ABSTRACT
Latin American developmentalism in the 1950s and 1960s perceived the state as performing a necessary function. The market was understood to distort social relations and, in the circumstances of Latin America, to lead to economic stagnation. The new state was a state of violent imposition, which renounced popular consensus in order to destroy the capacity of civil society to resist or oppose the state policies inspired by the politics of the total market. The state is the agency that can universalize resistance vis a vis the distortions produced by the market in human relations and in nature. Metaphysical antistatism is the response that arose in the 1970s and 1980s to the development of civil society and the state in the 1950s and 1960s. Antistatism combined with the totalization of the market demands that one live and let die. Democracy presupposes that one live and let live.
