Hugo Herrera (Chilean philosopher)

Hugo Eduardo Herrera Arellano (born 5 February 1974) is a Chilean lawyer, philosopher and scholar dedicated to the Philosophy of Right. Known as the theoretician of the Chilean "social right-wing", Herrera works as a professor at the Schools of Law of the Diego Portales University (UDP) and the University of Valparaíso (UV).

A former member of the Independent Democratic Union (UDI) from 1993 to 1997, Herrera is identified with centre-right politics, but proclaims to being distant from the neoliberal ideas of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys. He has been described as "one of the most lucid and enlightened intellectuals from the Chilean right today". He has also been classified by the libertarian Axel Kaiser as being close in thought to Chilean nationalism, but Herrera prefers to pigeonhole himself into a "national-popular tradition", and within which he mainly rescues works of Alberto Edwards or historians like Francisco Antonio Encina and Mario Góngora.

In 2015 he was an independent member of the Political Committee of Chile Vamos, a centre-right coalition whose then leader was Sebastián Piñera. Nevertheless, he has criticized his own coalition for its "lack of political vision" related, according him, to the prevalence of economic discourse over any other. One of the politicians whom he has influenced in the coalition is Mario Desbordes of Renovación Nacional (RN), although Desbordes does not recognize himself as being grounded in Herrera's theory. This influence became notorious after the Estallido Social (''Social Outbreak''; 2019–20 protests), where Desbordes was a key politician in the November 15th agreement to "Approve" a new constitution in the plebiscite to replace the 1980 constitution.

Herrera is a member of the board of several scientific journals, including the University of Valparaíso Journal of Social Sciences. He is a regular columnist in various Chilean press media, specifically the newspapers ''La Tercera'', ''La Segunda'', ''El Mercurio'', and ''El Mostrador''. Provided by Wikipedia