The research on modernity in Latin America: Lineages and dilemmas

Abstract

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French

Conventional research on modernity has interpreted Latin American experiences as lagging behind, as expressions of an ‘incomplete’ or failed modernity, since they do not meet the conditions of a ‘complete’ achievement of modernity as described by theories developed within European and, later, US academia. Since the emergence of dependency theory in the 1960s, and more emphatically since the 1990s, after the dissemination of postcolonial and decolonial theories in the region, this still dominant interpretation has been challenged by new approaches which convincingly underline the interdependent development of global modernity. This article reconstructs part of these debates and identifies a number of different lineages in current research on modernity in Latin America: a first lineage which describes modernization in Latin America as a mimicry of European/Western modernity; a second lineage which characterizes modernity as a global transformation activated by the colonial annexation of the Americas into capital accumulation; and an intermediary lineage which also recognizes the importance of colonialism in shaping global modernity, but at the same time underlines the European origin of modern emancipatory imaginaries.

Keywords

Dependency theory entangled modernity modernity in Latin America modernization theory multiple modernities

Introduction

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, Mexican essayist and author Octavio Paz perfectly illustrated Latin America’s complex relationship with modernity. He pointed out that Latin America saw itself historically as the pre-modern flip side of a modern Europe: ‘This is why there was frequent talk of “Europeanizing” our countries: the modern was outside and had to be imported’ (Paz, 1990). The term ‘modern’ in Latin America commonly involves a spatial and temporal association of modernity with Western Europe, later with North America as well. Because of this widespread understanding of modernity, Latin Americans often tend to consider that modernity is found either outside of the region or, if within Latin America, at some point in the future. It is the future of Latin America rather than its present that has been described by means of the concept of modernity.

The definition of modernity as a geographically and/or temporally distant social formation is also a consequence of the historical (lack of) theory production in the region. Due to the position of Latin American sociologists in the asymmetrical processes of knowledge production, they saw and often still see themselves as recipients of theories produced in Europe or the USA. Consequently, Latin American experiences of modernity are constantly interpreted as lagging behind, as expressions of an ‘incomplete’ modernity since they do not meet the conditions of a ‘complete’ achievement of modernity described by these theories. Additionally, the definition of the term ‘modernity’ in Latin America – as well as in other regions – proves problematic due to the inseparable connection between political-ideological and theoretical-analytical uses. Ever since the national independence movements swept through Latin America during the first half of the 19th century, modernity has been a highly contested notion. It is equated with a specific (distant) social formation and simultaneously represents a vision of the future whereby different forms of domination, also including dictatorships, are legitimized in the name of modernization.

It should be noticed that, on the one hand, the idealization of Europe and later of the USA as sources of authentic modern values represents a political self-subjugation of the Latin American upper classes at the global level. On the other hand, the imitation of these ideas produced an ideology that justified the dominance of an allegedly Europeanized elite over the (still) ‘not yet Europeanized’ masses (Schwarz, 1992).

Dependency theory, or at least part of the research categorized as such, represents the first attempt to break with the logic according to which modernity in Latin America is simply a distorted copy of the European or North American original. It undertakes a thorough and groundbreaking examination of the entangled developments of modernity in different world regions. This perspective is being referred to and expanded upon in current debates, yet without acquiring a hegemonic position. Throughout history and up until now the dominant trends within the discussions on modernity in Latin America have been those that deem it the result of the region’s Europeanization and Westernization.

In addition to these approaches, a further perspective on modernity was constituted in Latin America, which draws on the research programme of multiple modernities, as formulated by Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000). Some theses of this interpretation repeat the theorems of modernization theory, others emphasize the entangled character of modernity.

In this article, I reconstruct and discuss these trends, which I call the 2.5 lineages of modernity studies in Latin America. The first lineage regards the development of modernity in Latin America as a process of Westernization; the second variant stresses the entanglements between Latin America and global modernity; and lastly, the 0.5 lineage is an intermediary interpretation which views the unfolding of Latin America as a particular form in the context of multiple modernities. The reference to multiple modernities as a 0.5 lineage derives from its content-based position between the other two lineages. As a research programme, the multiple modernities approach is internationally well consolidated; in Latin America it is increasing influential.

This article reconstructs the lineages of the Latin American research on modernity in three steps. It begins with discussing the difficulties of finding an epistemic space in which a theory-based reflection of modernity in Latin America can be articulated. Then, the next section presents a selective historical overview of the vast intellectual debate about modernity up to the present. My selection of authors privileges those contributions which are both representative for encompassing tendencies and constitutive of lineages identified in the current sociological debates on modernity in Latin America. Lastly, the concluding section discusses the temporal and spatial perspectives characteristic for each lineage.

Systematizing long-term theoretical developments into intellectual lineages is an established genre within social sciences and the humanities. Starting in the 1970s, Foucault’s (1971) reconstruction of Nietzschean genealogy and simultaneous developments in the field of the Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts: Koselleck, 1972) have generated new methods and continuing impulses to this classical field of studies. The present article is rather concerned with the resonances of these debates within sociological theory and historical sociology.¹ Accordingly, it seeks to broadly situate the approaches at the historical, epistemological and societal level. Thereby, this article makes a specific contribution to analyse historical continuities, shifts and ruptures in the reflection on modernity in Latin America which have not been sufficiently researched yet. In addition, it investigates the nexus between theoretical developments and the changing position of Latin American social sciences in the global geopolitics of knowledge production.²

Latin America’s position in the international social sciences

Since their very beginnings, Latin American social sciences had difficulties in positioning themselves in the international context. Especially challenging for Latin American social scientists is the question of their own production of theory, as they were not expected by ‘international’ peers to produce theories. A thorough description of this theoretical abstinence stemming from external and internal constraints is not within the scope of this article. Its focus rather lies in the historical trajectory of social sciences in Latin America represented by three dilemmas that have contributed to this evident hesitation.

The first dilemma is of an epistemological character and goes back to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the initial stage of the Latin American social sciences, which was accompanied by a broad dissemination of racial and evolutionist theories in the region. These entailed certain disciplinary divisions within the humanities and social sciences that were based on a clear dichotomy of the world: modern Europe versus the non-modern rest. In accordance with this division, national historiography and social sciences were delegated to modern Europe, while the rest of the world fell into the field of study of European ethnology:

The unit of history – in which nature, moral, and political history coexisted – is taken apart and separated into a historical discourse of the modern type (which examines historical societies) and an ethnological discourse (which studies the so-called savage societies). The separation between history and ethnology consequently excludes the ‘savage’ peoples from the historian’s field, as a condition for the formation of a ‘general science of humanity’ and of disciplines such as ethnology and cultural anthropology, which investigate non-occidental societies. (Ventura, 1987: 148; own translation)

Hence Latin America fell into the subject area of European ethnology. In the context of this epistemic organization, the Latin American social sciences as such represent a contradiction in terms: by definition, scientific production of knowledge should not take place in Latin America. Furthermore, disciplines like sociology and political science researching modern societies in traditional Latin America would have been misplaced. Consequently, the early reflections of the social sciences in Latin America were heavily normative and disconnected from the local experience of modernity; during this time, social scientists worked towards prescriptive changes for their national societies (case par excellence: Oliveira Vianna, 1982 [1919]).

The second dilemma is of a theoretical nature and emerged more clearly during the postwar period. The institutionalization process of the sociological and political sciences as national disciplines began under the aegis of modernization theory. At least partially, modernization theory solved the above-mentioned problem by expanding the geographical range of sociological analysis to all world regions. In addition to this, modernization theory also granted the ‘non-Western’ national social sciences legitimacy to produce knowledge. However, this did not lead to a reconciliation between social experience and theory production since Latin American sociology was confined to reread and apply modernization theorems. Its purpose was not to ‘clearly understand’ social behaviour on a local level, as Weber (1922) would have wished. Instead, what was aimed at was the estimation of the distance that separated the supposedly particularistic and traditional lifestyles at the local level from the universal, modern ones in industrial societies. To overcome this distance, the advancement of social technologies was required (Knöbl, 2001).

Finally, the third issue is the specialization dilemma, in which the Latin American social sciences have been trapped more recently. In parallel with the increasing fragmentation of the social sciences, its sub-disciplines have uncritically adopted the methodological premises of modernization theory which stipulate that Europe and more generally the West provide the model for the transformation of all societies (Patel, 2015). Thus, specific developments of modernity in a small number of societies are taken as a theoretical constant that supposedly must also occur in all others. References to internationally established authors of the respective fields and their work seem to be a prerequisite for specialized social scientists in Latin America to expand international networks and publishing opportunities (Beigel, 2014; Collyer, 2016). However, this is paid at a high price, namely the increasing division between theory production and social experience.³

In the following section, the influence of the three dilemmas concerning the intellectual discussion of modernity during different phases will be further elaborated.

Modernity in Latin American research

Speaking of Latin America as a region and therefore regarding Latin America as an analytical unit can be easily and justifiably criticized. As several authors (e.g. Cairo, 2010) have pointed out, the countries involved have very little in common apart from a shared linguistic kinship and their similar histories as former Spanish and Portuguese colonies.

However, a close examination of the discussions on modernity indicates that Latin America is, though not a homogeneous referential unit, indeed a strongly compelling one. In other words, despite the divergent transformations Latin American countries have undergone at different periods of time, there is a substantial number of overlapping points in the scientific discussion on modernity within the overall region. Four distinct phases of the research and the discourse history are illustrated in the following using representative examples. Due to the extensive pertinent literature, omissions and exclusions of authors and approaches are unavoidable, yet, after broadly reviewing studies from different countries, I sustain that the main phases described below are representative of the theoretical developments observed in Latin America as a region.

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).

Concluding remarks: Lineages

Having reviewed the trajectory of modernity research in Latin America, two main lineages of interpretation come to light. The first is born out of an evolutionist perspective. It begins with Sarmiento and runs through the course of scientific racism, the first reception of Weber, modernization theory, and – to a certain extent – from the reformist wing of dependence theory to the ‘neomodern’ approaches. From this view, modernity corresponds to a time–space configuration that originated in Western Europe during the 18th century. From there, it spread to other world regions that could modernize themselves after a model similar to the European one. This perspective has consequences for the position of Spain and Portugal within Europe: according to this framework the societies belonging to the Iberian Peninsula were not considered a part of European modernity and had to be Europeanized first. Hence, Sarmiento referred to Spain’s position in Southern Europe during his time as a country ‘lying between the Mediterranean and the ocean, between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, united to cultured Europe by a broad isthmus and separated from barbarous Africa by a narrow strait’ (Sarmiento, 1874 [1845]: 14).

The initial reception of Weber’s work exhibits a similar stance. The Catholic Spaniards and Portuguese are ascribed with a propensity to reject ‘the modern religion of work and appreciation for utilitarian activity’, which amounts to ‘a reduced capacity for social organization’ (Holanda, 2012 [1936]: 9).

In terms of each individual country, the evolutionist interpretation of modernity led to a methodological dualism which portrays the not yet ‘modernized’ Latin American societies as a dichotomy: the civilized vs the barbarians (Sarmiento), superior and inferior races or ethnicities (scientific racism); traditional vs modern sectors (modernization theory); functionally differentiated systems vs hierarchical and stratified spheres (system theory); traditional or simple modern vs reflexive lifestyles (neomodernists).

In this first lineage, the development of modernity over time follows an evolutionary model: from tradition to modernity, and from modernity to ‘high or late modernity’, ‘second modernity’ or ‘reflexive modernity’.⁷

For the second lineage, which is based on the Marxist wing of dependency theory and is currently being pursued by social scientists inspired by postcolonial and decolonial theories, the history (or at least the prehistory) of modernity begins with the conquista of the Americas. Consequently, Spain and Portugal do not represent a pre- or semi-modern part of Europe; rather, they are interpreted as forerunners and a driving force of modernity in Europe. The secondary roles they assumed from the 18th century do not make them less modern since geographical and power shifts are inherent to modernity. This line of interpretation also explicitly rejects dualistic descriptions of single societies. Instead, it leans towards a radical relational approach, which regards not only different world regions, but also internal social structures and lifestyles deemed ‘traditional’, ‘modern’ and ‘reflexive’, as part of a web of relations which shapes global modernity with its power asymmetries. This second lineage claims that the beginnings of modernity are clearly not to be found in the 18th and 19th centuries but towards the end of the 15th century. The historical shifts in power from Southern to Western Europe and then to North America are emphasized along with the respective forms of domination: colonialism, imperialism, hegemony.

In terms of the differentiation between the spatial-temporal development of modernity in Latin America, the ‘multiple modernities’ programme, referred to here as the second and half lineage, falls neither under Westernization nor under intensification of global entanglements. On the one hand, this approach emphasizes the simultaneous development of modernity in Europe and America which points towards a common ground with the entangled modernity approach. On the other hand, Domingues, one of the best known Latin American proponents of the programme, concedes that Europe, and later the USA, set the path for the ‘modern imaginary’ and for modern institutions, which places him not far from an evolutionist interpretation. What is more, the ‘multiple modernities’ programme describes various paths of development which run through the different modernities in different regions, thus producing several histories and geographies of modernity which are to a certain degree independent of each other. The entangled lineage contests this, as demonstrated by Quijano’s exemplary work, claiming that there has been but one global and interdependent geography and one single history of modernity.

The multiple modernities programme indeed shares the postcolonial view of colonialism’s role in the formation of capitalism and power relations in modernity. However, authors object to Quijano’s interpretation, according to which a proto-modernity arises with the colonial annexation of the Americas. Quijano’s mistake, according to Domingues, consists of dating ‘modernity too early and overlook[ing] the utopian, emancipatory horizon of modernity, concentrating only on the elements of domination it embodies’ (Domingues, 2008: xvii). Although Larrain (2000) does not directly challenge Quijano’s proto-modernity thesis, he also sustains that modernity is intrinsically linked to emancipatory ideals only developed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Domingues for his part distinguishes three major phases in the history of modernity. The descriptions of the first and the second phases draw extensively on conventional periodization, particularly on Wagner’s (1995) findings. Domingues speaks of a ‘liberal restricted phase’ which stretches from the end of the 19th century to the 1920s, and of a second phase which is characterized by a strong presence of the states, encompassing the time period between the 1930s and the 1980s (Domingues, 2011: 518). The innovation in Domingues’s approach lies in the characterization of the third phase, which he claims begins in the 1990s. The empirical corroboration of his thesis is not drawn from Europe or North America, but from Latin America (Brazil in particular) and from Asia, with a special emphasis on India and China. In all three regions, Domingues observes a third phase of modernity currently taking shape (Domingues, 2012). Although this phase has formed and developed differently in each of the contexts investigated, Domingues claims that a common driving force is present in all cases. In contrast to the market-oriented initial phase and the state-dominant second phase, the third phase is characterized by new societal modes of governance. It refers to the increase in the plurality of lifestyles and a wider set of specialized social networks which are to take over the role which until recently was occupied by hierarchical coordination structures of markets and states.

Larrain, also drawing on Wagner’s phases of modernity, but concentrating only on Latin America, comes to a different periodization. Accordingly, Latin America’s trajectory towards modernity has followed five phases: (1) from national independencies to 1900: oligarchic modernity; (2) from 1900 to 1950: crisis of oligarchic modernity and populist modernization; (3) 1950–1970: industrial expansion; (4) 1970–1990: dictatorships and the lost decade; and (5) since 1990: neoliberal modernization (Larrain, 2000: 40ff.).

Lastly, there is no consensus within contemporary Latin American modernity research concerning the starting point of modernity, its phases of development or the current stage of the region’s modernity. Quijano and Dussel adopt a colonial-imperial conception of modernity, according to which modernity originates in the 15th and 16th centuries and has since then retained its fundamental characteristics. The ‘neomodern’ and the ‘multiple modernities’ approaches place the emergence of modernity in the 18th and 19th centuries. According to these, a complex and nuanced form of modernity can be observed today, which – depending on the author – has been denominated the second or reflexive modernity, the third phase of modernity or neoliberal modernization.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous reviewers of Current Sociology for their valuable comments and suggestions on a previous version of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Sérgio Costa trained in economics and sociology in Brazil and Germany. He is Professor of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and spokesperson for Mecila (Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America). His areas of interest are social theory, postcolonial sociologies, inequality research, conviviality and difference. He has published extensively on these subjects in different languages and formats (monographs, edited volumes, journal articles and dissemination papers). His most recent book publication is the volume Global Entangled Inequalities. Conceptual Debates and Evidence from Latin America (co-edited with Elizabeth Jelin and Renata Motta; Routledge, 2017).

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