The research on modernity in Latin America: Lineages and dilemmas

Modernity as a transplant

With his book Facundo or Civilization and Barbarism, former president of Argentina (1868–1874) Domingo F Sarmiento (1811–1888) is probably the first intellectual to systematically discuss the possibilities and problems of applying the concept of modernity to Latin America. The word ‘modern’ (moderno or moderna) appears in adjective form in the book, whereas the noun ‘modernity’ (modernidad) is not used at all. The term ‘civilization’, in turn, expresses all the positive characteristics that the author ascribes to Europe and to the modern lifestyles and societies. Sarmiento’s book explores the tension between a civilized Europe and the barbaric American continent, as perceived in Argentina. According to the author, the Argentinian cities, led by Buenos Aires, embodied civilization, whereas the rural areas (the pampas) represented backwardness: ‘What it now concerns us to know is, that the progress of civilization must culminate only in Buenos Ayres; the pampa is a very bad medium of transmission and distribution through the provinces’ (Sarmiento, 1874 [1845]: 24). ⁴

Transferring European civilization onto Argentina, according to Sarmiento, cannot be achieved by transferring European institutions onto the American continent alone; Sarmiento claims that Europeans must migrate to Argentina and replace the locals in order to guarantee progress: ‘In ten years a million industrious Europeans, spread throughout the Republic, teaching us how to work, will exploit new wealth and enrich the country with their qualities’ (Sarmiento, 1874 [1845]: 174).

This policy is obviously consistent with the European scientific racism from the end of the 19th century until the 1920s, which had different patterns of reception in Latin American countries. While in Argentina race theories were mostly taken strictly at face value to conclude that building a modern nation could only be achieved by replacing the indigenous population with European immigrants, race theories in countries such as Mexico and Brazil were interpreted differently. They were rather used to legitimize arguments for an intermixture of indigenous, Blacks and Europeans since only mixing races could allegedly lead to the ‘Europeanization’, that is, to the lightening of the skin colour of the total population (Stepan, 1991: 135ff.).

With the reception of German-American anthropologist Franz Boas’s work (1858–1942) in the 1930s, the untenability of seeing European modernity both as a civilization model and as home of a supposedly more developed, advanced human being became obvious. According to Boas’s theory, Europe still represents the most advanced model of civilization (civilization in the singular), but he did not regard biology as the source of the technological ‘backwardness’ of other regions. Rather, he attributed it to certain historical developments (Boas, 1969 [1904]; Hofbauer, 2006; Schwarcz, 1993). These theses led to a turn in the Latin American research on modernity by shifting its focus away from biology and towards the investigation of cultural, social and political processes that hindered and fostered modernization.

Essentially, the rejection of biological determinism during the first decades of the 20th century generated a new wave of research on modernity in Latin America, including developments towards at least two different directions. On the one hand, authors emphasized the distinctive and mestizo character of Latin American cultures and nations which, since colonialism, have supposedly been able to promote the hybridization of populations and traditions of indigenous, European and African origin (e.g. Freyre, 1999 [1933]). Accordingly, this cultural fusion would lead to a specific configuration of modernity in the region, which was no longer seen as a repetition and reproduction of European modernity but as singular modernities – elaborations on the idea of mestizo modernities can be interpreted to a certain extent as predecessors of the paradigm of multiple modernities which emerged in the 21st century. On the other hand, the refusal of biologisms led to the conviction that ‘modernity’ is the result of a process of a societal (self-)transformation capable of reconstructing (European) modernity in the region, as shown in the following section.

Modernity as self-transformation

The systematic search in the social sciences for a way to overcome the structural differences between Latin American societies and ‘modern’ European ones began to take shape in the 1930s, particularly through the reception of Max Weber’s comprehensive sociology. A paradigmatic example is the book Roots of Brazil by the Brazilian social historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902–1982) published in 1936, in which he provides a thorough interpretation of the modernization deficits of Brazil in comparison to the Western European paragons (the German in particular). According to his book, Portuguese and Spanish colonization led to the development of societies in which the work ethic and a sense of an impersonal and rationally legitimate order could not form. Since state institutions and civil servants acted entirely according to the logic of private interests and interpersonal loyalty, a modern bureaucratic state with its rational division of labour and its meritocratic hierarchy could have never taken shape in Latin America (Holanda, 2012 [1936]: 8ff.).

In Holanda’s book, ‘modernity’ is not explicitly defined. Yet in his discussion on the contrast between Brazil and ‘modern societies’, ‘modernity’ clearly means a complex social framework defined by specific social structures (prioritized urban life, political control over large landowners, separation of politics, economy, family, etc.), specific values (work ethic, secularism), as well as the corresponding ‘modern’ personal properties (individualism, autonomy, rationalism). The term ‘modernization’ does not appear here either: Brazil’s transition from a social formation based on particularistic, religious, familial structures into a secular, individualistic and performance-oriented society is described as ‘our revolution’ by Holanda. His wording does not indicate a Marxist–Leninist undertone; he rather alludes to something that was later to be called ‘modernization’:

If the revolutionary process we are witnessing – the most important stages of which have been suggested in these pages – has a clear meaning, then it will be that of the slow but irrevocable dissolution of the surviving forms of archaic remains that have yet to be successfully eradicated since our establishment as an independent state. More precisely, it is only through such a process that we will finally revoke the old colonial and patriarchal order, with all the moral, social, and political consequences that it implied and continues to imply. (Holanda, 2012 [1936]: 147)

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the implicit comparative discussion on modernity, which proceeded from an interpretation of existing Latin American lifestyles and social formations as the preliminary stages of the (authentic) European and US American modernity, became a hegemonic tendency in the Latin American social sciences under the influence of modernization theory. The internationally recognized and widely influential Italian-Argentinian sociologist Gino Germani (1911–1979) was the proponent par excellence of the transfer of modernization formulae into the region. At the centre of Germani’s concept of modernity is the process of secularization, which he defines in terms of the shifts in the normative structures of society. He lists the modernizing changes in the behaviour of members of society and in institutional structures as:

(1) type of social action: from prescriptive to elective action; (2) acceptance of change: from institutionalization of tradition to institutionalization of change; (3) institutional specialization: from a relatively undifferentiated complex of institutions to a high degree of institutional differentiation and specialization. (Germani, 1968: 345; italics in the original)

Research founded on modernization theory still plays a prominent role in contemporary development policy as well as in several research institutions in Latin America, even though the plausibility of some of the premises was questioned during the mid-1960s, especially by proponents of dependency theory, as analysed in the following section.

A dependent modernity

The main contribution of dependency theories to the modernity studies consists of exploring the interdependencies between underdevelopment and development. Hereby, the dependentistas contested postulations based on modernization theory such as the supposedly endogenous nature of modernization and the ‘sharp antithesis between modernity and tradition’ (Knöbl, 2001: 32).

It is well known that dependency approaches do not form a uniform and exclusively Latin American school of thought. This analytically and politically heterogeneous field, after its development during the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America, swiftly found new proponents abroad especially in Germany (Ruvituso, 2018). Given their heterogeneity, the merits of these studies within the modernity debate in Latin America differ from case to case.

For assessing these specific contributions, the distinction suggested by Kay (1989: 125ff.) between reformist and Marxist dependency theories is useful. In the first group there are authors such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso (b. 1931), Enzo Faletto (1935–2003), Osvaldo Sunkel (b. 1929), and others connected with the ECLAC/CEPAL (UN-Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) and its structuralist standpoint. Marxist dependency authors include Ruy Mauro Marini (1932–1997), Theotônio dos Santos (1936–2018) and André Gunder Frank (1929–2005) among others, who believed that overcoming underdevelopment under capitalism is improbable.

Kay (1989: 129) indicates that Marxists and reformists agreed on one point: underdevelopment, ‘or the pattern of development of dependent countries’, is not a chronological and logical preliminary stage of development as experienced by the industrial countries. Instead, development and underdevelopment have always been correlated, since the dependent countries ‘were forcefully integrated into the world capitalist system by the dominant countries’. Dependency theorists corrected the claim of modernization theory that modernity first began in Europe and then expanded globally. For proponents of the dependency approach, modernity has always been a part of the intensification of Europe’s relations with the rest of the world.

Within the dependency school, the use and interpretation of the interdependent conceptualization varies extensively when looking at Marxist and reformist perspectives. Two essays by Marini and Sunkel, both published in 1973, illustrate the radical differences between these interpretations.

According to Sunkel, the Industrial Revolution in Europe led to an ‘international system of division of labour which allocated manufacturing activity to the central countries and primary activities to the periphery’ (Sunkel, 1973: 12). Although Sunkel identifies this global division of labour as the source of the dependent relationship Latin America has with Europe, he claims that decisions in national politics are crucial in explaining why certain countries actually fell into dependency (Sunkel, 1973: 24). Consequently, his proposals to overcome underdevelopment are based on the conviction that a resilient national import substitution strategy would minimize the asymmetries between peripheral and central countries.

For Marini, however, the interdependencies between developed and underdeveloped countries are much more profoundly entrenched. On the one hand, he acknowledges the difference between colonial ties and the new dependencies, which emerged with the industrialization of the European (post)colonial powers. On the other hand, however, he emphasizes that the Latin American countries had already been contributing to a global capitalist economy since the 16th century, namely through the export of precious metals, raw materials and crops (Marini, 1973: 19). Marini sees the structures of capital accumulation in Europe, the USA and Latin America as profoundly entangled. Therefore, an economic surplus in dependent Latin America could only be produced through a hyper-exploitation of labour which then hindered the development of strong domestic markets in the region. What is more, because of Latin America’s technological and capital dependency on the central countries, even a steadfast industrialization based on import substitution further embedded the dependency logic:

The industrialization of Latin America produced a new kind of division of labour in which lower stages of industrial production were delegated to the dependent countries, while the imperial centres retained the upper stages (such as computer manufacturing and the electronic industry in general, and the exploitation of energy sources, such as atomic power) and the monopoly of the corresponding technology. (Marini, 1973: 68–69; own translation)

Marini’s work had a considerable impact on modernity studies. It shows that it was not during the Industrial Revolution, but that already during colonialism Latin America was irrevocably integrated into the global history of modernity. Furthermore, he demonstrates that the question of dependency is a global one. It simply cannot be solved at the national level, as the reformist dependentistas believed. This understanding is an explicit break with modernization theory, one that has resurfaced with great force in contemporary discussions on modernity within and outside of Latin America. ⁵

Current tendencies

There is an inconceivable abundance of empirical and theoretical work on modernity in the vast and varied landscape of contemporary Latin American academia today. The manifold approaches generally incorporate current international debates, and since the 1990s, they have been characterized by the attempt to integrate the configurations of modernity in Latin America into a global context.

The direction of the current discussion on modernity in Latin America has been largely shaped by the reception of theorists that Alexander (1994) subsumes under the term ‘neomodernism’. These are theorists who, on the grounds of the ongoing ‘triumph’ of the market economy and democracy since the 1990s, have returned to universalistic claims in social theory rather than agreeing with the then-dominant postmodern scepticism. In contrast to the modernization theories of the postwar period, neomodern approaches no longer describe modernization as an endogenous process occurring in national societies. However, some of the fundamental assumptions of modernization theory, in particular the tradition/modernity dichotomy, are left unquestioned by ‘neomodernists’ (Alexander, 1994: 187).

The central referential figures in the neomodern approaches in Latin America are authors such as Jürgen Habermas (1998), Anthony Giddens (1990) and Ulrich Beck (2008), whose portrayals of global modernity are based on observations of (and within) Europe. Consequently, when these theories are applied to the empirical modernity research in Latin America, they undertake the same function modernization theory once did: What is observed locally is once again deemed a ‘preliminary stage’ of the structures and processes that, according to the received theories, are characteristic of the contemporary (allegedly) global modernity. This is paradigmatically found, for instance, in studies on sexual behaviour and intimacy, as in case of Tenorio’s research carried out in Mexico City in which the recorded patterns of behaviour are classified as ‘traditional’ using Giddens’s (1992) and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s (1990) description of self-reflexive intimacy (Tenorio, 2012). The reception of Luhmann’s work presents a similar distortion: there, Latin American societies are usually categorized as ‘peripheral-modern’ – a specific type of modernity – because they lack functional differentiation: ‘Latin American societies, which, while anchored in a functionally differentiated world-society, are structured along stratified and hierarchical operational features’ (Romero et al., 2009: 172).

The method of implicit comparison which mirrors the progress of modernity in Latin America against the idealized image of the European and North American modernity prevailed until the recent developments of two different research perspectives. The first is based on Shmuel Eisenstadt’s programme of ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt, 2000), and considers modernity’s development path in Latin America as a specific and particular case. The other perspective consists of postcolonial and decolonial approaches that attempt to contextualize Latin America within the framework of an ‘global entangled modernity’ (Conrad and Randeria, 2002; Therborn, 2003) or a transmodernity as preferred by Dussel (2012).

The application of the multiple modernities approach to Latin America finds its paradigmatic expressions in the works of the Chilean sociologist Jorge Larrain (2000, 2005) and of the Brazilian sociologist J Maurício Domingues (2008, 2009, 2012).

Larrain builds on the historical comparative sociology of Peter Wagner (1995 among others) to develop his understanding of modernization not as a ‘unilinear, pre-defined or quasi-natural’ itinerary but as a plural and contingent process, strongly shaped by human agency and subjectivity (Larrain, 2005: 26). Following this interpretation, the author infers that Latin American modernization has led to the constitution of modern societies of a different and singular character:

The Latin American modernity is not exactly the same as the European one; it is a mixture, a hybrid, a product of a mediation process that has its own trajectory; it is not only endogenous, nor has it been imposed completely from the outside. (Larrain, 2000: 25; own translation)

Domingues (2008: 128) distances himself from Eisenstadt’s programme of comparing civilizations, arguing that civilizations in this framework become ‘similar to national or in any case closed cultures’. However, like Eisenstadt, he regards modernity as an articulated civilization system which takes different forms in different regions. At the centre of Domingues’s concept of modernity is a ‘modern imaginary’ consisting of ‘freedom, equality, solidarity, and responsibility’, as well as a set of institutions such as ‘citizenship, the legal-rational state, nationhood, capitalism, racism, patriarchy’ (Domingues, 2008: xv). Domingues examines the development of modernity in Latin America not as a process which follows the model of European modernization (not even chronologically speaking), but rather as one that takes place simultaneously and in conjunction with the development of Europe. He demonstrates how the ‘modern imaginary’ and the modern institutions developed in Latin America at the same time as those in Europe. According to Domingues, the simultaneous and entangled development of modernity in Europe and in the Americas does not lead to a decentred or polycentric modernity, because

[t]he dynamic center of the global system lay in the West – and it remains so to this day to a great extent, with the United States substituting the European countries as the world hegemon – although a number of modernizing moves and dynamic processes, especially if emancipatory, often emerge in the periphery. (Domingues, 2008: 125)

At this point postcolonial and decolonial approaches came forward: the focus here is shifted away from single regions and towards the entanglements and relationships between and beyond different regions. Consequently, modernity becomes spatially and temporally decentred: it is not found in Europe and/or America, instead it has been shaped since its beginnings by colonial and postcolonial power relations between Europe and the ‘rest’ of the world. From this perspective, using the terms centre and periphery does not involve any ascription of ontological and chronological precedence in the constitution of modernity; rather, these terms express the power imbalance between the West and the ‘rest’. Exemplary developments of this theoretical approach in Latin America are found in the work of the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano (1990, 2000 among others).

Quijano’s research on modernity is to a certain extent compatible with the programme of the Marxist wing of the dependency school, a group he was closely connected to in the 1970s. According to Quijano, modernity as a category emerged indeed in the 18th century, but the pertinent social changes had already been set in motion with the ‘conquer’ of America at the end of the 15th century. ⁶ In the context of a new ‘historical totality’ that connects Europe and America, modernity takes shape through the traffic of persons and goods as well as of a specific repertoire of ideas:

Without America, how could one imagine the rise of the typical European utopia of the 16th and 17th centuries when the first signs of a new rationality emerged, which envisioned the future as an empire of hope and rationalization – instead of the ubiquitous past, until then the sole source of legitimacy and comprehension, the only reflection of all dreams and desires of humanity? (Quijano, 1990: 12; own translation)

Beyond this symbolic dimension, Quijano identifies another nexus between America and Europe that was essential in the formation of modernity: the structure of labour control based on race that was shaped by (post)colonial capitalism. The author argues that colonialism and modern slavery led to a labour division which classified sequestered indigenous and African peoples as inferior races and forced them into unpaid labour, whereas white Europeans were paid for their work. This helped Europe to establish itself as the centre of power of world capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Different Latin American scholars have recently built on Quijano’s insights as well as on international discussions around the entangled modernity paradigm for emphasizing the interconnections between current global processes and transformations observed in Latin America. In addition to macro-sociological contributions which convincingly illuminate the interdependencies between ‘modern’ developments in Europe (the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, etc.) and slavery and colonialism in the Americas, some authors have also applied the decolonial/postcolonial framework to study phenomena observed in Latin America at the meso-sociological and micro-sociological levels. The former relates to discussions on democratization and the nexus between political institutions and inequality while the micro level addresses the decentring of political subjects and the deconstruction of cultural identities reified by (neo)liberal multicultural policies in the region (for an overview see: Boatcă and Costa, 2010; Jelin et al., 2017).