It is widely recognized that the period in the early 1970s in which Salvador Allende was president of Chile was a moment of political innovation, when people thought they could bring about socialist transformation peacefully and within existing democratic institutions. “People thought that this would be a political third way,” says Eden Medina, an associate professor in MIT’s Program in Society, Technology, and Society. Ultimately, a military coup brought a premature end to Chilean democracy and resulted in Allende’s death. But it’s a period of political and cultural history to…
