Latin America and social theory

Latin American social theory has been marked by constitutive historical tensions that have shaped its development. While in the nineteenth century social thought was urgently required to contribute to the state-building process, in the twentieth century the requirement was to address both the peripheral situation of Latin America vis-à-vis world centers and the global problems of modernization. From the last decades of the twentieth century, the main question was to explain and assess the region’s position in the circuits and flows of modern world society. In this entry, I argue that these historical movements led to a diversified corpus of theoretical approaches aiming to identify the Latin American trajectory through modernity. Considering different Latin American social theories, the entry concludes that knowledge production is currently plural and theoretically original.