Introduction

Sociological and comparative studies on Latin America produced in Western European and North American academic centers explain the sociopolitical contexts of peripheral regions and create explanatory models that are very often arbitrary. Since World War II, the modernization theory tried to interpret the underdevelopment of the region by relating it in a perverse manner to the cultural and institutional legacy of the colonial period. Catch-all culturalist typologies, which related the region's “historical handicap” to its heritage of Latin traditions and Iberian culture, were standard in explaining the causes of backwardness and stunted social, political and economic development. Modernization theory suggested that it would suffice to remove the elements of cultural heritage – which had created the inadequate cultural values – to clear the way for capitalist and democratic development. Autonomous thought on modernization in Latin America, best represented by dependency theory and the works produced by members of the Comisión Económica para América Latina (CEPAL) referring to the perverse consequences of capitalist development (as for example the widening of social and global inequality), did not take roots in mainstream academic centers of the core countries and were overthrown by globalization theories in the 1990s with the triumph of neoliberalism.

Neither the modernization theories nor the globalization theories permit to comprehend satisfactorily the production of inequalities and the ways to overcome them, which nonetheless remains the main challenge in the so-called modern semi-peripheral countries, such as Brazil.