From Sociological Interpretation to Political Science

The Starting Point

The social sciences of the twenty-first century have developed in a context of internationalization that tends to involve interpretive multidisciplinarity and methodological eclecticism, both of which are stimulated by information and digital technologies. The social sciences examine society in terms of hypotheses and various modes of data collection and interpretation, allowing for the formulation and reformulation of new explanations (Puga, 2008), but these methods are relatively new in the region. The Latin American “social science” model during the second half of the twentieth century was guided by subjects, theories, and paradigms (cf. González Casanova, 1970) that generated hypotheses and narrative arguments based on a “holistic” reading of social phenomena. It was paradigms, theories, and approaches rather than methods or analytical techniques that determined the questions about social problems. In the twenty-first century a shift occurred: broadly across the social sciences, methodology has become a central concern in explaining social processes. Research agendas have diversified with democracy as one of the central themes (Coppedge, 2012; Mayorga, 2016). However, the scope of the methods and techniques employed has become one of the central independent variables. While discussion of research methods across all the sciences allows for the corroboration of the breadth and the limits of scientific explanations, some currents of the Latin American social sciences seem to prioritize the method over the subject (cf. Munck, 2007). From the 1950s to the 1970s, the general view espoused by the social sciences was that the political and social phenomena of a society were a reflection of socioeconomic conditions and the correlation of productive forces. Collective phenomena were therefore more important than individual actions and not even groups were autonomous, derived as they were from social classes. A significant number of the research agendas of the time focused on the elaboration of concepts within the body of work established by the dominant political and social theories, leading to inductive mid-range interpretations (Munck, 2007: 8–12).

In this context, “Seven Theses” was innovative not so much because it opened new windows onto the interpretation of Latin American reality as because it broke from the mainstream social sciences, whose logical-historical structure often went unquestioned (Zapata, 2012). At a time when theories on modernization and development had fallen into a crisis and dependency theories were booming, the appearance of “Seven Theses” signaled an impasse like the one that dependency theory brought about for development and modernization theories. Stavenhagen’s (1967 [1965]) arguments in opposition to the seven theses, which reflected the Latin American scientific and intellectual spirit of the times, can be summarized as follows: First, the “archaic” and “modern” societies in Latin America are two products of a single historical process, and their interrelations are the result of a single global society that includes both. Duality is not the issue; the issue is the relations between these two Latin American worlds (traditional and modern), which generate internal colonialism. Second, the progress of urban and industrial areas in the region takes place at the expense of the traditional and underdeveloped areas. Third, there is no consistent internal market, given the absence of a national and progressive form of capitalism. Fourth, an alliance between the national bourgeoisie and the oligarchies prevails in order to maintain this internal colonialism, which benefits both classes. Fifth, the middle classes in Latin America are neither nationalist, progressive, entrepreneurial, nor dynamic; they fail to develop these characteristics because they are economically and socially dependent on the higher strata of the dominant class and therefore maintain the status quo. Sixth, mestizaje (racial mixing) does not constitute an alteration of the social structure, and maintaining the idea of cultural mestizaje as a necessary condition for national integration is a racial prejudice. And seventh, the idea of an alliance between workers and peasants as part of a common front against the bourgeoisie and imperialism is incorrect because, strictly speaking, their interests are not the same.

Around the same time, Andre Gunder Frank (1967 and 1969) advanced similar arguments, pointing out that underdevelopment did not precede development but the two processes unfolded simultaneously; underdevelopment in Latin America was the result of the same historical process that kept the region a satellite, and the relations between the metropolis and its satellite were reproduced within dependent countries. As a rule, criticisms regarding interpretations of Latin American reality were based on Marxism (see Laclau, 1977). Divergences in positions on development and modernization, however, were rooted in a common epistemological platform inspired by the first theories of “political development” and modernization that emerged in the 1950s and matured during the 1960s in the United States. These perspectives, like those criticized by Stavenhagen, shared concerns but were not the same, having different starting points.

The subject of modernization became pivotal in the social sciences as decolonization deepened in Africa during the 1960s. The concept was influenced, on the one hand, by the ideological positions of those who analyzed it and, on the other, by the uncertainty of its starting and ending points. During those years, Latin America developed a critical attitude regarding European and U.S. scientific production, which in turn prompted attention to a specifically Latin American set of issues (Dos Santos, 1969: 149–150). However, Latin American theories of development (which first promoted “outward” and then “inward” development) reached a crisis point when the effects of industrialization did not meet expectations, giving way to dependency theories. These took shape as a critical response to theories of development and modernization, but viewed from a distance they form part of a set of theories that share epistemological assumptions rather than being counterposed. While dependency is identified as a single theory (there were actually several), Horacio Cerutti and others (Chilcote, 1974; Dos Santos, 2002) insist that it was not really a theory but an explanation of a situation. Even so, the literature on dependency seemed more like a doctrine—a set of propositions articulated with a certain degree of internal coherence (Cerutti, 2006 [1983]: 185). In short, perspectives on Latin American reality in the second half of the twentieth century were the sum of at least two major paradigms meant to provide broad explanations of regional reality.

“Seven Theses” and the Latin American Social Sciences of its Time

Part of the ongoing relevance of “Seven Theses” lies in the fact that the phenomena and social conditions it interpreted (for example, internal colonialism) remained and even grew exponentially and in its systemic and holistic analysis of the structural relations among multiple closely related social and economic structures. Economic interpretations of Latin American history (or the weight of the economy in the region’s historical development) dominated much of the twentieth century, especially in sociology and anthropology (e.g., Cardoso and Faletto, 1969; Marini, 1970a). The nineteenth century was characterized as “neocolonial,” dominated by a landowning oligarchy that, in turn, accommodated the agricultural and mining oligarchies trapped in a relationship of dependency with European trade and capital (Jaguaribe, 1973). Thus, Latin America’s entrance into the twentieth century was marked by the search for a path to modernization via industrial development and the middle class’s drive toward democracy. The validity or persistence of the “colonial” concept (and, consequently, of derivations such as “neocolonialism” or “internal colonialism,” which arose from traditional liberal speech in assuming the survival of “colonial structures”) in economic interpretations resignified a kind of economic dependence that survived even after political independence. As pointed out by Charles A. Hale (1993 [1973]), the term “colonial” acquired a strictly Latin American connotation derived from a view of the region as a single historical, cultural, and economic entity. While the nineteenth century in Latin America involved a series of imitations of political and economic structures as a form of identity search, this was accomplished but not fully accepted in the twentieth. This largely explains the “duality” (i.e., internal colonialism, the organic and structural relationship between poles of growth and underdeveloped internal colonies) and the interactions arising from it.

By the 1960s, concerns arose regarding the Latin American social sciences’ capacity to understand the political and economic events in the region. Marxism (or in some places Neo-Marxism) was in vogue and was adopted by some academic sectors as the “only system of thought” that brought together “a knowledge method” and a “worldview” (see Flores, 1964). It could be said that the social sciences did not find the politicization of science suspect if it had a direct effect on the subject being studied. As González Pedrero (1961: 85) pointed out, “Ever since Marxism forged the theory of ideologies nobody, in the realm of social sciences, can play at ‘objective innocence.’ The only sincere and possible kind of objectivity in political science is committed objectivity.” At the same time, there was mistrust of “empiricism,” which was seen into the 1980s, in the words of Fernando H. Cardoso (1981: 272), as “naive” because “it continues to measure the frequency of interactions or the degree of relative prestige between power groups,” blunting social thought’s sensitivity to the emergence of new conjunctures and proving inconsistent when trying to explain the dynamics of historical processes.

In this sense, “Seven Theses” was also a critique, a questioning of the kind of social science practiced until then across much of Latin America. According to Zapata (2012), the theses were based on propositions developed by modernization theorists, on the one hand, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), on the other, and intended to influence public policy. However, the modernization, development, and subsequent dependency theories appear to have developed in a scientific context that remained isolated from theoretical discussions in other parts of the world. At the beginning of the 1970s in the United States, for example, the focus was on a need to develop a less descriptive and more analytical kind of political science while moving from concepts to their quantification (all with due precautions, as pointed out by David Apter in 1965). At the same time in Latin America, there was discussion of the analytical limits of current interpretations without, however, questioning their epistemological and therefore methodological foundations. Studies of political development in Latin America did not debate theories coming from outside the region, where modernization (economic aspects) and political development (institutional aspects) were part of a single process. Even though political development was the “dependent variable” of other socioeconomic changes, there were other more specific social variables that had much greater impact, among them literacy, mobilization, integration, and political participation. For writers like Huntington and Domínguez (1975), for example, political and economic development revolved around the distribution of power: concentration, expansion, and dissemination. Years earlier, Apter (1965) had pointed out that modernization was based on the combination of values and authority structures. Virtually all proponents of modernization identified democracy as their goal (Pasquino, 1998).

The dimensions addressed in “Seven Theses,” as an example of the social science literature of the time, suffer from the absence of politics—its structures, institutions, and actors. Actors (mainly, the social classes) are seen as rational collective subjects with their own identified interests. From this viewpoint, since power relations are subsumed within the economic structure, any mention of politics is wholly unnecessary: it is not autonomous and does not affect the structure. The state is contained within the superstructure (as in classical Marxism), and since relations of production define social development politics becomes a residual element. There is no doubt that the relationship between political and economic development was for several decades and especially between 1950 and 1980 one of the major concerns of the social sciences. In the United States and Europe this concern was addressed by political scientists, who focused on the type of political organization. Latin Americans took off from the opposite starting point: economic development, as a kind of epiphenomenon, was seen as the engine of social progress (Pasquino, 1974: 126). Lack of development was viewed as an unavoidable consequence of U.S.-dominated relations of international exchange. This view would prevail well into the 1980s, as can be seen in the texts compiled by Norbert Lechner (1981) in Estado y política en América Latina. When analyzing regime transitions (forms of power enactment) in Latin American states (still understood as tending to be politically homogeneous), the authors barely address forms of government (modes of power distribution), as if these did not impact the structure. Would this way of practicing social science be effective today?

Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, some areas of the social sciences show varying degrees of disenchantment with research approaches that are based on socio-anthropological interpretations derived from structural conditions (cf. Krotz, 2011). However, social conditions in Latin America have also changed and need to be studied from new angles. Some of the ideas relevant in the 1960s and 1970s now appear anachronistic. Among the reasons for this are the following global political and economic changes:

Theories of development and modernization did spur economic policy models such as Argentina’s 1955 Prebisch Plan and the model of import-substitution industrialization, which was subsequently dismantled in response to the critique of dependency theories. The 1980s and 1990s saw the appearance of regional policies influenced “from outside” such as the Washington Consensus and structural adjustment policies that replaced those aimed toward “development” and modernization.

Political Science and “Holistic” Interpretations

“Seven Theses” criticized a set of ideas and theoretical assumptions from a particular historical period while reflecting the model adopted by the Latin American political sciences at that stage. There was concern regarding the boundaries between the diverse disciplines dedicated to the study of political, power, economic, and social relations and their explanatory scope. The first obstacle, observed by Ruy Mauro Marini (1970b), was the difficulty of establishing the boundary between political sociology and political science. The second was the extent to which Latin America’s economic and social conditions allowed for the development of reflective and critical thought regarding the region itself. It was the changes that took place after the war and subsequently under “developmentalism” that strengthened disciplinary confluence in addressing regional problems. The dominant perspective over several decades was that politics could not be understood from the viewpoint of a single social science but required a set of disciplines that converged in the plurality known as the “political sciences.” Half a century after the publication of “Seven Theses,” we should ask ourselves what Latin American political science can (re) learn from a 50-year old interpretive model. Although Stavenhagen’s arguments in that essay were characterized by an underlying vision steeped in Marxism, their relevance lies in their holistic approach, in which national characteristics are blurred by a powerful context of regional/structural trends. While the seven theses can be located within the succession of paradigms ranging from “modernism” to “dependency” (Helguea, 1989: 91 and passim)—that is, as part of a research agenda—they are an example of the regional social scientific thought and practice of the time.

Today, the Latin American social sciences have gained considerable independence from overarching ideological paradigms such as the kind of Marxism that held sway throughout the 1960s. Changes in the international context during the 1990s, especially the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the socialist bloc, allowed the political sciences to free themselves from dogmatic interpretations such as Marxism. As José Nun (1965: 267) points out, the latter should have been a theoretical lens with which to capture and reflect a multitude of rays but became a tube that allowed only a certain kind of light through. In this context, the “new” political science (singular), the product of U.S. academic influence on the training of Latin American social scientists, was (re)born. From a critical perspective and with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that a new type of dogmatism, a methodological and specifically quantitative one, has spread. It cannot be described as dominant, but it still produces intellectual and academic biases similar to those of previous decades (cf. Meilleur, 2005).

The kind of political science currently practiced in Latin America focuses on the particularities (some of them irrelevant) of political (usually institutional) phenomena and on specific, mostly electoral processes. Regional trends receive much less attention, except in the field of international relations. There is no Latin American paradigm or grand theory to orient analytical perspectives. Even though theories of democracy (from J. A. Schumpeter to R. Dahl and A. Downs) and their derivations have become the general framework for studies of sociopolitical reality, political science has concentrated on strictly institutional aspects, paying little or no attention to structural or holistic aspects. In other words, if in the 1960s and 1970s the political sciences analyzed the Latin American regional situation without paying much attention to political institutional issues and with very little empirical evidence for their claims while, at the same time, viewing economic structural aspects as determining the political process, the opposite has been happening during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Few analyses have returned to observing political and social structures as long-term processes. While Latin American integration into the new dynamics of capitalism has been achieved simultaneously with democratization, interpretations are now split among world-systems theorists, political scientists, and economists. Some social sciences have become more autonomous: their analyses have depth and are methodologically consistent. Their interpretive horizons, however, are increasingly narrow and have a limited impact on the development of public policy.

Some explanatory analyses of the development process in Latin America, such as the paradigms of modernization, developmentalism, and dependency—along with their critiques, as outlined in “Seven Theses”—were linked to important intellectual figures with both academic and political weight. These texts became platforms for social organizations and movements and for political parties. Even some governments adopted developmentalist arguments. They were analyses that attempted to formulate policies aimed at the political and social transformation of the continent (Zapata, 1998). Little can be said about the social sciences today aside from the guidelines applied by neoliberal economists during the last two decades of the twentieth century. The social sciences across the region have focused on pointing out our problems but have offered little in the way of solutions.