Latin American social theory or from Latin America?: For a truly existing sociology of modernity

Abstract

The decolonial current has proposed a specifically Latin American knowledge that speaks and knows from its historical particularity and its specific cultural matrix, rejecting the sociological knowledge of European modernity as intrinsically oppressive in its universalist pretension. This proposition, I argue, stems from a profoundly idealistic interpretation of the historical process of modernity, which ends up supplanting its materiality by its ideological correlates. A materialist interpretation of what modernity as a global process has meant, and of the role that Latin America - and other colonies - played in it, allows instead for the elaboration of a sociology of actually existing modernity. In this really existing modernity, the region is neither a truncated process nor a reality incommensurable with respect to "the modern": on the contrary, it is a particularly clear and relevant expression of its characteristic processes and conflicts. It is precisely from there that the sociology of Latin America can not only contribute to the modern project of science, but play a crucial critical role in it.