Sociology, progress and the civilizatory road in argentina. a journey through the ideas of long-term social change (1845-1960)

Abstract

Over time, Argentine sociology has developed an intellectual project that had to reconcile the mythical promise of a promising future for the country, with a political program oriented towards social change. In this sense, this discipline focused on the search to understand the history of the civilizing development of the Argentine nation. When a cultural legacy that affirmed a manifest destiny of greatness expanded in the mid-nineteenth century, sociology took on the task of tracking and guiding this transition towards civilization, adapting its entire theoretical-cultural arsenal to meet this objective. However, the permanent crises in Argentina invited local sociology to reflect on the obstacles on this path, and forced it to identify factors and social actors capable of facilitating or blocking these changes towards an unquestioned future. Thus, Argentine sociology built long-term theoretical arguments on social change and the role of national society in the history of Western civilization. This article historically reconstructs these interpretations of progress, development and modernization in different intellectual stages, along with a tour of the institutionalization process of the discipline. A set of ideas and interpretations on the future of the country in the Generation of 1837, the sociology of the Centenary and the sociology of the interwar period are presented in a synthetic and integrated manner. This review of authors and conceptual debates includes a discussion on the nature of change, the resulting tensions, the role of social groups in accelerating or slowing development, and the tools necessary to overcome obstacles. The main hypothesis is the existence of a line of continuity between these ideas and the theory of Latin American modernization of the 1960s. Therefore, Gino Germani's project made possible the confluence of international demands to rethink social change in Argentina, with a long-standing native tradition (in cultural, disciplinary and epistemological terms), aimed at thinking about this civilizing transition, although with criticisms and challenges.