PRESENTATION
Sergio Grez Toso
According
French sociologist Robert Castel, "the 'social question' can be characterized by concerns about the ability to maintain the cohesion of a society", which is threatened with breakdown by groups whose existence makes the overall cohesion hesitation. While on the "social question" there are many definitions and approaches, it is possible to find some consensus among many historians and social scientists around certain subjective elements invariably referred to the feeling of danger in leading groups, which at one point in history are threatened the social order that benefits them. From this perspective, when the ruling classes do not experience the start, even if you are against the existence of many "social problems" can not speak of "social question" as such. This would appear closely linked to awareness by the ruling elite (or a sector thereof) about the fragility of social order, their order, which until recently was as safe and consolidated.
The "social question" is therefore a mixture of material factors with anxiety and fear, but also a field of political action that involves the entire society. For the poor and dispossessed, of course, because, we limit ourselves exclusively to the identification a "social issue" in the Modern Age, they have always been the main victims of the negative consequences of urbanization and industrialization which was coupled with this phenomenon. But the modern "social question" also devolved to the ruling class, fearing seizures that were generated from the bottom of society, tried to explain what was happening and were keen to develop solution strategies or containment within acceptable margins capitalist social order. And somehow this issue is also wrapped in the middle that pulled from the extremes of society, they tended to go to one side or the other according to different historical moments.
On the "social question" in Chile there is a wide literature has been enriched considerably in recent decades, regardless of numerous books, articles and dissertations that deal as part of the context in which the plot unfolds their stories. But few local or regional studies concerning the topic. For cases of Conception and the coal area of \u200b\u200bthe Gulf of Arauco (Coronel and Lota), we note that although we have numerous historiographical works related to partial aspects (conditions of life popular sectors, the labor movement and others), until now lacked a book to try a look at all elements of the modern "social question" during the period of hatching. Is the challenge that has taken Professor Laura Benedetti Reiman to publish this book on the social question in Concepción and mining centers of Coronel and Lota (1885-1910). The first chapter
The second chapter is devoted to the presentation and analysis of the lives of the popular sectors of the city of Concepción, with emphasis on diseases, epidemics and high mortality rates, fears that it generated in the elite and solutions implemented by the State, as the law 1838 of Rooms Workers enacted in 1906 - while attempting to resolution (highly incomplete and failed) to a problem whose roots ripped from the same social order that the ruling classes are intended to maintain.
The third chapter extends over similar materials in the area of \u200b\u200bCoronel and Lota coal, with a particularly interesting paragraph concerning the mechanisms of domination implemented by coal companies, private mining police to control workers, the chips and half-vouchers as methods of avoiding the seasonal migration of labor and to receive an extra profit, and electoral and judicial intervention of employers to ensure political control of the areas that gave them their wealth.
As stated by the author, the "social question" had different elements in all locations and precise identification lies, in my opinion, the greatest value of his work. It is hoped that on the solid foundation of general studies on the subject in Chile that have preceded this book, other monographs multiply like Laura Bendetti, to account for the diversity of situations in different geographic settings, cultural local, regional and social problems inherent when a subsidiary's way to the capitalist economic modernity concatenated to be in the elite discourse and in the arena of social and political struggles the thorny "social question."
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