century Chile. Revista Némesis, (20). Retrieved from https://revistanemesis.uchile.cl/index.php/RN/article/view/82043
