History of Sociology in Chile: Trajectories, Discontinuities, and Projections (Sociology Transformed) 3031104803, 9783031104800

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SOCIOLOGY TRANSFORMED SERIES EDITORS: JOHN HOLMWOOD · STEPHEN TURNER

History of Sociology in Chile Trajectories, Discontinuities, and Projections Juan Jesús Morales Martín Justino Gómez de Benito

Sociology Transformed Series Editors

John Holmwood School of Sociology and Social Policy University of Nottingham Nottingham, UK Stephen Turner Department of Philosophy University of South Florida Tampa, FL, USA

The field of sociology has changed rapidly over the last few decades. Sociology Transformed seeks to map these changes on a country by country basis and to contribute to the discussion of the future of the subject. The series is concerned not only with the traditional centres of the discipline, but with its many variant forms across the globe.

Juan Jesús Morales Martín Justino Gómez de Benito

History of Sociology in Chile Trajectories, Discontinuities, and Projections

Juan Jesús Morales Martín Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez Santiago, Chile

Justino Gómez de Benito Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez Santiago, Chile

ISSN 2947-5023     ISSN 2947-5031 (electronic) Sociology Transformed ISBN 978-3-031-10480-0    ISBN 978-3-031-10481-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10481-7 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Society and Sociology in Chile  1 2 From “Armchair” to “Scientific” Sociology (1948–1958) 13 3 Sociology: From Scientific to Its Radicalization (1958–1973)  33 4 Breakdown,  Crisis, Prosecution, and Refoundation of Sociology Under Civic–Military Dictatorship (1973–1990) 63 5 Democratic  Recovery and the New Scene for the Academic and Professional Exercise of Sociology (1990–2010) 99 6 The  Return of Society in the Twenty-First Century (2011–2021)131 7 Conclusions: A Plural Sociology for a Diverse Society161 Index171

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Society and Sociology in Chile

Abstract  The origin of sociology in Chile, its institutionalization process, and the close relationship between sociology and society are introduced. We give account on how the country’s historical events have marked the evolution and identities of the discipline, and highlight the Latin-­ Americanist identity of Chilean sociology, as it shares features with other sociological fields of the region. In addition, the analytical dimensions used in the chapters are introduced, namely: (1) the relationship between society and sociology; (2) sociology in Latin America and Chile; (3) the institutional framework of sociological training and production; (4) sociologists within the intellectual field; (5) sociologists and sociology in other fields; and (6) sociology of sociology. Keywords  Sociology • Chile • Identity • Process • Institutionalization • Crisis Making history of sociology for sociologists, and also for the general public, implies something different from assuming a descriptive approach on the development of the events and factors that have influenced it from its origin to its present. Its expansion and progression should be taken into account, but also its reductions and suppressions, and main promoters

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Morales Martín, J. Gómez de Benito, History of Sociology in Chile, Sociology Transformed, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10481-7_1

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with their achievements and difficulties, their thematic fields, tensions, heroes and villains. In addition to outlining a chronology, making sociology’s history means also understanding the process of configuration of its identity, or rather identities, insofar as in both the old and new worlds— and in Chile too—sociology was born plural and diverse. Its object of study—Chilean society and its social life—is heterogeneous in the composition of its population, its form of stratification, and the extreme particularities of its geography and territories. The processes and events that have marked its history have also taken part in sociopolitical and ideological movements that carried diverse, even divergent, orientations and purposes. More importantly, its spaces of institutionalization—both public and private—, as well as its actors and their analytical perspectives, have marked an accumulation of sociological production that has proved diverse in quantity and quality, but above all in themes, theoretical approaches, and methodological uses. These pages are motivated by a set of questions that show a continuity throughout the two centuries in which the seven decades that make up this history of Chile’s sociology are located. These questions are related to the origins of the discipline, its development, and its institutionalization process; they also raise the significance, social function, and roles that sociology has played, along with the status it has acquired both for society and for its own practitioners. To answer these questions, we theoretically rely on a classical approach that combines perspectives from intellectual history, the history of sociology, and the sociology of sociology (Blois, 2018; Brunner, 2014; Coser, 1971; Moya, 1970; Ribes, 2008). We propose therefore a study of Chile’s sociology that places the discipline, its institutions, authors and works, both within and outside the space of sociology itself. Particular attention is given to the historical contexts and social frameworks; to the general political, cultural, and intellectual issues that accompanied it; to the sociological tradition and the discourses about its major works; as well as to the audiences to which these works are addressed. The book also intends, albeit modestly, to understand how sociologists themselves have defined and regarded themselves over time; what their relationship with the sociological tradition has been; what are their concepts of Chilean sociology and society; and how they have been seen by other sociologists, and by the very society they have analyzed. It is very important to point out here the influence of Dahrendorf (1966a, 1966b) and his perspective of relating society and sociology, something that makes it possible to problematize the historical evolution of sociology in Chile,

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and its relationship with its own society (Garretón, 2005). For the history of sociology in Chile is also constitutive of the history of Chilean society. Given the closeness of the link between sociology and society (Beigel, 2007), this combination of the study of sociology, society and history allows us to understand Chile as a powerful “laboratory” for the development, production, and application of sociological knowledge. More concretely, we depart from the fact that sociology in this country, from the decade of the 1950s until the coup d’état of 1973, assumed a role of “awareness” regarding the broader socio-historical projects, being it by formulating its general perspective, in its programmatic design or in the formulation and representation of projects or visions of society. Of course, there is a “before” and an “after” with regard to the 1973 democratic breakdown, and this historical fracture makes it difficult to trace continuities within the Chilean sociological field, when dealing with the discipline’s classic authors or the received legacies and traditions. Above all, it profoundly conditions the account that Chilean sociology makes of its own past and about itself. For the discipline, like sociologists themselves and their works, share a common historicity and are mediated by a specific society, with its processes, contradictions, issues, traumas, and dilemmas. However, interpreting the history of Chile’s sociology involves not only placing it along the history of Chilean society, but also leads us to develop a broader framework, since it belongs to the history of sociology in Latin America and, due to the great influence of European and US-American sociologies, is also tied to the actual globalized world. We dwell a little to point out the Latin-American identity of Chilean sociology, which shares with other sociologies of the region features such as composition and cultural diversity, political and economic crises as well as ways to overcome them, and their contribution to building future perspectives. The sociology developed in Chile was instrumental for the whole region, and even it contributed to unfold the idea of a “Latin American sociology”, with its distinctive scholars and professionals, institutions, theoretical and methodological options, and political commitments, under the coloniality of knowledge and power, displaying a singular nature since its inception (Germani, 1964; Giordano, 2017; Ianni, 1965; Marini, 2008; Poviña, 1941; Roitman, 2008). In fact, and as we shall see, Chilean sociology has made a contribution to giving shape to various debates about the configuration and structural composition of our societies; on the status of LatAm in the world; on how the region has been incorporated into global history and, in addition, into the world economic

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system; and what the historical development of capitalism in the region— which today is in its neoliberal stage—has been. Within Latin American sociology, such intellectual debates can be traced back to at least the 1960s; as these pages shall indicate, they are still alive when it comes to interpreting the social structures produced by modernization processes and the particular forms of being in globalization. This is also about writing a history of sociology that, even when situated in its subcontinent and bearing the features of Latin-American sociology, has also been nourished by—and dependent on—major European and US American universities, in its trends and paradigms as much as in its methodologies, and particularly in the training of its most outstanding intellectuals and scholars. It is also a sociology that received numerous scholars and instructors from other countries, especially Europeans, but also from the rest of the continent. In fact, the contribution of foreign intellectuals has been instrumental to the development of sociology; nonetheless, national authors have also stood out with original sociological products. This is because, in contrast to other Latin American countries, Chile is distinguished by an early institutionalization of sociology in the 1950s. To speak about institutionalization is thus to acknowledge, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms (1981, 1990, 1996), the existence of a field with its own logics, norms, rules, agents, languages and codes. Of course, in speaking about the sociological field we also speak of a discipline that has endured different stages of autonomy and expansion. In some moments, sociology made in Chile was referential for the rest of Latin America, affording for the constitution of truly regional circuits of knowledge and practitioners. In some periods, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, the sociological field’s autonomy has been particularly prominent. In turn, sociology in Chile has endured other moments of contraction, above all during the period of the dictatorship, which implied a major accommodation to adverse circumstances. Obviously, the 1973 coup impacted the subsequent disciplinary advance and determined its institutional, political and social frameworks, which, in some way, have legacies to this day. This is especially visible in the current fragmentation of the Chilean sociological field, which is characterized by multiple private universities competing with the public ones for both student enrollment and research funding resources by the state; with a growing and diverse work and professional environment—both public and private; and with civil society actors such as private study centers and

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think-tanks emerging firmly when it comes to building and disseminating different projects of society. All this being said, our hypothesis is certainly controversial: not only was Chilean sociology conditioned by the 1973 coup, but after the 1990 democratic return it was also conditioned, precisely, by the cultural and ideological frameworks of the “transition to democracy” and the so-called “political agreements”. From such a historical milestone, we argue that in the 1990s there was a parallel “sociology agreement”: this was certainly useful for the sake of the new public policies that the transition to democracy had to face, but nevertheless with not enough critical distance when reflecting on itself and its own past. As a matter of fact, many studies of the history of Chilean sociology since then have not contained an in-depth analysis of the axes that this work considers essential; accordingly, this book adopts a different approach to the history of the discipline. For example, in the two decades from the 1950s until the coup, sociology made an instrumental contribution to the developmentalist, modernizing agenda of Chilean society. Yet this political and social project, in addition to being fixed on the Marxism/anti-Marxism axis of the Cold War’s global context (Lamo de Espinosa, 2001), was crossed by significant structural tensions within Chilean society itself. These included: the Catholicism/secularism discussion; the historical quarrel between Universidad de Chile and Pontificia Universidad Católica for the intellectual leadership of Chilean society; the dispute between younger and older generations of sociologists over the scientific status and political value of the discipline; and, above all, for its relationship with political parties, regarding the role that sociology should assume in the socioeconomic transformations that society demanded. Undoubtedly, these axes added further tension to the definitions on the identity—or plural identities—of sociology and its practitioners: public intellectuals, militants, professionals, technocrats, bureaucrats, academics, scientists, consultants, and so on. Therefore, given the evidence of certain correspondences of the historical context, the sociological field and political power during this period of time, it is striking how the most recent studies about the history of Chilean sociology have left unattended the relationships between sociology, politics and political parties, and some salient problems such as migrations and social movements that have affected the way of life of the population since the return to democracy in 1990. Variables such as political alignments or partisan membership have not been sufficiently addressed by scholarly sociology; in fact, as was mentioned earlier, this has had repercussions for

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the ways in which the history of sociology in Chile has been narrated and recounted. Very few works (examples include Cortés, 2020; Iglesias, 2015, 2016) have pointed out this mutual reciprocity between the politicization of Chilean sociology and its positive effects on its institutionalization and professionalization. By contrast, for other authors (Chernilo and Mascareño, 2005; Morandé, 1984), this entanglement with the political field has blocked sociology’s independence. From this viewpoint, the politicization of sociology ended up becoming a sort of technology for programmed change, thereby blurring the logic of the field and hindering its autonomy. Perhaps the biggest problem in understanding the discipline has been to overstate its capability to aptly and effectively contribute to the country’s development and help solve its more pressing social problems (Godoy, 1977). From a realistic perspective, we argue that the Chilean sociological field has been related to power and politics, and, of course, it has been closely influenced by the modernization process, the country’s development, and its various political cycles. Sociology, at least in Chile, has historically occupied a position of leadership in the interpretation of reality, displaying a remarkable political will to act on such a reality from the political realm. This close relationship has involved a series of crises, tensions, even persecutions, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. Consequently, high doses of creativity and adaptation strategies to unexpected, adverse contexts have been demanded from sociology’s representatives and institutions. Furthermore, that urge of sociology for intervening and participating in fundamental debates—such as poverty, marginality, development, democratization, inequality, or the need for social change itself—has not necessarily been a negative element; rather, the desire by sociologists to intervene in social and political reality has been a distinctive feature that continues to the present day. Initially, sociologists in Chile contributed to expanding both critical awareness in society and the potential for participation in emancipation processes (Hopenhayn, 1993). In the heat of development and modernization, this moment also helped professionalize sociology throughout Latin America, and clearly in Chile. During that period, there was a strong discourse about sociologists as public intellectuals with political commitments. In the period of the civil-military dictatorship, the panorama for the practice of sociology changed radically. Nonetheless, political militancy, participation in popular social movements, and political commitments against the regime and for human rights and democratic recovery remained

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in the collective imagination. With the return to democracy, sociology not only returned to the universities; it also—as we will argue—recovered political presence in different spheres—locating sociologists in the upper echelons of state power, as government officials on duty, as advisers in political parties, or participating in unions, organizations, and social movements. In doing so, sociology returned to society and to the political sphere by advising, diagnosing, and influencing as much as possible (Ruiz, 2015). Conversely, a new field of professional development was created in the private sector. In addition, in recent years the discipline has been revisiting its conceptual and interpretive frameworks, as a way to better explain the emergence of new actors, subjects or social movements in contemporary Chile, carrying with them different vindications in education, social welfare, environmental well-being, ethnic and cultural recognition, gender and sexual diversity, health, and dignity. This allows us to speak today of a diverse sociology, which has been adjusting its own identities towards a plurality that was in sync with a dynamic society with its increasingly complex challenges, contradictions, and opportunities. Composed of seven chapters (this introduction included), this book provides an account of the discipline’s development and evolution, which combines a study of the field with careful consideration of the interdependence between the sociopolitical context and the conditions for exercising sociology. Rather than dates, we have preferred to mark periods in terms of events, actors, and sociological production. This allows us to distinguish between stages of society as a whole and, within this, to identify the themes and conditions for sociological production. Consequently, the epistemological and reflexive focus of this work is placed on the interpretation of trajectories, discontinuities, and projections of social sciences in Chile, that is, in understanding the specific relationships between discipline and society, along with observing what sociologists observed, analyzed, and reflected on this very society. With no claim to exhaustiveness (owing to the nature and the extent of this book), we have nonetheless followed a systematic bibliographical review in writing each chapter, mainly of books written in the corresponding historical period. Books are the discipline’s “heart” and remain in time; furthermore, the abundant bibliography referenced here helps the interested reader to dig deeper into the authors, themes, and periods presented in this book. Therefore, this book is regarded as being introductory in nature, and provides a panoramic view of the history of sociology in Chile. Each chapter can thus be understood as a particular picture of a concrete period in

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the disciplinary development. In each chapter, we have relied on an analytical scheme composed of six dimensions, in order for this exercise of contemplation and understanding to be as complete as possible. The dimensions account, in turn, for: (1) the relationship between “society and sociology”, which corresponds to the contextual (social and political) national framework, but also to a broader, global scenario; (2) “sociology in Latin America and Chile”, which is related to thinking of Chilean sociology as part of the Latin American sociological tradition; (3) the “institutional framework of sociological training and production”, which mainly refers to the position of sociology within universities, schools, departments, and careers; (4) “sociologists in the intellectual field”, that is, the public presence and sociological production of books and journals by the discipline’s practitioners; (5) “sociologists and sociology in other fields”, which deals with their presence in politics, culture, communication, and also the private sector; and (6) the “sociology of sociology”, a dimension that helps make to make a synthesis and compile a balance sheet with regard the contributions of sociology in each historical period analyzed. The analytical schemes proposed, as well as the effort to synthesize different theoretical and interpretive perspectives, are two of this book’s main features, and distinguish it from other important studies dedicated to the history of sociology in Chile (Barrios and Brunner, 1988; Brunner, 1988; Devés et al., 1999; Garretón, 2014; Godoy, 1960; Garretón and Mella, 1995). Our rather modest aim is to draw a history that is complementary to those views, by incorporating new nuances—such as the Latin American perspective or the concern for gender—, and including in the picture the discipline’s margins, which are usually excluded from official histories by hegemonic visions (Benavides, Godoy and Vergara, 2015; Donoso, 2020). We have also tried to analyze how, in recent decades, a new type of sociology began to develop in Chile, more in line with the profound changes experienced by the country. Notwithstanding this, Chilean sociology has been characterized as having a great capacity for self-observation over time, features of its early institutionalization, its conquest of autonomy in different periods, as well as its profound critical aim (Ramos, 2014). From the past-present perspective that structures this research, we acknowledge that reflecting on Chilean sociology allows us to understand a legacy of a diverse and variegated knowledge that is important to recognize and valorize contemporarily. The strengthening of the discourse of our sociological history allows us, beyond doubt, to identify a discipline that is now fully autonomous and adequately institutionalized.

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As a way to conclude this introduction, it is necessary to point out the position that we, as authors and subjects, occupy in the field of Chilean sociology and, by extension, in Chilean society. The story of this book is very particular, mediated as it is by our biographical, intellectual, and professional trajectories. We are both professors of foreign provenance: both born in Spain, for different reasons we have developed our trajectories in Chile; we belong to different generations, hold different sociological backgrounds, and have coincided intellectually as well as professionally in the School of Sociology at the Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez. This feature of being foreigners gives us, à la Simmel, a particular perspective for historicizing the discipline, reading its texts and authors, understanding its phases and stages, and examining Chilean society itself. Coming from abroad gives this work more freedom, as we cannot hide that we come from outside and we have encountered this reality, this society and this sociology, making it our own. Coming from abroad also favors us, a priori, when it comes to having less bias, particularly with regard to political matters. However, this way of seeing is also a way of not seeing, and, of course, it brings limitations. At the same time, our way of seeing and analyzing Chilean sociology and its history is conditioned by our location in a small academic and professional School of Sociology. From this arguably peripheral or marginal position, we have been able to develop this research. This book is the result of our academic activity and, more importantly, the in-class discussions with our students, who also helped us collect , analyze, and systematize material. In turn, teaching allowed us to talk about the progress of the book; we were thus able to listen to their visions, ideas, and the way in which new generations understand the role of sociology in a society that finds itself in a moment of historical change, as the current Constitutional process indicates. The book therefore reflects an intergenerational dialogue, and yet, of course, we, the authors, are largely responsible for this very personal vision of the history of sociology in Chile.

References Barrios, A., & Brunner, J. J. (1988). La sociología en Chile. Instituciones y practicantes. Santiago de Chile: FLACSO. https://www.flacsochile.org/old/publicaciones/la-­sociologia-­en-­chile-­instituciones-­y-­practicantes/ Beigel, F. (2007). La FLACSO en el laboratorio chileno (1957–1973). Procesos de internacionalización, regionalización y nacionalización de las ciencias sociales en

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el Cono Sur. Congreso Latinoamericano y Caribeño de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO. Ecuador, Quito. Benavides, L., Godoy, M., & Vergara, F. (2015). Antología del pensamiento crítico chileno contemporáneo. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. https://www.clacso.org.ar/ antologias/detalle.php?id_libro=1029 Blois, J. P. (2018). Medio siglo de sociología en la Argentina. Ciencia, profesión y política (1957–2007). Universidad de Buenos Aires. Bourdieu, P. (1981). La représentation politique: Esquisse d’une théorie du champ politique. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 36–37, 3–24. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Polity. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility. Elite schools in the field of power. Polity. Brunner, J. J. (1988). El caso de la sociología en Chile: Formación de una disciplina. Santiago de Chile: FLACSO. https://www.flacsochile.org/old/publicaciones/el-­caso-­de-­la-­sociologia-­en-­chile-­formacion-­de-­una-­disciplina/ Brunner, J. J. (2014). Sociología de la sociología. Estudios Públicos, 133, 147–163. https://www.cepchile.cl/cep/site/docs/20160304/20160304100606/ rev133_JJBrunner.pdf Chernilo, D., & Mascareño, A. (2005). Universalismo, particularismo y sociedad mundial: Obstáculos y perspectivas de la sociología de América Latina. Persona y Sociedad, XIX(3), 17–45. Cortés, A. (2020). Clodomiro Almeyda and Roger Vekemans: The tension between autonomy and political commitment in the institutionalization of Chilean sociology, 1957–1973. Current Sociology, 69(6), 900–918. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0011392120932935 Coser, L. (1971). Masters of sociological thought: Ideas in historical and. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Dahrendorf, R. (1966a). Sociedad y libertad. Hacia un análisis sociológico de la actualidad. Editorial Tecnos. Dahrendorf, R. (1966b). Sociedad y sociología. Editorial Tecnos. Devés, E., Sagredo, R., & Pinedo, J. (Eds.). (1999). El pensamiento chileno en el siglo XX. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Donoso, A. (2020). El relato disciplinar consagrado en torno a la sociología universitaria en dictadura y la “producción de ausencias”: Estudiar sociología en Antofagasta, 1972–1984. Revista Temas Sociológicos, 27, 625–661. http://ediciones.ucsh.cl/index.php/TSUCSH/article/view/2334. Garretón, M. A. (2005). Social sciences and society in Chile: Institutionalization, breakdown and rebirth. Social Science Information, 44(2–3), 359–409. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0539018405053292 Garretón, M.  A. (2014). Las ciencias sociales en la trama de Chile y América Latina. Estudios sobre transformaciones sociopolíticas y movimiento social. LOM Ediciones.

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Garretón, M.  A., & Mella, O. (1995). Dimensiones actuales de la sociología. Sociedad Chilena de Sociología. Germani, G. (1964). La sociología en América Latina: Problemas y perspectivas. Editorial Universitaria. Giordano, V. (2017). La crítica como proyecto intelectual. Hilvanes continuistas del pensamiento social latinoamericano. Revista Temas Sociológicos, 21, 27–53. http://ediciones.ucsh.cl/ojs/index.php/TSUCSH/article/view/1095/0 Godoy, H. (1960). Orientación y organización de los estudios sociológicos en Chile. Ediciones Universidad de Chile. Godoy, H. (1977). El desarrollo de la sociología en Chile. Resumen crítico e interpretativo de su desenvolvimiento entre 1950 y 1973. Estudios Sociales, 12, 33–56. Hopenhayn, M. (1993). El humanismo crítico como campo de saberes sociales en Chile. In Paradigmas de conocimiento y práctica social en Chile (pp. 203–277). Santiago de Chile: FLACSO. Ianni, O. (1965). La sociología en América Latina. Revista Latinoamericana de Sociología, I(3), 414–428. Iglesias, M. (2015). Lo social y lo político en Chile: Itinerario de un desencuentro teórico y práctico. Izquierdas, 22, 227–250. https://scielo.conicyt.cl/pdf/ izquierdas/n22/art10.pdf. Iglesias, M. (2016). La construcción teórica de los movimientos sociales en Chile: El movimiento de pobladores, entre la Sociología y la Historia Social. Revista Austral de Ciencias Sociales, 30, 145–160. https://doi.org/10.4206/rev.austral.cienc.soc.2016.n30-­07 Lamo de Espinosa, E. (2001). La sociología del siglo XX. Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 96, 21–49. https://www.redalyc.org/ pdf/997/99717909003.pdf. Marini, R.  M. (2008). Origen y trayectoria de la sociología latinoamericana (1994). En C. E. Martins (Ed.), América Latina, dependencia y globalización. Fundamentos conceptuales Ruy Mauro Marini (pp.  235–245). Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre, CLACSO. http://resistir.info/livros/marini_dependencia_y_ globalizacion.pdf Morandé, P. (1984). Cultura y modernización en América Latina: Ensayo sociológico acerca de la crisis del desarrollismo y de su superación. Instituto de Sociología de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Moya, C. (1970). Sociólogos y sociología. Siglo XXI. Poviña, A. (1941). Historia de la sociología latinoamericana. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Ramos, C. (2014). Local and global communications in Chilean social science: Inequality and relative autonomy. Current Sociology, 62(5), 704–722. https:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0011392114521374

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Ribes, A. (2008). Conocer a los que conocen: Sociologías de las sociologías. Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 121, 55–80. https://www. jstor.org/stable/40184845. Roitman, M. (2008). Pensar América Latina. El desarrollo de la sociología latinoamericana. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. https://core.ac.uk/reader/35172750 Ruiz, C. (2015). De nuevo la sociedad. LOM Ediciones.

CHAPTER 2

From “Armchair” to “Scientific” Sociology (1948–1958)

Abstract  This chapter presents “armchair sociology” as the first institutional form of the discipline, while the qualitative leap towards “scientific sociology” occurred in the 1950s, in respect of the modernizing pressures from the region’s governments. It examines how a generation of sociologists challenged academia, contested positions with sociology scholars, and channeled the new direction of discipline in the years to come. Some fundamental institutional milestones are pointed out, such as the creation of ECLAC in 1948, of FLACSO in 1957, and of Sociology Schools at the Universidad de Chile in 1958 and Pontificia Universidad Católica in 1959. Keywords  Armchair sociology • Scientific sociology • Professional sociology • Institutionalization The origins of sociological thought in Chile comprise a time frame that extends from the final third of the nineteenth century to the creation of the first sociology chairs and lectures at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1887, the chair of Administrative Law was created at the Universidad de Chile, under the direction of Valentín Letelier. In 1889, the Pedagogical Institute was created at the same institution. In 1909, chairs of social sciences were created in several universities and in the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Morales Martín, J. Gómez de Benito, History of Sociology in Chile, Sociology Transformed, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10481-7_2

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1930s, the first courses of “General Sociology” were taught in the Faculty of Philosophy and Education and the Pedagogical Institute at Universidad de Chile. Sociological studies were taught in isolated university courses, most of the time related to training in law, history, philosophy, or pedagogy. In general, this fragmentation had an impact on the teaching of sociology, as the existence of a chair at the university did not constitute the establishment of a distinct profession. Furthermore, there were no professional criteria for the selection of the teaching staff, and many of the sociology-­related courses were taught by an assistant attached to the university chair. During this period, sociological thinking was not taught with a view to training sociology teachers or professionals. This initial period of sociology has been labeled “armchair sociology”, insofar as the discipline had not yet been projected as a scientific or professional exercise. “Armchair sociology” was thus the first institutional form within which sociological discourse was adopted in Chile. Among the main features were: an unclear, confusing, essayistic thinking, with no methodological discussion, nor empirical grounds, and lacking its own elaborations, to the extent that the teaching referred almost exclusively to the discipline’s European foundations, mainly the writings of Auguste Comte (Brunner, 1988). With neither an empirical basis nor a systematic connection between theory, method, and sociological subject matter, at the time the conception of a “national sociology” was closer to essayism and philosophy, by and large based on positivistic, idealist, and historicist views. This institutional arrangement displayed a “sociological intention”, from which sociology was progressively incorporated into higher education, although it lacked a mature community and was represented mainly by individual practitioners (Godoy, 1960). The most representative figures of this period in Chile were José Victorino Lastarria, Valentín Letelier, Juan Serapio Lois, and Agustín Venturino. Despite the limitations identified, sociology was subsequently seen as a science of reform and social change, aligned to the Chilean state emerging after the 1925 Constitution, and in the midst of the quarrels between liberals and conservatives. In fact, the sociological discourse is regarded as a rational, reformist, modern, secular, and liberal discourse, in contrast to and in contention with the traditional Catholic hegemony of Chile’s oligarchy. The early sociological discourse was closely related to the modernization of Chilean society, especially with regard to its political, economic and sociocultural dimensions. Sociology also partook in the aspirations of a renewed, secular, liberal state committed to ensuring free public

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education. All this was happening at a time in which the “social question” was experienced in Chile through the emergence of the labor movement, the mining boom and subsequent saltpeter crisis, and the development of large cities and new circuits of poverty and marginalization due to large-­ scale countryside-to-city migrations. Therefore, a discourse with scientific pretensions was being elaborated as Chile’s reality itself was in motion. A clear representative of the heterodox, enlightened currents linked to the incipient sociological thinking of the time is Agustín Venturino (1893–1960). Driven by his encyclopedic motivation and traveling spirit, he toured the whole of Chile several times and traveled all over Latin America for a period of 15 years. Moreover, he was a member of several scientific institutions in Europe, such as Brussels’ International Institute of Sociology, Paris’ Society of Americanists, and Madrid’s Geographical Society. Venturino considered sociology as a thorough fieldwork, a practice linked to observation. He understood society in terms of the model of biological organisms; in fact, he gave considerable importance to geography and natural determinants for society and culture. In his view, the nation was founded upon the adaptation of people to their environment. Influenced by social Darwinism, such a conception led him to approach the evolution of the “Chilean race” as a way of being that explains “the Chilean character” (Alvarado Meléndez, 2015, p. 199). Venturino wrote five seminal volumes on the evolution and formation of American nations in general, and Chile’s in particular, published between 1927 and 1935, namely: Chile-Indian Primitive Sociology, Vol. I–II (1927–1928); Chilean Sociology, Vol. III (1929); American General Sociology, Vol. IV (1935); and General Sociology: Interdependence, Vol. V (1935). From a contemporary light, his work may seem feeble, anthropologically prejudiced, and with no scientific rigor. However, Brunner (1988, pp. 122–123) praises Venturino as “the first Chilean sociologist” for having taken over the sociological discourse of his time, assuming the discipline’s explanatory aims, explaining Chile’s society from a panoramic view, and, fundamentally, engaging in and fostering links with international sociological associations, in a time in which this kind of institutions did not yet exist in the country. As Chile’s modernization process continued during the first third of the twentieth century, it was necessarily to develop a scientific sociology with explanatory power and rooted in rigorous research, and not only in the description of changes. It is possible to situate the beginning of the country’s modernizing project in the government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, who became president in 1938 following the formation of a Popular Front

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alliance. The birth of the Popular Front was significantly conditioned by the economic and social catastrophe experienced throughout Latin America in the aftermath of the New York Stock Exchange crash in 1929 and the Great Depression that followed in the 1930s. Its effects on the Chilean economy included the complete collapse of the saltpeter industry, a situation that demanded a renewed consideration of the problem of economic development. In a 1933 work entitled The Industrial Problem, Aguirre Cerda himself had envisaged the need to modernize Chilean society, to lift it out of its educational, cultural, economic and social backwardness, by means of promoting industrialization and the expansion of public education (Devés, 2000, p. 294). Under his rule, the Corporation for the Promotion of Production (CORFO) was created in 1939 as the state-­ nucleus of a series of initiatives and programs pursuing the country’s development (Muñoz, 1968). Because of these economic and social developments, there was the now a need for rigorous, systematic, scientific knowledge in order to channel political processes for modernizing transformations that came with an array of new social problems associated to industrialization, such as countryside-­to-city migrations and demographic growth, urban concentration and housing deficits, together with the increasing presence of an organized labor movement, and also the incipient development of the professional middle class. Sociology, therefore, could be instrumental in knowing further and better about its own social order in the making. It is thus unsurprising that, at the Tenth Chilean General Scientific Congress held in Santiago de Chile in January 1944, an urgent plea to “promote sociological studies” was addressed (Sociedad Científica de Chile, 1944, p. 55). This horizon of institutionalization for the discipline will be materialized, in Chile and Latin America, just after the end of World War II. If the beginnings of sociology’s institutionalization followed in Chile an itinerary common with most of the Latin American countries, its subsequent evolution had an distinctive singularity: it became regional and international in its institutionalization process and its debates, topics, and practitioners. Santiago de Chile was the hub of an academic circuit on a regional scale that operated between the 1950s and the mid-1970s (Beigel, 2019). As we have seen, at the outset only “amateurs” exercised sociology (Williamson, 1956, p. 148), and in universities a kind of “armchair sociology”—speculative and literary, cultivated by amateur professors—was taught (Krebs, 1994, p.  537). Soon, sociology moved from university chairs to specialized institutes, for example, with the creation in 1946 of

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the Institute of Sociological Research in the Faculty of Philosophy and Education at Universidad de Chile.1 In 1951, Eduardo Hamuy took charge of the Institute; he had studied Sociology at Columbia University and he worked in New  York as a researcher and instructor. The initial function of the Institute was to “coordinate the sociology chairs and courses that were being taught within the Pedagogical Institute” at Universidad de Chile, as well as for students to submit their assignments for sociology lectures (Brunner, 1999, p. 65). As we shall see later, the first undergraduate schools soon began to be created, undoubtedly an indication of the significant momentum experienced by social sciences and sociology in the country. The qualitative leap toward what we call “scientific sociology” took place in Chile and Latin America in the post-war years, under the international context of the Cold War. In the 1950s, the modernizing demands of governments in the region, along with the role of international organizations, helped promote social studies. “Scientific sociology” signaled the transition to a further specialized discipline with more empirical grounds, with the aim to overcome “armchair sociology”. Thus, the scientific sociologist makes its first appearance—appointed to a professional position, trained in research methods, who bases his arguments on empirical data and, moreover, is exclusively dedicated to the cultivation of the discipline. A good representative of Chile’s “scientific sociology” is Eduardo Hamuy, who combined empirical research with theoretical reflection, also helping develop the methodology and techniques of social research in the country. Indeed, Hamuy’s appointment as head of the Institute of Sociological Research at Universidad de Chile opened the path for a new generation of sociologists that Brunner (1999, p. 67) has labeled “contenders”, to the extent that they challenged the elder “armchair” sociologists, disputed their positions, and managed to influence the new directions of Chile’s discipline over the following years. However, as Brunner (1999, p.  68) points out, “Hamuy was not a newcomer”, as he had already participated in the mid-1940s student movement that so strongly influenced and conditioned power relations in 1  In Latin America, the creation of sociology institutes of this kind began in 1940, with the Institute of Sociology in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at Universidad de Buenos Aires (González Bollo, 1999). In Sucre, Bolivia, a similar institute was created in 1941, the Institute of Sociology of the Faculty of Law and Political and Social Sciences (Brunner, 1999, p. 66).

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Universidad de Chile’s Faculty of Philosophy and Education. Therefore, when Juan Gómez Millas—a modernizing mind—was consecutively the Dean of the Faculty and then the Rector of the University (between 1953 and 1963), Hamuy and other sociologists of his generation, such as Hernán Godoy and Raúl Samuel, obtained enough support and institutional legitimacy to mobilizing resources. These two also gained sponsorship to study sociology (Godoy) and social psychology (Samuel) in France. Later, the Institute sent Osvaldo Sepúlveda, Danilo Salcedo, and Guillermo Briones to study sociology in the United States, and, with the help of a scholarship, Luis Ratinoff studied sociology in England. In this way, a first group of researchers and professional sociologists who had trained abroad could then be gathered at Universidad de Chile (Brunner, 1999, pp. 69–70). A group of young students and early-career professionals was subsequently associated, one of whom, Enzo Faletto, became the outstanding figure. Sociology at Universidad de Chile was not an isolated case; on the contrary, a collective, joint effort to evolve and professionalize the discipline was taking place at the national and regional level. In the Latin American context, the process of growth of Chilean sociology had its origins in two changes. First, the inextricable wave toward the internationalization and dissemination of sociological studies was consequential for the emergence of a transnational, rather than national, sociology with both regional and international scope. A “Latin American sociology” began to be referred to, with problems, methods and concepts approached from regional perspectives, and preferably under the reference framework of world sociology, characterized by the primacy of US American and European schools (Franco, 1974, p. 59). In this sense, sociology in Chile and Latin America adapted to international requirements for teaching theories and methods, by sending abroad the first generations of students to be trained in the discipline. The second change is related to the fact that during this period both Chile and Latin America were also in the process of transformation. The rapid transition to modern, industrial, urban social forms presented a new problem for sociology, namely, the development and modernization of Latin American societies. The demand to address this new reality with renewed conceptions and methods grew something that brought about debates and tensions among sociological currents, authors, and perspectives. Across Latin American countries, there was at the time a generalized awareness about international inequalities and the accumulated backwardness evidenced in peripheral countries, to the point that “the pressure to

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be modernized” was made felt and deployed in a very special way (Quijano, 1988, p.  101). World War II and its subsequent repercussions had laid bare imbalances in world trade and the precarious industrialization of Latin America. In the middle of the war, the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944—which created the World Bank and opened the way to a new world economic system that characterized the activities and economic relations of the quarter-century between 1948 and 1973 (Furtado, 1983)—attended none of the region’s economic demands; there was no Marshall Plan for Latin America. Chile—a peripheral but well connected country, inserted as it was in international debates on modernization and development—was an exemplary case at the regional level. Characterized by a reformist sense and its openness to the world, the Chilean state demonstrated great diplomatic ability through its hosting of the headquarters of several international organizations in Santiago de Chile. Certainly, the image projected by the country was totally favorable to this end, highlighting political conditions of democratic stability since the 1930s, in addition to a long tradition of linking economic development to democratic development through policies that displayed an identifiable social reformism. In this way, the creation in 1948 of the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLAC (CEPAL, for its Spanish acronym), was a fundamental milestone in the development of economic knowledge and the promotion of sociology both within the country and across the entire region. One main promoter of ECLAC was Hernán Santa Cruz, then Chile’s representative at the United Nations, who played a fundamental role in its creation (Urquidi, 2005, pp.  119–120). Santa Cruz envisaged the commission being established along the lines of the Economic Commission for Europe, then headed by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, with the goal of promoting developmental policies and economic reconstruction. The United Nations had also recently created yet another Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East. Therefore, ECLAC was created with the aim of contributing to Latin America’s economic and social development, providing technical support to coordinate actions for promoting it, in addition to strengthening economic relations with other countries of the world. The 20 Latin American countries, plus the United States and the three European countries that claimed possession in the region at the time (Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France), became its regular members. In the second period of sessions, held in May 1949 in Havana, Argentine economist and consultant

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of the ECLAC General Secretariat Raúl Prebisch presented his work The Economic Development of Latin America and its Main Problems, a document that give birth to the structuralize or classical ECLAC school (Di Filippo, 2007), and which influenced Latin American economic, social, and political thought during the following years. Here, Prebisch introduced the “center-periphery” opposition to explain the specific pattern of insertion of Latin America (part of the “periphery”) into the world economy. The region produces raw materials that participate in an undynamic international demand, while importing goods and services for a rapidly expanding internal demand; consequently, the latter was quickly assimilating consumption patterns and technologies from industrialized “centers”. This characterization led to the promotion of a singular industrialization model for Latin American countries, in which technical progress is introduced and a sustained economic growth ensured, with a balanced absorption of the labor force that impacts on a fairer income distribution. Prebisch’s argument was widely accepted among Latin American governments, as it conjured Latin America with a particular identity—that of the “underdeveloped periphery”—, and promoted the implementation of an import substitution industrialization policy (the ISI model) to achieve economic and social development. In 1950, Raúl Prebisch assumed the role of Executive Secretariat of ECLAC, a position that allowed him to recruit important economists and social scientists, for example, Brazilian Celso Furtado, Mexicans Juan Noyola and Víctor Urquidi, and Chileans Jorge Ahumada, Osvaldo Sunkel, and Aníbal Pinto. They began the historical interpretation of Latin American economic structures in its formative process; with their documentation and reports, this work contributed to “further generalize the discussion and studies on the financial, technological, institutional, and other aspects of economic development in general, and of industrialization in particular” (Ianni, 1971, p. 20). Produced and disseminated by ECLAC, ideas about the need for industrialization in Chile and Latin America were enthusiastically adopted by political, economic, and intellectual elites in the 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, the idea of “regional integration” through economy and trade was a very appealing horizon (Rodríguez, 1988, p. 21). Regardless of the fact that the industrial project was developed from the backward conditions characteristic of the periphery, the adoption of a deliberate industrialization policy commenced to be explicitly appreciated. It was the prime of Latin American “developmentalism” (desarrollismo), or so-called “golden age of development” (Urquidi, 2005,

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p. 185). A top-level government forum providing expert advice to Latin American governments, ECLAC provided systematic collection of information, generated the first statistics on economic and social factors, even set the ground for the first panoramic reports on Latin American societies, thereby significantly improving the precarious knowledge about Latin American countries’ socio-economic reality. According to ECLAC’s view, development had been approached from a very formulaic vision and understood exclusively by economic parameters (Devés, 2003, pp. 23–29). It was thus necessary to integrate the sociological perspective. It was Spanish-born sociologist José Medina Echavarría who introduced the discipline in order to understand Latin America’s issues for economic development. A member of the Spanish Republican exile in 1936, Medina Echavarría was recruited by ECLAC in 1952. Yet, before arriving in Santiago de Chile, he had a long career in several countries of the region, in which he stood out in the promotion of sociological studies. He was Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México between 1939 and 1943, and also the first Director of the Center for Social Studies of El Colegio de México between 1943 and 1946, one of the first Latin American institutions in offering a Diploma in Social Sciences (González Navarro, 1990; Lira, 1983; Morales, 2017; Morcillo, 2008; Moya & Morales, 2008). In addition, Medina Echavarría actively participated in other activities for publishing and disseminating contemporary sociological discourse and thought in Mexico. For example, he published several works on the scientific status of sociology in the initial issues of the Revista Mexicana de Sociología, which had been created in 1939 by Lucio Mendieta y Nuñez. Between 1943 and 1946, he founded and directed the magazine Jornadas, a publication of El Colegio de México dedicated to social issues and which continues to be published today. From 1939 to 1959, he took charge of the Sociology Section of the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), a publishing house created in 1934 by Daniel Cosío Villegas. It was precisely in his Mexican period, from 1939 to 1946, that Medina Echavarría was directly responsible for the early Spanish translation of some of the most important works in Western culture, which were published in Fondo de Cultura Económica. In some way, this certainly filled a huge gap in the region’s social sciences. Regarding sociology, this effort brought the best of the European—mainly German—sociological tradition to Latin America, as represented by the 1944 translation of Economy and Society, Max Weber’s major work. Medina Echavarría himself directed

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a translation team composed of Juan Roura Parella, Eduardo García Máynez, Eugenio Ímaz, and José Ferrater Mora. Later, in 1946 the Spanish-born sociologist occupied a Sociology Chair at the University of Puerto Rico. Before being recruited in ECLAC, Medina Echavarría had been recognized by his important intellectual contributions for Latin American sociology, which also counted with his books Panorama of contemporary sociology (1940), Sociology: theory and technique (1941), Intelligence Responsibility: Studies on our time (1943) and Lessons in sociology (1946). Medina Echavarría’s arrival at ECLAC in Santiago de Chile in 1952 coincided with a favorable climate for the promotion of sociological studies in this country. Precisely, in 1951 the Chilean Society of Sociology was established, representing a maturation point in the professionalization, togetherness and growth in legitimacy of the discipline (Morales, 2017). In those years, new sociology and social sciences chairs were created across the country, mainly linked to schools of journalism, architecture, law, and pedagogy in institutions such as Universidad de Chile, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, the Universidad Técnica del Estado (currently Universidad de Santiago de Chile), Universidad Católica de Valparaíso and Universidad de Concepción. There were also sociology courses for teacher training in teacher training schools (escuelas normales). In addition, since 1952 ECLAC sent missions to different countries of the region, in order to select students to receive scholarships for participating in a “Basic Course on Problems of Economic Development” in Santiago de Chile (Beigel, 2010, p. 57). A milestone in the production of Latin American sociological knowledge and research was the creation of ECLAC’s Social Studies Division, under the charge of Medina Echavarría. In various works that were collected in the 1959 book Social aspects of economic development, he lays “the foundations of the sociology of economic development or, more generally, of an integrated conception of development” in Latin America (Prebisch, 1980, p.  12). This publication also “marks the beginning of the Latin American theme” in Chilean sociology (Godoy, 1977, p. 40), opening up a reflection and debate within the Chilean sociological field, in which Latin America is approached as an object of study from both a historical and a regional perspective. Medina Echavarría (1973, pp. 2 and 5) identified in these pages Latin America’s “socio-cultural aspects of economic development” in terms of the cultural and social components that go “beyond the borders of the usual concern of the economist and his

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conceptual instruments”. In this vein, underdevelopment ceased to be considered exclusively as an economic phenomenon, isolated from other social factors, and it was now analyzed, studied, and interpreted as a historical process in which various social and cultural factors intervened and exerted their influence on its successive transformations and configurations. These initial formulations on Latin America’s economic development were aligned with the center-periphery theory elaborated by Prebisch and other ECLAC economists. Little by little, the awareness of development was displaced to the urgency of social development, understood as cultural, social, and political modernization. The demand, assumed by Latin American governments, to comply with the precepts of modernization brought with it numerous exchanges that affected the ECLAC perspective, building bridges between economics and sociology. A sociological approach to the data offered by the economists began to take form; moreover, it was acknowledged that the economic theory contained a sociological theory. ECLAC also developed a common language around the “social conditions” of economic development, taking into account some aspects related to the historical interpretation of economic processes, as well as the “social obstacles” that characterize cultural, social and political difficulties in achieving economic objectives in the countries of the region (Morales, 2010). In this vein, Chilean economists Jorge Ahumada and Aníbal Pinto produced important reflections from sociological foundations; they had a great impact at the time, insofar as they offered a bold socioeconomic portrait of Chile’s historical development. In particular, Ahumada’s 1958 book En vez de la miseria identified four major obstacles to economic and social development in Chile, namely: the stagnation and low productivity of national agriculture; the country’s endemic inflation; income’s unequal distribution; and an excessive centralization of population, production, and the state. In turn, Pinto published Chile, a case of frustrated development (1959), a book in which he made a journey through the country’s economic and social history. Briefly summarizing his argument, it is pointed out that in the historical period between 1830 and 1930 the country wasted the profits derived from the nitrate boom, something that prevented it from becoming a more developed country. Pinto emphasized the exhaustion of the dynamic bases of the nitrate model—exports and foreign investments—, giving shape to a crisis with important social repercussions. Warning that the application of the same model to copper

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or other raw materials may have the same consequences, he pointed out that there was no industrializing—“capitalist”, in the sense of Max Weber—mentality in Chile. On the contrary, Pinto stressed the contradictory reality experienced by the country: on the one hand, it shows an advanced political development—if one compares Chile to other Latin American nations—while, on the other, it faces a severe economic backwardness. Therefore, Ahumada’s and Pinto’s books stood out for highlighting the structural and social contradictions that capitalism produces in peripheral societies, taking Chile as a study case. They were also important in making a diagnosis of the causes and eventual solutions to underdevelopment, emphasizing among them the agrarian reform, a new industrialization impetus, the nationalization of copper, and the increase in social and political participation of the Chilean population. These works had a significant impact during the 1960s, contributing to the broad consensus among intellectual and political sectors about the way out of the economic stagnation of the national economy—the search for growth—through the implementation of profound structural reforms toward social development and democratic expansion. This consensus had a notable repercussion and influence in the formulation of public policies and structural reforms in the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva between 1964 and 1970. Before that period, the second half of the 1950s was a period politically prone to the renewal of still “traditional” Latin American societies, conceived as a “modernizing turn” in favor of social change. In it, there was a positive estimate of the contributions that social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, could make to these efforts (Devés, 2003, p. 45). Furthermore, there was a favorable climate to modernize and develop social sciences, as Latin American countries needed to know more about themselves—they needed statistics, data, figures, and technically well-trained public officials, as well as to possess full-time sociology professors and social science professionals. In fact, social sciences’ professionalization was an open international trend after World War II, linked to a positive assessment of development, also spurred on by US academia, and stimulated in Latin America by international organizations (Labbens, 1969). Under such a climate, sociology was seen as a science capable of understanding and, above all, planning the muchdesired development.

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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) also shared the interest in professional social sciences and sociology, given the presence of British sociologist Thomas H. Marshall at the head of its Department of Social Sciences. The organization’s main objective was the creation of a Social Sciences Research and Teaching Center in Latin America, designed on lines similar to the Center for Research on the Problems of Economic and Social Development in South Asia in New Delhi (Franco, 2007, p. 29). In 1957, UNESCO and Latin American governments agreed to create the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), which, thanks to the diplomatic insistence of the Chilean government and Universidad de Chile’s rector Juan Gómez Millas, established its headquarters in Santiago de Chile. The same year, UNESCO also collaborated in the foundation of the Latin American Center for Research in Social Sciences in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, dedicated to sociological research. UNESCO would later open similar centers in Europe (Vienna, 1963) and Africa (Nairobi, 1965). If the creation of ECLAC was a milestone in the formulation of socioeconomic knowledge in Chile and the entire region, the creation of FLACSO was instrumental in the establishment of an institutional architecture for the shared modernizing project across Latin American governments, universities, and international organizations: the institutionalization of a professional sociological education for future sociologists and sociology teachers. From the 1957–58 academic year onward, FLACSO offered the first diploma course in sociology in Chile and Latin America, entitled “Diploma of Higher Studies in Sociology and Training for the Exercise of University Teaching in Sociology”. However, initially FLACSO had to face two challenges that were identified by the Argentinian sociologist Gino Germani (1964, p. 43) for teaching social research in Latin America: the insufficient availability of scientific personnel, and the scarcity of financial resources. These obstacles were sorted out with the help of UNESCO, the Chilean and Latin American governments, and also Universidad de Chile. From its origins, FLACSO was an UNESCO agency, yet from the very outset Universidad de Chile was committed to supporting not only its creation, but also in offering the basic infrastructure and economic conditions for its installation, with the provision of administrative staff, language instructors, and two scholars who belonged to the university’s Institute of Sociological Research: Eduardo Hamuy and Guillermo Briones (Beigel, 2009, p.  327). Likewise, support for instruction was

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received from a French mission that operated within the framework of the UNESCO agreement with the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. This implied the arrival of, among others, Peter Heintz, Alfred Metraux, Lucien Brams, George Friedman, Alain Touraine, Alain Girard or Jean Daniel Reynaud. Three other UNESCO experts also arrived in 1957, including José Medina Echavarría (Franco, 2007, pp. 57–60). In addition, ECLAC’s Latin American Demographic Center (CELADE) contributed with three demography professors and, finally, several instructors were hired to teach English and French. Gustavo Lagos Matus, FLACSO’s first General Secretary between 1957 and 1961, appointed Medina Echavarría as the first director of the Latin American School of Sociology (ELAS) (Franco, 2007; Morales, 2012). Some years later, in the wave of expansion of Latin American social sciences, and thanks to funds provided by the Inter-American Development Bank, the Latin American School of Political Science and Public Administration (ELACP) was created, in 1966. In turn, in 1969 the Institute for the Coordination of Social Research (ICIS) was created. Therefore, FLACSO’s ELAS was born in the middle of a Chilean sociology that, at the time, had yet been scarcely professionalized, with any full-­ time instructors of sociology. In Chile and Latin America, sociology was taught in isolated courses that were part of other careers’ curricula, an auxiliary role that did not favor sociological research. ELAS was indeed created to fill the gap of sociology schools, in a context in which no university degrees of this kind existed in Chile or other Latin American countries. The first version of the “Diploma of Higher Studies in Sociology”, a two-year post-graduate program, was divided into four quarters. Together with subjects such as anthropology, economics, law, and political sciences, the training focused on sociological theory and sociological subfields, such as “Sociology of Development”, “Sociology of Science and of Knowledge”, “Sociology of Labor”, “Sociology of Education”, and “Political Sociology”. The second quarter emphasized methodology and empirical research, with courses on “Statistics” and “Research Methods and Techniques” (FLACSO, 1959). ELAS’ sociology program combined theoretical and methodological training, allowing students—who came mainly from law, economics, history, philosophy, and political science—to explore the discipline and acquire the sociological lenses and skills necessary for teaching and exercising it (Fonseca-Tortós, 1976, p. 8). It performed a significant role in Chile and the region, providing well-trained sociology professors for the first time, as well as

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offering specialists and technical staff to the public sector. This is why ELAS was enormously relevant in the institutionalization process of sociology in Chile and Latin America, as it was pivotal for the modernization and renewing in teaching social sciences, in a time in which there were no specialized centers doing thus (Germani, 1959, pp. 8 and 17; Solari, 1969, p. 448). This modernizing momentum given to sociology by international organizations such as ECLAC and FLACSO had a corresponding effect at the level of the national university system, in the years of the death throes of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo’s populist government (1952–1958). Indeed, 1958 became a significant year in the institutionalization of sociology in Chile. First, the Sociology School at the Universidad de Chile was created this year, under the leadership of Raúl Samuel. Second, the Pontificia Universidad Católica opened the Institute of Sociology and a sociology degree in 1959, in charge of Belgian Jesuit priest Roger Vekemans. The fact that the two most important universities of the country were contemporaneous in institutionalizing sociology helps somehow represent the tensions of Chile’s cultural field in the twentieth century, particularly in educational matters, as the projects of Catholic and state-led secular thought were clashing. Universidad de Chile’s Sociology School benefited from the leadership of Eduardo Hamuy, as much as from the systematic work he developed at the Institute of Sociological Research along with his collaborators in the 1950s. It also received the support of several foreign professors invited by FLACSO. Conversely, Hamuy was in charge of Chile’s first public opinion polls, together with Danilo Salcedo and Orlando Sepúlveda. This pioneering survey, entitled “The first artificial satellite: effects of public opinion”, measured the impact that the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik had on the population of Santiago. In 1958, Hamuy inquired about the possibilities of that year’s presidential candidates Salvador Allende, Eduardo Frei Montalva, Luis Bossay, and Jorge Alessandri. Almost a month before the elections, he predicted Alessandri’s triumph, who finally won with 31.6% of the votes. Until then, Hamuy’s surveys reached only a small group of specialists; however, during the 1960s he initiated a program of public opinion polls that endured until 1973, carrying out more than 40 surveys about perceptions of national contingency, social mobility, democratization (Hamuy, 1967), and electoral behavior (Cordero, 2009; Navia & Osorio, 2015).

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Apart from public opinion polls, the Institute of Sociological Research pioneered in Chilean studies on education and public health. Worth mentioning in this context is the research “The Educational Problem of Chile’s People”, by Eduardo Hamuy, Willian Hansen, Orlando Sepúlveda, and Guillermo Briones, conducted in 1956 and published in 1961 (Hamuy, 1961). In 1957, Universidad de Chile’s editorial house’s Editorial Universitaria published Hamuy’s Anthology on social stratification. This editorial house will have a prominent role in the dissemination and unfolding of sociological research in academic environments and public opinion, publishing numerous volumes devoted to social issues. Regarding the Pontificia Universidad Católica’s Sociology School, it was born as a means to put into practice the Catholic Church’s social doctrine, since “also in Catholic environments the need was felt to have a scientific tool to address pressing social problems” (Krebs, 1994, p. 537). This institution became involved in the modernization processes of education, updating and improving study plans and curricula. Among the best-­ known actions taken in this sense was the collaboration agreement with the University of Chicago. Signed in 1955, this agreement offered scholarships for Chilean students to study economics at Chicago; in return, the US institution took charge of forming a Center for Economic Research and a School of Economics, in a time in which there was only one economy school in the country. Later known as the “Chicago Boys”, these students returned convinced that market liberalization provided a new model for economic development (Valdés, 1989). Under this framework, Sergio de Castro, Pablo Baraona, Álvaro Bardón, Jorge Cauas, Fernando Lens, Sergio Undurraga, Juan Villarzú, and José Luis Zavala, among others, they will be in charge of the entire macroeconomic revolution imposed by the Pinochet regime, various positions as economists in the Secretaries of Economy, Finance, and Labor. In its initial steps, the activities of the Institute of Sociology revolved around the figure of Vekemans and his ability to establish links that favored the institution’s sociology program. He was able, for example, to leverage resources from foreign philanthropic foundations, and also to obtain study-abroad scholarships from the Organization of American States (OEA). José Sulbrandt and Raúl Urzúa were the first students from the Institute to be trained in sociology at the University of California (Brunner, 1999, p. 78). The Institute also benefited from the support of the Catholic Church and, in particular, the Jesuit order and its entire national and international network. Jesuits held a position of leadership in the field of

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human and social sciences, achieved through its secondary schools and its magazine Mensaje, created by priest Alberto Hurtado from 1951; later, the Research and Social Action Center (CIAS) and the Center for the Economic and Social Development of Latin America (DESAL) were created. Under this social sensitivity promoted by the Jesuits, Vekemans arrived in Chile in 1957 to join the CIAS—within which Mensaje was later integrated—, and soon the Bellarmino Center was founded (Beigel, 2011). Mensaje continues to be published, with sociologists and social analysts regularly collaborating with political, social and cultural analysis on the country’s issues; the magazine has also incorporated an international perspective to think about the Chilean reality from a further global perspective. Nonetheless, a specific training of experts, professors and researchers in the area of social sciences was missing in the Catholic realm, a gap that came to be filled with the creation of the sociology degree at the Universidad Católica. The career began in 1959, with professors from Belgium (particularly from the Université Catholique de Louvain), the Netherlands and France. In 1961, the Sociological Research Institute was created with the aim of providing substantial empirical studies to the Institute of Sociology, thereby unifying teaching and research. Therefore, the Catholic realm associated to “the social question”, and particularly the Jesuit congregation, promoted sociological studies and generated an institutional architecture for the production of professionals capable of analyzing a Chilean society marked by social injustice, poverty and underdevelopment, and also to propose and intervene in policy-making oriented to a fairer, more solidary social order. In the political field, these intellectual endeavors coincided with the creation of the Christian Democratic Party in 1957; later, in the government of the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva, the political and the intellectual currents emerged in the Catholic realm converged. Summarizing, in the late 1950s the first institutional steps of sociology had already been taken in the country, particularly in Santiago de Chile. It was also during these years that the Central Institute of Sociology was created by Professor Raúl Samuel at the Universidad de Concepción in Southern Chile, and later reorganized by Guillermo Briones. At the beginning, all these sociology schools and institutes had to face important challenges such as shortage of instructors with a systematic sociological vision, given the predominance of “amateurism”; lack of bibliographic material; and the scarcity of both data and sociological research skills (Godoy, 1977,

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pp. 39–40). These difficulties were gradually resolved, as the first generation of students were sent abroad to receive training in the United States or Europe; conversely, well-trained sociologists from Europe and Latin America were hosted by local institutions; specialized libraries were created in FLACSO and ECLAC; and ECLAC began to provide the first data on the socioeconomic reality of the Chilean and Latin American economies. These limits and obstacles notwithstanding, the institutional foundations of an academic community were already established, and in the 1960s it will only expand sociology to different areas of Chile’s society.

References Alvarado Meléndez, M. (2015). El joven Agustín Venturino y los orígenes de la sociología chilena. Revista de Humanidades, 78, 177–216. http://www. memoriachilena.gob.cl/archivos2/pdfs/MC0070043.pdf. Beigel, F. (2009). La Flacso chilena y la regionalización de las ciencias sociales en América Latina (1957–1973). Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 71(2), 319–349. http://www.scielo.org.mx/pdf/rms/v71n2/v71n2a4.pdf. Beigel, F. (2010). La institucionalización de las ciencias sociales en América Latina: Entre la autonomía y la dependencia académica. In F. Beigel (Dir.), Autonomía y dependencia académica. Universidad e investigación científica en un circuito periférico: Chile y Argentina (1950–1980) (pp.  47–64). Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos. Beigel, F. (2011). Misión Santiago. El mundo académico jesuita y los inicios de la cooperación internacional católica. LOM Ediciones. Beigel, F. (2019). Latin American Sociology: A centennial regional tradition. In F.  Beigel (Dir.), Key Texts for Latin American Sociology (pp.  1–30). London: SAGE. Brunner, J. J. (1988). El caso de la sociología en Chile: Formación de una disciplina. Santiago de Chile: FLACSO. https://www.flacsochile.org/old/publicaciones/el-­caso-­de-­la-­sociologia-­en-­chile-­formacion-­de-­una-­disciplina/. Brunner, J.  J. (1999). Los orígenes de la sociología profesional en Chile. En E. Devés, J. Pinedo & R. Sagredo (Comps.), El pensamiento chileno en el siglo XX (pp. 65–80). México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Cordero, R. (2009). Dígalo con números: La industria de la opinión pública en Chile. In R. Cordero (Ed.), La sociedad de la opinión. Reflexiones sobre encuestas y cambio político en democracia (pp.  69–92). Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales. Devés, E. (2000). El pensamiento latinoamericano en el siglo XX. Del Ariel de Rodó a la CEPAL (1900–1950). Tomo I. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos.

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Devés, E. (2003). El pensamiento latinoamericano en el siglo XX. Desde la CEPAL al neoliberalismo (1950–1990). Tomo II. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos. Di Filippo, A. (2007). La Escuela Latinoamericana del Desarrollo. Cinta de Moebio, 29, 124–154. http://www.facso.uchile.cl/publicaciones/moebio/29/difilippo.pdf. FLACSO. (1959). Seminario sobre terminología de las ciencias sociales. FLACSO. Fonseca-Tortós, E. (1976). Prefacio. In J. Medina Echavarría (Ed.), Consideraciones sociológicas sobre el desarrollo económico América Latina (pp.  7–24). Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana. Franco, R. (1974). Veinticinco años de sociología latinoamericana. Un balance. Revista Paraguaya de Sociología, 30, 57–92. Franco, R. (2007). La FLACSO clásica (1957–1973). Vicisitudes de las Ciencias Sociales latinoamericanas. Santiago de Chile: FLACSO-Chile. Furtado, C. (1983). Breve introducción al desarrollo. Un enfoque interdisciplinario. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Germani, G. (1959). La comunicación entre especialistas en sociología en América Latina. Situación actual y sugestiones para su mejoramiento. Trabajos de Investigación del Instituto de Sociología, 20, 21. Germani, G. (1964). La sociología en América Latina: Problemas y perspectivas. Editorial Universitaria. Godoy, H. (1960). El ensayo social. Notas sobre la literatura sociológica en Chile. Anales de la Universidad de Chile, 120, 76–110. https://anales.uchile.cl/ index.php/ANUC/article/view/27376/29028. Godoy, H. (1977). El desarrollo de la sociología en Chile. Resumen crítico e interpretativo de su desenvolvimiento entre 1950 y 1973. Estudios Sociales, 12, 33–56. González Bollo, Hernán (1999). El nacimiento de la Sociología empírica en la Argentina: El Instituto de Sociología, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (UBA), 1940–54. Buenos Aires: Editorial Dunken. González Navarro, M. (1990). El Centro de Estudios Sociales. In E. C. Lida & J. A. Matesanz, El Colegio de México: Una hazaña cultural, 1940–1962. México D.F.: El Colegio de México. Hamuy, E. (1961). El problema educacional del pueblo de Chile. Editorial del Pacífico. Hamuy, E. (1967). Chile: El proceso de democratización fundamental. Universidad de Chile. Ianni, O. (1971). La sociología de la dependencia en América Latina. Revista Paraguaya de Sociología, 21, 18–29. Krebs, R. (1994). Historia de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile: 1888–1988. Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile. Labbens, J. (1969). The role of the sociologist and the growth of sociology in Latin America. International Social Science Journal, 21(3), 428–432.

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Lira, A. (1983). Las ciencias sociales y el destino del hombre: Notas sobre la obra de José Medina Echavarría. Relaciones. Estudios de Historia y Sociedad, 5(18), 66–80. https://www.colmich.edu.mx/relaciones25/files/revistas/014/ AndresLira.pdf. Medina Echavarría, J. (1973). Aspectos sociales del desarrollo económico. CEPAL. Morales, J. J. (2010). José Medina Echavarría y la sociología del desarrollo. Íconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO-Ecuador, 36, 133–146. https://revistas. flacsoandes.edu.ec/iconos/article/view/389. Morales, J. J. (2012). José Medina Echavarría y la sociología en Chile. El intento de constituir una “tradición sociológica” en la Escuela Latinoamericana de Sociología. Revista Central de Sociología, 7, 79–115. https://www.centraldesociologia.cl/index.php/rcs/article/view/21. Morales, J.  J. (2017). José Medina Echavarría. Vida y sociología. El Colegio de México. Morcillo, A. (2008). Historia de un fracaso: Intermediarios, organizaciones y la institucionalización de Weber en México (1937–1957). Sociológica, 67, 149–192. http://www.scielo.org.mx/pdf/soc/v23n67/v23n67a7.pdf. Moya, L.  A., & Morales, J.  J. (2008). Estudio introductorio. In J.  Medina Echavarría, Panorama de la sociología contemporánea (pp.  11–76). México D.F.: El Colegio de México. Muñoz, O. (1968). Crecimiento industrial de Chile, 1914–1965. Instituto de Economía y Planificación, 105. Navia, P., & Osorio, R. (2015). Las encuestas de opinión públicas en Chile antes de 1973. Latin American Research Review, 50(1), 117–139. https://www. jstor.org/stable/43670234. Prebisch, R. (1980). Homenaje a José Medina Echavarría. In A. Gurrieri (Ed.), La obra de José Medina Echavarría (pp. 11–13). Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica. Quijano, A. (1988). Otra noción de lo privado, otra noción de lo público: Notas para un debate latinoamericano. Revista de la CEPAL, 35, 101–115. Rodríguez, O. (1988). La teoría del subdesarrollo de la CEPAL. Siglo XXI. Sociedad Científica de Chile. (1944). Décimo Congreso Científico General Chileno. Sociedad Científica de Chile. Solari, A. (1969). Social crisis as an obstacle to the institutionalization of sociology in Latin America. International Social Science Journal, 21(3), 445–456. Urquidi, V. (2005). Otro siglo perdido. Las políticas de desarrollo en América Latina (1930–2005). El Colegio de México. Valdés, J. G. (1989). Pinochet’s economists, The Chicago School in Chile. Cambridge University Press. Williamson, R. C. (1956). La sociología en América Latina. Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 18(1), 145–153. http://revistamexicanadesociologia.unam.mx/ index.php/rms/article/view/59819/.

CHAPTER 3

Sociology: From Scientific to Its Radicalization (1958–1973)

Abstract  This chapter situates the development of sociology in Chile, the Latin American subcontinent, and a world in which profound economic, political and sociocultural transformations made sociology a necessary science in all areas. Institutions such as ECLAC, ILPES and FLACSO hosted prominent researchers who made significant contributions to Latin American sociology as a science capable of specifying development strategies and policies, as well as of preparing professionals to work on them. The highest expression of sociology’s political commitment can be found in the government of Salvador Allende. However, the expectations invested in the process of change were abruptly brought to an end with the 1973 coup. Keywords  Modernization • Development • Dependency theory • Marxism • Unidad Popular • Coup d’état The institutionalization of sociology in Chile, between the late 1950s and early 1960s, took place in a context of deep economic, political and socio-­ cultural transformations, which made sociology an appealing science oriented to knowing social reality and thus deciphering the patterns of change that were being experienced in wide areas of the region. Those years

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Morales Martín, J. Gómez de Benito, History of Sociology in Chile, Sociology Transformed, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10481-7_3

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witnessed a world divided by the Cold War, a Latin American region disrupted by the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and a country (Chile) utterly immersed in such transnational coordinates. In particular, the Cuban Revolution gave momentum to a renewed awareness of the unequal conditions in which development in Latin America was prosecuted (Alburquerque, 2011; Devés, 2003). Its importance cannot be overestimated both for Chile’s modern history and also for that of the wider Latin American region, as it brought with it a change in the United States’s geopolitical stance regarding the region, which went from open military interventions in some countries such as Guatemala, to the formulation of a policy of openness and democratic reforms, mainly aimed to hinder the revolutionary impulses boosted by the Cuban example (Faletto, 1980, pp.  2–3). Under the umbrella of the Alliance for Progress, the United States seriously considered the establishment of civil and democratic regimes in Latin America. It is thus no coincidence that, immediately after the Cuban Revolution, Chile was chosen by the Alliance for Progress as the exemplary alternative and democratic pole to Cuba. The Southern Cone country became a social and political laboratory for the major turn in democratization and social reforms launched by US President John F.  Kennedy in 1961 (Quesada, 2016). Conversely, the reformist zeal of the United States was the occasion of an intellectual “encounter” with the ECLAC theoretical approach (Gabay, 2008). The institutional representation and channeling of this understanding between ECLAC and the Alliance for Progress led to the creation in Santiago de Chile of the Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES) in July 1962 (Franco, 2013). From a modernization paradigm, ILPES took charge of the training of technical personnel from different Latin American countries so as to generate sectorial diagnoses, outreaches, programs and the like, necessary to obtain financial resources via the Alliance for Progress. Therefore, economic and social planning was instrumental to achieve the much-desired development. It was widely regarded as a method prone to the rationalization of state participation in economy and social life, at a time in which state intervention was conceived as a crucial positive factor in the revitalization of Latin American economies. By and large, there prevailed in the region an intellectually and politically optimistic view on the predictive capacity of sociology and social sciences. This was apparent in Chile’s case, in which the “professionalization of the sociologist” was increasingly favored in the 1960s, with a summit

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under Eduardo Frei Montalva’s Christian Democratic government (1964–1970), and with the crucial influence of Roger Vekemans’s modernization ideas. In this decade, social scientists worked as experts at the service of state intervention and development social programs. “Chilean sociologists made their debut in governmental and administrative posts’‘(Godoy, 1977, p. 45). Sociology was presented as a science capable of specifying the laws of development and preparing men and women for political action. The massive transformations taking place in Chile gave rise to an identifiable interest in social sciences and, in particular, in sociology (Krebs, 1994, p. 537). Undoubtedly, it was period of expanding prestige for social sciences and sociology, but it also marked the beginning of the most ideologically polarized phase of this discipline, as it became largely dependent on national political battles for democratic openings in the country (Garretón, 1989, p. 4; Cavarozzi, 2017). It is possible to say that in Chile sociology played a role in raising awareness about structural social problems, something that had already reached a radical political expression in the 1958 presidential elections, and continued to do so in those of 1964 and, especially, 1970. As across the entire region, sociology in Chile was a developing discipline devoted to development studies and committed to development as a project. Nonetheless, the “sociology of sociology” reflexive perspective indicates that those years were also characterized by the tension between Marxism and anti-­Marxism. On the one hand, numerous sociologists embraced both intellectual work and political militancy, analyzed the current situation with Marxist categories, and championed radical social change. These sociologists were confident in sociology’s transformative power.1 On the other hand, there are those who followed functionalism and the so-called “scientific sociology”, mainly in favor of a rigorous, objective, and non-partisan nature of the discipline. Of course, there were intermediate, “third-way” positions, yet as the 1960s progressed, we found these heterodox and reformist currents to be increasingly in the minority (Lamo de Espinosa, 2001). As we will see throughout this chapter, a radical confrontation of sociological conception took place in Chile in these years—critical theory versus 1   Marxism, in its diverse manifestations (Stalinism, Castrism, Guevarism, Socialism, Trotskyism, Socialist-Christianity, and so on), held already a long intellectual and political tradition at the time, in Chile and Latin America largely. A chronological account that reconstructs the historical evolution of Marxism in Latin America from the early twentieth century on can be found in Löwy (2007).

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functionalism, dialectics versus analytics, conflict versus consensus, and others. There will be little possible reconciliation between sides, as the stakes were not only between two ways of doing sociology, but between two different and overly distanced ways of understanding both sociology and the Chilean society itself. In addition, sociologists’ new generations openly contested their elderly masters because of their conservative, narrowly scientific, and uncommitted stance. The Chilean sociology in which all these conceptual, ideological and political debates took place had another important feature, as its institutional expansion had a regional, international dimension. Between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, Chile became a sort of “peripheral center” for social sciences in Latin America, as the most important regional institutes of the time found headquarters in the country, and it hosted most of the UN intergovernmental agencies (Beigel, 2010a). Moreover, Chile quickly became a hub for international academic networks, for example, the socio-religious studies of the Society of Jesus and its intellectual centers, Center for the Economic and Social Development of Latin America (DESAL) and Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILADES) (Beigel, 2011). These international organizations gave the city of Santiago de Chile a cosmopolitan halo, fostering the circulation of experts from different Latin American countries and also from the United States and Europe. The circulation of sociologists was, of course, beneficial for sociology schools in Chilean universities such as Concepción, Valparaíso or Tarapacá, which hosted foreign professors. The coups d’état in Brazil (1964) and Argentina (1966) gave a paradoxical contribution to Chile’s position as a regional platform for the internationalization of social scientists from across the world. Hundreds of South American exiles arrived, and institutions such as CEPAL, FLACSO and ILPES offered posts that were the ground for the consecration of a regional new generation of social scientists. Circulation and exchange gave exceptional productivity to regional sociology, with new theories and conceptualizations contributing to the consolidation of a Latin-American sociological tradition rooted in debates on subjects such as economic development, dependency theory and social marginality (Cortés, 2012; Morales, 2012; Quijano, 1970). Interdisciplinary debates in nature, they traversed sociology, economics and history. In 1967, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) emerged with the aim of stimulating the development of research groups and publications, playing a crucial role in the circulation of the intellectual production of the region. Chile also became a sort of laboratory for an endogenous process of knowledge

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production and application worldly acknowledged as a valid option—first with the Christian Democracy’s “Revolution in freedom”, and later by the Unidad Popular’s (Popular Unity’s) “Chilean road to socialism”. Therefore, the 1960s were propitious for the convergence of politics and sociology. One of the most apparent expressions of this reciprocity was the aforementioned creation of ILPES in 1962. As said, the climate favorable for sociological studies coincided in Chile and Latin America with the Alliance for Progress’ “political-social reformist zeal” (Cardoso, 1977, p. 30). In this way, a certain intellectual, bureaucratic, and financial convergence between the United States, ECLAC, and Latin American governments—with the exception of Cuba—took place, as they fundamentally shared goals and perspectives on the type of democratic reforms for economic and social development. ILPES was established in Santiago de Chile as a project of the United Nations Special Fund, with Raúl Prebisch as its first Director (Franco, 2013). It was supported largely by the Chilean state and countries of the region, yet it also had the backing of international and private organizations such as the Ford Foundation. ILPES was thus born with the objectives of providing the training and technical support requested by Latin American governments and conducting research on development and social planning. It is worth remembering that, at this time, the state in Chile and other Latin American countries was undergoing a rebuilding process, thus the question of the state evolved into an aspiration for democratic planning (Medina Echavarría, 1967, p. 63). Before the revolutionary option, a gradual and highly institutionalized pattern of social change was implemented, with the state as the modernization engine and force in the transition from a traditional, oligarchic and rural society to an industrial free society. As a matter of fact, the contribution of sociology was decisive for state planning, as it contributed with studies, fieldwork, figures and socioeconomic data on this transition, apart from the training of public officials and the technical advice to Latin American governments on public policy issues (Franco, 2013). A rather unintended consequence of this was the consolidation of ILPES, one of the few hubs of theoretical production in Chile and the region (Morales, 2012). This is to say that sociology in Chile also stood out in generating a theoretical framework to come to terms with peripheral capitalism, and thus be able to guide planning in practice. To an important extent, this would not be possible without the presence of José Medina Echavarría, who headed ILPES’s Social Planning Division from 1963 until his retirement in 1974 (Gurrieri, 1980, p. 135).

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He was provided with the necessary powers to act autonomously when it came to securing the minimum conditions in personal and financial assistance for the creation and long-term sustenance of a sociological research group. In 1959, Chilean sociologists Enzo Faletto and Luis Ratinoff joined ECLAC as researchers under Medina Echavarría’s supervision. Two years later, Marshall Wolfe was appointed as head of ECLAC’s Department of Social Development. Brazilian sociologist Fernando H.  Cardoso arrived to occupy the post of deputy director in ILPES’s Social Planning Division in 1964, bringing with him a substantial number of young sociologists who were also fleeing Brazil’s military coup against Joâo Goulart, among them Vilmar Faria, José Serra, Pedro Paz, and Francisco Weffort. Other scholars were incorporated into FLACSO, including Susana Prates from Brazil, Edelberto Torres Ribas from Guatemala, José Luís Reyna from Mexico and Carlos Filgueira from Uruguay. Shortly after, Argentina sociologists Jorge Graciarena and Adolfo Gurrieri arrived in Chile. Finally, late in the 1960s the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano and the Uruguayan sociologist Rolando Franco landed at ILPES, while the Uruguayan sociologist Aldo Solari joined ECLAC. The scope of the United Nations’ action in Santiago de Chile (ILPES and ECLAC), in addition to FLACSO’s contribution in training sociology’s first generations, brought together a largely influential network of Chilean and international sociologists and social scientists who departed from “Cepalino” thought and developed significant contributions to Latin American sociology from it. The presence of intellectuals such as Medina Echavarría provided new intellectual challenges when approaching Chile’s and Latin America’s major questions—economic, political, and social development; the modernization process; and social issues derived from urbanization, industrialization, and migration. A preliminary framework for these topics revolved around discussions on “agents and social aspects of development in Latin America”; its goal, both theoretical and empirical, was the identification in the region of the social subjects capable of leading the modernization promised after World War II.  An important theoretical influence of this framework was the US American version of modernization theory, associated with the late 1940s and early 1950s functionalist school of sociology, and whose first exponents were, among others, David E.  Apter, Samuel N.  Eisenstadt, Samuel P.  Huntington, Seymour Lipset, and Talcott Parsons. Its reception in Latin America was significant, with Gino Germani in Argentina, Florestán Fernandes in

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Brazil, and José Medina Echavarría in Chile as its main advocates (Fernandes, 1957; Germani, 1964). In the case of the latter, his great intellectual reference was Max Weber; consequently, his work was a permanent attempt to validate some core postulates of the Weberian theory by means of analyzing the Latin American reality, as a means to understand the genesis of capitalist development in the region and its social consequences. In particular, Medina Echeverría’s hypothesis of the “structural porosity” of Latin America was widely circulated throughout the region. Exhibiting a clear Weberian influence, this interpretation is collected in his 1963 book El desarrollo social de América Latina en la post-guerra [“Latin America’s post-war social development”], co-written with Enzo Faletto and Luis Ratinoff. The book recovers Medina Echeverría’s previous theorizations regarding economy as a system and its typical arrangements in Latin America, and identifies hacienda [large-landowning] as the fundamental institution not only in the traditional order but also contemporarily, to the extent that its authoritarian cultural components continued to manifest themselves despite its apparent decline under the capitalist industrial process. In consequence, it is argued that the “[much-]desired economic process” was delayed by the conflict between the economic and social interests of the developmentalist ideology, with an identifiable national orientation, and the particular interests of the landowning minority. Under this light, Medina Echavarría suggested that Chile’s (and Latin America generally speaking) structural peculiarity (and, indeed, that of Latin America in general) lay in the permeability of their traditional society to change. In his own words, “the traditional society has adapted itself, knowing how to assimilate these or those ‘enclaves’ of modernity, but today that modernization is not enough” (Medina Echavarría, 1963, p. 12). Far from rigid, traditional structures impressed for theirs adaptability in incorporating modern elements, especially market forms; however, they also gave shape to obstacles in terms of important political and social aspects of a democratic development. Medina Echavarría’s intellectual positions were consistently oriented to prevent the reduction of development to economic achievements, as it also encompasses democratic goals. His option was for social change to be a state-planned action, a reformist process that guarantees individual freedoms and respects democracy; in his view, historical leaps entail enormous human and social costs that should not be allowed (Medina Echavarría, 1961). Medina Echeverría was one of Max Weber’s greatest interpreters in Spanish, and some of his ILPES

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theorizations were continued in later works, including the 1964 book Consideraciones sociológicas sobre el desarrollo económico [“Sociological considerations on economic development”], 1967’s Filosofía, educación y desarrollo [“Philosophy, education, and development”], and 1972’s Discurso sobre política y planeación [“Speech on politics and planning”]. Undoubtedly conditioned by Chile’s political context, the ideas contained in these works were influential in some crucial economic and social reforms of the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva; in particular, the 1965 Agrarian Reform established the hacienda as its main target for the dismantling of the system of traditional domination built upon this social form (Huneeus and Couso, 2015; Oszlak, 2016).2 However, it was Roger Vekemans who led the way when it came to influencing national politics from sociology in the Frei Montalva years (Cortés, 2020). From a modernization perspective, Vekemans offered a political alternative to the revolutionary positions opened in the aftermaths of the Cuban Revolution in Chile and Latin America. His theoretical propositions and the analysis of Chilean society gave shape to an interpretive framework oriented to alter the capitalist rules of functioning and its manifestations in the periphery, yet from a reformist and democratic stance incapable of letting go of capitalism. His propositions were manifestly intended to curb both Cuba’s revolutionary example and the spread of Marxism in the country. In doing so, Vekemans had the support of the Pontificia Universidad Católica network and the Bellarmine Center, which was linked to the Vatican and the Society of Jesus (Beigel, 2011). He was himself a major articulator of this network that invigorated sociology, social sciences, and the national political life more generally in the 1960s. 2  Furthermore, the interest in carrying out the Agrarian Reform was also related to reducing illiteracy, especially among the rural population. The Educational Reform initiated in 1965 was the first step to addressing illiteracy in marginalized youth and adults. It was based on the report “General Bases for the Planning of Chilean Education” (Ministry of Public Education, 1961), elaborated in the government of Jorge Alessandri. Its results were devastating, particularly regarding the years of study: most students only stayed one or two years at the school, so they reached adulthood as illiterate. Among the reasons for school dropout identified were inefficient pedagogical techniques, shortage and poor qualification of teachers, and the students’ precarious living conditions. Consequently, the reform, led by Secretary of Education Juan Gómez Millas, was oriented to reduce school dropouts and guarantee minimum levels of literacy and culture. Different education levels were introduced—preschool, primary and secondary—, as well as a common cycle and a differentiated secondary that eventually ended up with the student’s admission to the higher, college level.

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The social-Catholic network competed and collided with another important network of the time, articulated around the Universidad de Chile and related to UN organizations such as ECLAC and FLACSO, and with support of the Chilean state. Both pursued a hegemonic position in the country’s cultural and political scene, and built their own orbit of influence among university and academic circles. With headquarters in Santiago de Chile and regional offices across the country, the Universidad de Chile was predominantly a public, secular and professional institution. In turn, Pontificia Universidad Católica had also provincial offices, and was at the time in the midst of a struggle for the modernization of a highly hierarchical and conservative institution. In both, however, social development was a structuring problematic, giving room to the presence of centrifugal tendencies that disputed the mainstream process of social sciences specialization (Beigel, 2010b, p. 67). These university projects give a good representation to two different ways of understanding both Chilean society and the role of sociology in the process of social change. This is not to say that they had no bridges or links; on the contrary, collaborations and intersections proliferated among actors and groups from both networks, as well as among organizations such as ECLAC, FLACSO, and ILPES. With connections and distances, these networks converged in the task of modernizing and professionalizing social sciences in general and sociology in particular, by means of an ongoing effort to bring foreign experts and attracting foreign resources, mainly from philanthropic sources such as the American foundations Ford and Rockefeller, the German foundations Konrad Adenauer, Misereor and Adveniat, and the support of international cooperation agencies such as the American Fulbright Program or US-AID agencies, the Canadian International Development Research Cooperation (IDRC), the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation (SAREC), Netherlands’s NOVID-­ CEBEMO, or France’s CNRS-CCFD (Quesada, 2018). Vekemans stood out precisely in the task of attracting foreign funds to invigorate his sociology project. His ascendancy over the social-Catholic realm increased with the foundation of the Bellarmine Center and his appointment at the head of the Sociology School at the Pontificia Universidad Católica, from which he promoted the creation of the Sociological Research Institute in 1961. The Belgian sociologist also led the creation of other important centers such as the Center for the Economic and Social Development of Latin America (DESAL) in 1962, and the Latin American Center for Population and Family (CELAP) in

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1963. In 1964 and 1966, respectively, CIDE (Center for Educational Research and Development) and ILADES (Latin American Institute of Doctrine and Social Studies) were created in close relation to the Society of Jesus. In turn, the Corporation of University Promotion (CPU) was founded in 1968, and soon became a referential spot of seminars, meetings, and publications—particularly those addressing global higher education problems. In the 1960s, therefore, the first independent or private social science centers were founded in Chile, most of them characterized by the promotion of research on social problems and the adoption of an orientation favorable to development and social change. Virtually all of them emerged from within the social-Catholic realm; several were linked, in one way or another, to the ruling Christian Democratic party. Vekemans achieved an important status among these circles, given his organizational capacity, university and institutional management, and also a vast intellectual activity oriented to elaborate a developmental model for Latin America in general, and Chile in particular. Regarding the Pontificia Universidad Católica’s Sociology School, it showed two clearly defined goals under the direction of Roger Vekemans in the 1960s. On the one hand, the training of sociologists in scientific research; on the other, the provision of teaching assistance in sociology to other centers and departments at the university.3 This was largely due to the multidisciplinary approach of the Belgian sociologist, who conceived development as “a complex phenomenon, with multiple sociological and psychological nuances, and that, consequently, should be addressed by sociologists, social anthropologists, and social psychologists” (Krebs, 1994, p. 538). It is thus unsurprising that the Sociology School and its Sociological Research Institute evolved in concomitance with the rapid changes taking place in Chile during those years, as Vekemans was one of the great promoters and theoreticians of Eduardo Frei’s “revolution in freedom” (Krebs, 1994, p. 539). However, in the early 1960s the social-Catholic realm’s most important ideological platform was DESAL, an institution that allowed Vekemans to associate theory and social action for political planning, framed by a 3  What distinguished the Universidad Católica’s Sociology School was its high-­performance requirements over the course of the five years of the program; to graduate, students had to submit a dissertation and pass a final exam, in addition to having learnt some German, French and English languages.

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modernization program that constituted “the most mature and finished fruit of the positive social research system in Latin America” (Brunner, 1993, p. 49). Supported by the Alliance for Progress’s more progressive aspirations for Chile and Latin America, and itself a part of the modernizing paradigm, Vekemans’ reformist current had a great practical reception (Faletto, 1999, p. 121). One might even assert that DESAL functioned as a think-tank or ideological booster for the Christian Democratic government, in an attempt to make theoretical thought, sociological intervention, social action, and political orientation converge under the motto of “popular promotion”. The work of the Belgian sociologist as ideologue of the “revolution in freedom” 1964 campaign confirmed the incorporation in politics and power of the modernizing turn of “populist sociology”. This shift, in turn, modified previous conceptions within the social-Catholic realm itself and the Christian Democracy itself, helping overcome the moralistic and conservative approaches to social problems and turned toward a more progressive developmentalism (Devés, 2003, p. 45). The popular masses became to be regarded as subjects of their own development. This sociological approach provided major importance to community organizations and popular promotion for overcoming structural strangulation—that is, traditional elites—that opposed social integration all the way down. A substantial modification of the social reality was put in motion through planning and sociological techniques and practice, from a perspective wider than Anglo-Saxon “social engineering”. The Agrarian Reform, like other structural transformations demanded by Chilean society and enforced by the Eduardo Frei government, relied upon studies on marginality. A model of social integration based on popular promotion was also proposed (Godoy, 1977, p. 55). Vekemans was also a champion of popular promotion and the functional integration of the popular masses in Latin America, in works such as La prerrevolución latinoamericana. Marginalidad, promoción popular e integración latinoamericana [“Latin America’s Pre-Revolution. Marginality, Popular Promotion and Regional Integration”] and Doctrina, ideología y política [“Doctrine, Ideology, and Politics”]. He highlighted the need to bring popular masses from the state of marginality up to their social incorporation (Vekemans, 1968, p. 19). Vekemans’s “popular promotion” was a response to revolutionary perspectives on Latin American development, “in the sense of pursuing a radical change in values and structures” (Vekemans, 1968, p. 38). Along the strategic lines of popular promotion, the Eduardo Frei government

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strongly advanced the formation and legalization of grassroots social organizations, with the aim to generate spaces of participation for popular sectors—at the time vast majority of the population—and promote cultural change in the Chilean society as a whole. Furthermore, the political goal of popular promotion was the reduction of insurgency from marginalized groups, which were seen as hazardous focal points that could destabilize institutional order. This was the context for the creation and promotion across the country of thousands of “juntas de vecinos” (neighborhood committees), motherhood centers, sports clubs, social venues, offices for technical improvement for seamstresses, as well as the training of community leaders. At the beginning, left-wing sectors distanced themselves from the popular promotion initiatives implemented by the government, as they believed them to be merely means to facilitate electoral intervention. Yet they soon began to participate and take advantage of the enormous political mobilization that the organization of popular masses was acquiring. Of course, popular promotion was also oriented to restrain the irradiation of Marxism in Chile, something that opens up a discussion about the extent to which popular promotion actually pursued social integration rather than containment. As the process’ history demonstrates, popular promotion failed to contain popular masses, thereby missing the achievement of one of its main objectives. The popular masses expressed the need to increase the pace and scope of their social demands. There was evident impatience, given the frustrations generated by the actual model of economic and social development; as we will see, in this they were accompanied by intellectuals and sociologists. In the late 1960s, workers’ factory occupations and until-then unwitnessed street manifestations and protests were clear indicators of the polarized climate in Chile, something that would experience yet another radicalization with the presidential election of Salvador Allende in 1970. Roger Vekemans’s theoretical and practical work significantly imprinted a number of loci in the Chilean sociological field. The PUC Sociology School played a major role in the institutionalization of sociology, standing out for its scientific and empirical approach to the discipline. It also influenced the rise in interest in social intervention of graduates, professors, and student leaders, in a wave that led to the 1967 University Reform. Other professional sociologists held leadership positions in parties such as the Christian Democracy, MAPU (Popular Unitary Action Movement), and the Christian Left. Vekemans’ influence was thus part of the action exercised by centers of thought, research and social promotion (CIAS and

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Centro Bellarmino) founded or directed by Jesuits, and promoted by Cardinal Silva Henríquez (CIDE and ILADES), in the processes of sociocultural transformation of the country, and particularly of the Catholic Church. The abovementioned sociopolitical vicissitudes of the mid- to late-­1960s had direct repercussions on the Chilean sociological field. In this period, it began a moment of severe questioning of dominant paradigms, such as the ECLAC and ILPES mainstream doctrines or Vekemans’s modernizing reformism. This “crisis of developmentalism” moment was characterized by a myriad of criticisms targeting the developmental model, some of them from radical militants largely influenced by Marxism. It was a moment in which the commitment with social forces demanding greater levels of participation—the integration of the popular masses, as we saw— led to a fierce criticism of the “democratic-capitalist style” (Graciarena, 1978, p. 57). In addition, a significant problematization of scientific sociology and its empirical orientations took place, mainly as a result of the so-called Camelot affair in 1965. In the context of the Cold War—let us recall—it came to the public the news about an investigation program that caused a real scandal in academia, in politics, and the public opinion more broadly, as it helped deepen the discredit of US foreign policy in the region (Navarro and Quesada, 2010). Created by the Special Operations Office belonging to the American University, and contracted by the Department of Defense to be applied in Chile, the Camelot Program was designed to measure, predict, and control internal conflicts that were a menace for social stability in peripheral countries (Horowitz, 1967). The denunciation of the Camelot Program was made in 1968 by Johan Galtung, a Norwegian professor who was then teaching at FLACSO in Santiago de Chile. This helped widespread mistrust and general rejection of US foundations, representatives and donations. The affair was also a demonstration of the autonomy and public influence of Chilean social sciences at that time. In this period, as the intervention of sociologists in public affairs grew, a new paradigm of social research—Marxist-inspired dependency theory— was decidedly taking over the scene (Brunner, 1993, p. 57). To a certain extent, the combined development of Chile’s sociology and political process had its highest representation in the link between sociological Marxism and Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, in which the field of power and the sociological field interacted and conflated. It was a confirmation of the “displacement from the development question to the

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dependency question” (Beigel, 2009, p.  342), a moment in which the institutional and political conditions increased the idea that sociological theory can be popularized and that it can function quite effectively in channeling social change. “Through new arguments, this theorization proposed socialism as a fate and, by derivation, announced the necessary failure of the modernizing-democratizing experiences driven by alliances with bourgeois sectors” (Moulián, 1993, pp.  143–144). The Marxist dependency paradigm functioned as a theoretical ground for the Allende government, so that the Chilean society continued thinking of itself as a social laboratory, carrying out something unprecedented not only in Latin America but in the whole world: a “peaceful transition to Socialism” (Faletto, 1999, p.  121), also known as the “Chilean way to socialism”. The basic definition of this project was that, with the base of the majority of vote and observing democratic procedures and political pluralism, it is possible to change the bourgeois regime and carry out the economic, political and social transition to socialism. The emergence of dependency theory as a sociological paradigm can be symbolically situated in time with the 1965 publication by Fernando Henrique Cardoso of a document entitled “The Development Process in Latin America: hypothesis for a sociological interpretation”, which circulated among his ILPES colleagues in Santiago de Chile. In it, the notion of dependency is introduced for the first time (Morales, 2012) as “a basic concept to explain Latin America”, representing a new perspective when it comes to theoretically approaching the region’s problems (Franco, 2007, p. 101). The influence of this document was enormous, as its approach was based on the integrated analysis of economic processes of development, social change, and political arrangements (Reyna, 2007, p.  4). Cardoso proposed a sociological interpretation of peripheral underdevelopment based on the combined reading of Karl Marx and Max Weber (Beigel, 2006). A mature version of these ideas was the renowned work Cardoso co-authored with Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America. Published in 1969, this book remains one of the most influential works of Latin American sociological thought (Lamo de Espinosa, 2001). Cardoso and Faletto propose a conception of Latin American economic and social development as “historical process”; in order to be properly understood, it is required that the study of structural relationships formed throughout such history: “this approach recognizes, at the sociopolitical level, the presence of a certain kind of dependence, a dependence whose

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historical beginnings are located in the expansion of the economies of the originary capitalist countries” (Cardoso and Faletto, 1971, pp.  23–24). The condition of dependence of Latin American countries was thus explained, first and foremost, by the fact that their economies are conditioned by the development and expansion of the economies of central countries. Based on an international division of labor, dependence allows industrial development for some countries while limiting it for others; the latter was the case of Latin America and peripheral countries, generally speaking. This condition certainly affects both limitations and possibilities for action or economic performance; however, this is not written in stone, as hegemonic and dependent conditions can vary, since they are historical. In a nutshell, Cardoso and Faletto pointed out the Latin American development’s double bind: external economic pressures become internal arrangements that had a straightforward expression in the country’s stratification. It is possible to assert that Dependency and Development in Latin America remains a sociological milestone as it provided one of the first explanations of how globalization operates in the region, and how peripheral capitalism is connected to the world economic system (Morales, 2012). Therefore, dependency theory was born within ECLAC and ILPES as a theoretical movement that offered a critique of developmentalist and modernizing paradigms. It gained momentum and wide validation in the whole region until the mid-1970s, when it began to receive strong criticism—and military dictatorships arrived (Casas Gragea, 2006; Marsal, 1979). As knowledge paradigm or, more exactly, “committed sociology” (Maestre Alfonso, 1991, p. 17), dependency theory was greatly influenced by the Chilean and Latin American social and political climate of the “long sixties”, from the Cuban Revolution to the 1973 coup in Chile. In between, a vast array of social experiences, such as the military dictatorship in Brazil, the revolutionary movements in Bolivia, and the student movement that initiated the 1967 University Reform in Chile. The latter were active participants of coordinated actions of sociology students and professors in direct commitment with social revolution, and felt themselves in alignment with the society’s most needy classes. The youth also made use of Marxism and historical materialism as a sociological research program as an identity symbol against the previous generation of teachers and researchers (Faletto, 1999, p. 123). They conceived sociology not as analytical science, but rather as a practical-political one, an instrument capable of modifying social reality and fostering political experiences. It worked as a sort of a “gadget” to fight against social

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injustices. It is important to have in mind that, after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, a revolutionary way to take over power was very appealing, and a significant part of the Chilean intelligentsia and social scientists also conducted academic and professional activities in newer ways. All this serves to make sense of the fact that, as a paradigm, dependency theory counted several currents and orientations; no less because authors from many countries and institutions participated in its formulation, from different theoretical backgrounds and with diverse ideological perspectives. This is certainly not the place for a piecemeal look into dependency theory’s intellectual history, given the enormous number of authors, works, and particular theories contained under such a label (González Casanova, 1981; Larraín, 1998). And yet, an introduction to its most representative currents may be in order. Succinctly, we can identify three dependentista currents in Chilean sociology in the early 1970s, namely: “the structuralist criticism or self-criticism of ECLAC scientists”, “the non-orthodox Marxist trend” and “the neo-Marxist trend” (Casas Gragea, 2006). The structuralist criticism or self-criticism of ECLAC scientists corresponds to new structuralist positions nested within ECLAC and also adopted in ILPES and other Chilean and Latin American academic institutions. Authors such as Celso Furtado, Osvaldo Sunkel, Aníbal Pinto, Aldo Ferrer, Helio Jaguaribe, and Fernando Fajnzylber continued ECLAC’s core postulates; among them, an explanation of Latin American underdevelopment derived from endogenous factors and the “insufficient dynamism” of the socioeconomic structures of these countries. The non-orthodox Marxist trend was represented by Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto. What is peculiar about this is the fact that these authors characterized the structural-historical process of dependence in terms of class relations, emphasizing the political significance of economic processes, and dismissing the idea that socialism was the only way to development (Casas Gragea, 2006). Close associates of José Medina Echavarría at ILPES, they preferred to speak of specific situations of dependency, as they combined conceptual aspects of neo-Marxism and neo-Weberianism to stress “the analysis of those structural patterns that link, asymmetric and regularly, central economies to peripheral economies” (Cardoso, 1981, p.  36). Cardoso and Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America had an enormous intellectual and political impact among Latin American social scientists, who found in its argument a radically new theoretical horizon, beyond Marxism and functionalism. This combination and perspective is what Alain Touraine (1977,

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pp.  368–369) when stated that “as much as the analysis of economic dependence must start from the logic of international capitalism, capital drain, and the over-exploitation of peasant and worker labor, so the sociological analysis of national situations shows us the role of privileges and exclusion, rather than the direct confrontation of class interests. The two faces of Latin American reality shall not be set in opposition, since they cannot be understood without each other.” Finally, the neo-Marxist trend of dependency theory finds exponents in several Chilean authors and academic centers. Among the latter, the Universidad de Chile has been considered its home (Casas Gragea, 2006, p. 41). This orientation favored studies of exploitation, social marginality, colonialism, imperialism, and the center–periphery theory over structural analyses. Its core thesis was grounded on a dialectic of domination in which the underdeveloped, peripheral position of Latin American countries is explained by the domination and exploitation of external forces, that is, countries at the core of world economy, most importantly the United States. Therefore, the more the countries of the region participate in the capitalist system, the greater their underdevelopment and dependence on hegemonic countries (Weffort, 1970, p. 390). In this way, what this critical theory emphasizes is that the socioeconomic conditions of Latin America are caused by external conditioning factors. In this climate of changes and newer concerns that characterized national life in Chile at the time, the Universidad de Chile’s Institute of Sociology initiated research and studies framed by critical thought and dependency theory, in order to determine the causes of economic underdevelopment in Chile and the region. Along these lines of action, it is worth to mention some Chilean and foreign sociologists such as Alberto Martínez, Sergio Aranda, Hugo Zemelman, Néstor Porcel, Hernán Villablanca, and André Gunder Frank; the latter was at the time professor of sociology and economics at the Universidad de Chile, and also a close collaborator of the Allende government. Born and trained as a sociologist in Germany, he arrived in the country attracted by the opportunities offered by the Chilean social laboratory to combine theoretical reflection and political praxis. Gunder Frank’s prolific production made him one of the greatest among dependency theorists, in a list that includes Capitalismo y subdesarrollo en América Latina [“Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America”] of 1967, América Latina: subdesarrollo o revolución [“Latin America: underdevelopment or revolution”] of 1969, Sociología del desarrollo y subdesarrollo de la sociología: the development of

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underdevelopment [“Sociology of development and underdevelopment of sociology: the development of underdevelopment”], also of 1969, and the famous Lumpenburguesía: lumpendesarrollo. Dependencia, clase y política en Latinoamérica [“Lumpenbourgeoisie: Lumpendevelopment. Dependency, class, and politics in Latin America”], of 1972. In these and other works, Gunder Frank developed the thesis that Latin America has suffered underdevelopment since the early moments of capitalism; in consequence, from the era of colonialism on, the region has been capitalist. This early subordinated participation in world capitalism led to subsequent unproductiveness, misery and underdevelopment: “the development of underdevelopment”. The economic development of the center and the underdevelopment of the periphery are shown to be different aspects of the same world reality. In contrast to the Eurocentric perspective, in this theoretical structure Latin American underdevelopment is not a backward historical stage, but rather the actual consequence of the international economic system. The solution proposed by Gunder Frank for Latin American countries to emerge from underdevelopment was a delinking from Western capitalist countries (Gunder Frank, 1973), a perspective that certainly shared similarities with the foreign policy of the Popular Unity government and the Chilean way to socialism. Also a teacher at the Universidad de Chile Economy School, Marta Harnecker was one of the first female sociologists in the country and one of the most recognized Marxist ideologists in Latin America during the 1970s. She introduced and translated French philosopher Louis Althusser, by means of a work of remarkable pedagogical systematization of the Marxist-structuralist perspective, reaching wide circulation in Chile and throughout the region with Los conceptos elementales del materialismo histórico [“The elementary concepts of historical materialism”] and the Cuadernos de Educación Popular [“Notebooks of Popular Education”] (Moulián, 1993, p. 137). These books were widely used by communist and other revolutionary parties and workers’ organizations in the training of militants. Harnecker also directed the weekly Chile Hoy, founded in 1972 and associated with the Socialist Party, hence with the cultural, social, and political project represented by the Popular Unity. Conversely, the Center for Socioeconomic Studies (CESO) at the Universidad de Chile was headed by Brazilian economist and sociologist Ruy Mauro Marini, and hosted a number of Brazilian sociologists, including Vania Bambirra and Theotonio dos Santos, as well as Chilean economists Orlando Caputo and Roberto Pizarro. The Brazilian authors at

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CESO elaborated some of the most suggestive ideas with regard to the “Chilean laboratory” in the Latin America context and from a political code. The 1964 coup in Brazil sent them into exile with an impressive mix of Marxist theoretical training and grassroots militant experience (Cárdenas, 2015). Theotonio Dos Santos was the leading figure of a more traditional Marxist approach, as he formulated a theoretical critique of ECLAC developmentalism that assumed a newer definition of dependency so as to “open the way for a systematic approach to the problems of economic development” (Dos Santos, 1999, p.  34). In his view, Latin American underdevelopment was a consequence of the dependence on the central economies, and that capitalism was unable to generate development in the periphery (Devés, 2003, pp. 141–144). Among his most significant works, mainly published from CESO in his time in Chile, were El nuevo carátcer de la dependencia [“Dependency’s New Nature”] of 1967, Socialismo o Fascismo. El dilema latinoamericano [“Socialism or Fascism. The Latin American dilemma”] of 1969, and Dependencia y cambio social [“Dependency and Social Change”] of 1972. Vania Bambirra, in turn, contributed to dependency theory with important works that include Las relaciones de dependencia en América Latina [“Dependency Relations in Latin America” of 1968, Imperialismo y dependencia [“Imperialism and Dependency”] of 1969, El capitalismo dependiente latinoamericano [“Latin-America’s Dependent Capitalism”] of 1972, and La revolución cubana: una reinterpretación [“The Cuban Revolution: A Reinterpretation”], of 1973. Last but not least, Ruy Mauro Marini’s books Subdesarrollo y revolución [“Underdevelopment and Revolution”] of 1969, and especially Dialéctica de la dependencia [“Dialectics of Dependency”] of 1973, were—and still are—crucial reference points in dependency debates, as they offered key theoretical sources for Latin American critical studies. Along with Orlando Caputo and Roberto Pizarro’s book Imperialismo, dependencia y relaciones económicas internacionales [“Imperialism, dependency, and international economic relations”] of 1971, Dos Santos, Bambirra and Marini proposed a new conception of dependency. It is thus fair to consider the CESO of that time as a school of critical thought (Cárdenas, 2015). To begin with, its members understood development and underdevelopment as intertwined processes that emerge not only simultaneously but in combination; they are the results of the unfolding, expansion, and maturity of the world capitalist system, that is to say, of its relations taking place in Latin America at least from the nineteenth

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century’s independency events. Moreover, the region shows economies determined by the international division of labor, fulfilling the function of producers and exporters of raw materials and food, while central economies produce and export industrial and technological goods. In doing so, these authors proposed a conceptualization of capitalism as a world-system characterized by the inherent duality of center–periphery, a duality that determines development as unequal exchange within the world economic system. In addition, these works pointed out the contradictions of Latin American dependent capitalism qua peripheral capitalism, for the expansion of world capitalism implies the development of underdevelopment in the region. For this reason, from a general perspective the transit from a dependent, underdeveloped condition to a developed capitalism implied by necessity important ruptures: first, with spontaneous accumulation trends or market self-regulation, by giving more weight to state intervention; second, with the ruling classes and bourgeoisies of underdeveloped economies, for lacking the historical will to lead national integration and general betterment. And third, with central economies in order to neutralize foreign capital. It should be pointed out here that the works of Bambirra, Dos Santos and Marini, in addition to those of Gunder Frank, had a scope that went beyond Chile and Latin America, having, in fact, an international dimension and network, with partners in Europe, the United States and Africa. So, for example, Latin American dependency theory established dialogues with and influenced authors such as Inmanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin or Emmanuel Arghiri in their theories of the world economic system and the relations between underdeveloped and developed countries (Larraín, 1998). In parallel to this international effect, the sociological ideas of dependence were prominent as they found an important political resonance within the Popular Unity government. Theotonio Dos Santos, for example, was a member of the Socialist Party and also had strong relationships with the Communist Party. Ruy Mauro Marini entered the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria MIR, founded in 1965, and became one of its leaders (Dos Santos, 2013). A crucial role in putting politics and sociology into relationship was played by Clodomiro Almeyda in the years he headed the School of Sociology of the Universidad de Chile; a lifelong member of the Socialist Party, in the Allende government he held the secretaries of Defense and International Relations (Cortés, 2020). Therefore, it becomes apparent that there was a close relationship between the

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sociological and political fields that operated within the Universidad de Chile under Allende, from its School of Sociology, and fundamentally from CESO. This is mainly for its role as one of the most active hubs of dependency theory, with publications such as the journal Sociedad y Desarrollo, Economía y Sociedad, the fortnightly Punto Final, or the editorial house Prensa Latinoamericana. In them, the effects of the Cuban revolution in Chile, the chances of armed struggle in Latin America, and the need to rapidly transform Allende’s popular government into a socialist revolution, were discussed (Moulián, 1993, pp. 144 and 147). The “violent road” debate gained presence, and not a few intellectuals, politicians, and social scientists regarded armed struggle as an inevitable outcome (Faletto, 1999, p. 123). Let us not forget, for example, the visit to Chile of foreign social scientists such as French thinker Régis Debray, who understood that the only alternative to the social and political crisis was armed struggle and revolution, as he pointed out in his 1971 book Entretiens avec Allende sur la situation au Chili. But dependency theory was not a product exclusive to the Universidad de Chile. On the contrary, the neo-Marxist trend of dependency took great presence in other Chilean academic centers, in part due to major transformations in universities between 1967 and 1970 (Moulián, 1993, p.  135). A “sociological fashion” of sorts began (Cueva, 2008, p.  18; Godoy, 1977, p. 55). The predominant theoretical source of the new generations of sociologists and social scientists was the militant “neo-Marxist” approach (Graciarena, 1975, p.  104). There were dependency theorists teaching at regional universities, such as Pedro Paz, co-author of the book El subdesarrollo latinoamericano y la teoría del desarrollo [“Latin American underdevelopment and development theory”] of 1970. His co-writerwas Osvaldo Sunkel, who taught at the Universidad Concepción at the time (Altamirano, 2019, p. 244). Indeed, this university had also opened the Central Institute of Sociology and hosted several Brazilian exiles as adjunct professors, such as the sociologist Evelyn Pape. In turn, in 1972 the Universidad del Norte in Antofagasta created a sociology program structured and oriented by Marxism, historical and dialectical materialism. This program was headed by sociologists who had received their previous training at the Universidad de Concepción, such as Mario Fanta or Jorge Fuentes Alarcón; the latter was a member of the MIR’s Central Committee, and became yet another victim disappeared by the civic–military dictatorship (Donoso, 2020, pp. 637–640).

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Conversely, the rise of dependency theory in the middle of the Chilean process made itself felt also in the Universidad Católica. Students and professors of the School of Sociology and the Institute of Sociological Research were closely engaged in left-wing political parties, mainly with MAPU (Krebs, 1994, p. 540). Founded between 1968 and 1969, MAPU was a left-wing political party formed after a split in the Christian Democracy, and collaborated with the Popular Unity government in its project of a peaceful transition to socialism. In turn, the Center for the Study of National Reality (CEREN) of this same university, directed at the beginning of the 1970s by Chilean sociologist Manuel Antonio Garretón, was receptive to the intellectual interest in dependency and critical sociology. In collaboration with CESO, CEREN organized the “Symposium on the Transition to Socialism” in October 1971 (Altamirano, 2019, p. 244). One of CEREN’s finest outcomes was its magazine Cuadernos de la Realidad Social, which published and disseminated in national circles works that interpreted Chilean and Latin American underdevelopment from dialectical perspectives. In the 17 issues which it published between 1969 and 1973, authors such as Armand Mattelart, Michel Mattelart, Christian Lalive, Osvaldo Sunkel, Norbert Lechner, Manuel Antonio Garretón and Tomás Moulián appeared (Godoy, 1977, p. 55). The focus of these analyses was oriented to a wide range of theories: imperialism, underdevelopment, fetishism, religion, social change, socialism, bourgeois ideology, mass media, class struggle, cultural studies, Marxism, and popular studies. It was also in the Cuadernos de la Realidad Social that the first writings of German-born economist, theologian, and social scientist Franz Hinkelammert appeared. He contributed from Chile toward the elaboration of dependence as an analytical subject, and of its affinities and relations with Latin American liberation theology. Briefly speaking, liberation theology reflected the commitment of the social-Catholic realm with the economic, social and political development of the region, and was greatly influenced by the renewing winds of the Second Vatican Council (1959–1962). The liberation doctrine had considerable repercussions for ecclesial structures, particularly after the General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate held in Medellin in 1968. Since then, and throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s, there was a sector within the Catholic Church that chose the “option for the poor” as a paradigmatic mission and main aim of pastoral work, by engaging and sharing paths with people suffering in miserable conditions in an unfair, dislocating capitalism.

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Seeking to represent the “voice of the poor”, liberation theology conceived the oppressed as the collective subject of a history that is yet to be made (Milanesi and Cervera, 2008). Far from being a contemplative religiosity, it was a practical one. The option for the poor was also aligned with Chile’s image in the “Third-world” movement, as it was selected to hold the Third United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in the Third World, better known as UNCTAD III, in April 1972 (Alburquerque, 2020). Furthermore, liberation theology was hugely influenced by the analytical and theoretical tools provided by Marxism and critical sociology to understand the causes of poverty and social marginality, as well as specific patterns of capitalist contradictions and class struggle in Latin America (Löwy, 1999, p. 51). Consequently, life experiences and a noticeable sensitivity led liberation theologians to fill the gap between the Catholic Church and the daily issues of poor people. Among its first promoters: Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez, Colombian Camilo Torres, Brazilian Leonardo Boff, Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal, and Argentine Juan Carlos Scanone. In Hinkelammert’s case, he firmly relied on Marxism as a fundamental tool to analyze and comprehend Chilean and Latin American social reality. He identified the struggle against poverty and underdevelopment with anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles, and elaborated a theological critique of capitalism in which the countries of the region are defined as “unbalanced peripheries”. Even though further elaborated in his exile in Costa Rica (Hinkelammert, 1984), these ideas were initially formulated in books such as Ideologías del desarrollo y dialéctica de la historia [“Ideologies of Development and the Dialectics of History”] or Dialéctica del desarrollo desigual [“Dialectics of Unequal Development”], both of which were published in 1970. Another important locus of production and diffusion of critical sociological thought in dialogue with Marxism and dependency theory was the late-­1960s and early-1970s FLACSO. Important was the presence of such debates all over its own institutional journals such as the Latin American Journal of Political Science, later renamed the Latin American Journal of Social Sciences (Godoy, 1977, p.  51). More significantly, its professors made a remarkable contribution to the cultural, intellectual, and political life of the country. If Santiago de Chile became, in fact, the melting pot in which a “Latin American perspective” was forged for an entire generation of social scientists, FLACSO held a prominent place as an institution in which a good number of Latin Americans and foreigners sociologists

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circulated, most of them feeding national sociology. Names such as the Brazilians Glaucio Soares and Fernando H. Cardoso, the Chileans Enzo Faletto and Hugo Zemelman, the Uruguayan sociologist Teresita de Barbieri, and the Guatemalan Edelberto Torres Rivas, with Alain Touraine from France and Manuel Castells from Spain also making use of its classrooms. Certainly not all of them can be labeled as dependency theorists or Marxist authors; however, their works questioned the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of the functionalist paradigm, as well as providing studies in newer, emerging lines of research (Franco, 2007, pp.  104–105). Teresita de Barbieri, for example, came to FLACSO in 1968 as a student, and later became a professor and published in 1972 one of the first studies on gender and women in Chile: “El acceso de la mujer a la carreras y ocupaciones tecnológicas de nivel medio”. Conversely, Alain Touraine was a visiting professor at FLACSO in the 1960s. Highlights of intellectual production in Chile include one of the most relevant works about the industrialization process in the Great Concepción, co-written with fellow French sociologists Lucien Brams and Jean-Daniel Reynaud, and Argentine sociologist Torcuato Di Tella. This sociological research on Huachipato and Lota’s labor movement and unions was initially published in France in 1966 (Huachipato et Lota. Étude sur la conscience ouvrière dans deux entreprises chiliennes) and a year later in Argentina as Sindicato y Comunidad. Dos tipos de estructura sindical en América Latina [“Union and Community. Two types of organization structure in Latin America”], pioneering contributions from Latin America to sociological studies on work, workers’ consciousness and union organization (Zapata, 1990). In Chile between the late-1960s and the early-1970s, Manuel Castells also had academic and teaching experiences in Brazil and Mexico. In his time as FLACSO professor, he was interested in issues of urban and social planning and studies of social classes. Following a critical Marxist perspective, he published in 1971 Problemas de investigación en sociología urbana [“Problems of research in urban sociology”], one of the first contributions to this field of studies in Spanish language. His experience in Chile was recounted in his 1974 book Class struggle in Chile, in which a sociological analysis of the Popular Unity government is offered, analyzing the social conflicts and structures of a strongly politicized transitioning society. Chile also hosted Spanish political scientist Joan Garcés, author of the classic book, Chile: el camino político al socialismo [“Chile: the political road to socialism”], and who became Salvador Allende’s advisor and companion

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until the last moment of that fateful September 11 of 1973. In books such as El estado y los problemas tácticos en el gobierno de Allende [“The State and tactical problems of the Allende government”] of 1974, and Allende y la experiencia chilena. Las armas de la política [“Allende and the Chilean experience. The weapons of politics”] of 1976, he later collected more elaborated and detailed reflections on that unique historical period. Undoubtedly, these books are an evocation of a key period in Chilean and Latin American history, as they are able to convey the deep cultural, democratic and political meaning that the Popular Unity project represented, offering important intellectual and sociological clues to one of the most influential political processes for the left, globally speaking. A large number of the authors mentioned in this chapter had a common expectation in living first-hand the historical, social, and political processes that occurred in the Chile of those years. This was especially expressed by a mid-1960s generation seduced by the social laboratory Chile offered, and the desire to intervene in the sociopolitical reality—it was one of its hallmarks (Graciarena, 1978). On the other, more content-­ shaped hand was the predominance of a Marxism grounded in the analytical framework of dependency theory and on “socialism” as a limit-concept (Garretón, 1989, pp. 4–5). The borders between sociology and politics were diffuse, if not non-existent, and even a “notorious infatuation of intellectuals for the study of Marxism in terms of both doctrine and real experience” (Medina Echavarría, 1965, p. 244) was diagnosed. Discussions within the discipline became increasingly ideological, as abstract empiricism, functionalism, and modernization theory were seen as deeply associated with the Anglo-Saxon world, and hence with US imperialism. “Statistics and methodology ceased to have the weight they had in previous programs, and Marxism spread as a way of accessing reality. Young people demanded greater articulation of teaching and research to make sociology a science capable of transforming reality” (Beigel, 2009, p. 337). A good example of the generational divide of Chilean sociology, but in a broader Latin-American context, occurred at the Tenth Congress of Latin American Sociology (ALAS) held in Santiago de Chile in 1972. In it, “a significant rupture at the level of Latin American social thought” took place, with the younger generation bringing to a stage largely settled by and for mainstream social scientists the debates of great transformations that were in order. The debate between positivists and functionalists, that had been introduced early in the 1950s in ALAS conferences, “was

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shattered by the advanced young generation of the time” (Ríos, 2019, p. 36). Other times, other interests now contributed to the discipline. Nonetheless, the massive expectations and hopes deposited in both sociology and the processes of change in Chile ended abruptly with the coup d’état of September 11, 1973. In the final months of his government, Allende pursued parliamentary majorities to avoid the intervention of the army. He was unsuccessful. The proposal for a democratic solution failed as the Chilean society was utterly polarized into two irreconcilable political and intellectual positions that ended up bringing about the tragic collapse of the country (Valenzuela, 1978). Nothing could help deactivate a military coup that was already in the making (Reyna, 2007, p. 2). In a country that historically had mechanisms of political balance, and thus far considered exemplary in terms of the quality of its politics and its rule of law, the violence and political and ideological polarization gained terrain in a way fairly typical of Latin America in the Cold War context. In Chile—a country that possessed democratic freedom and stability, political pluralism and strong unions, a fairly good cultural level, excellent universities, and even two Nobel Prize winners such as Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda–, these democratic foundations and traditions were tragically abandoned, even betrayed. The extremism that grew daily in the Chile of Popular Unity resulted in the cancellation of the social and political life of the country. Of course, September 11, 1973 also brought profound changes to Chilean sociology, some of which reverberate to the present day.

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CHAPTER 4

Breakdown, Crisis, Prosecution, and Refoundation of Sociology Under Civic–Military Dictatorship (1973–1990)

Abstract  This chapter evaluates the consequences of the democratic breakdown in Chile as well as in sociology, with the intervention in universities, the persecution of academics and students, and the shrinkage of sociology departments to the bare minimum. Even so, sociology squeezed the spaces provided by private institutions and regional organizations such as ECLAC, ILPES, UNDP, and FLACSO. Numerous independent academic centers were created with the help of international funding. These provided professional opportunities for sociologists, and also working as places of resistance and intellectual criticism from the democratic opposition to the dictatorship. 1988 marked the beginning of the transition to democracy in Chile, opening up a new contextual, institutional and political framework for sociology, in the context of an increasing privatization of higher education. Keywords  Dictatorship • Authoritarianism • Independent academic centers • Privatization • Transition to democracy On September 11, 1973, the military coup carried out by the armed forces against the popular, democratically elected government of Salvador Allende constituted the first moment of breaking and destroying everything that represented a transformation of the structures and interests of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Morales Martín, J. Gómez de Benito, History of Sociology in Chile, Sociology Transformed, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10481-7_4

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the traditional dominant classes—landowners and the industrial and banking bourgeoisie, closely linked to North American capitals—in Chile. In addition, the democratization of culture and the intellectual field, as well as the wide-ranging university reforms promoted by the government, will suffer radical violence and state intervention. Universities, and, in particular, there were interventions in the faculties of social sciences, with the prosecution and replacement of sociology careers’ authorities and a large part of the academic body. Publications from sociologists and social sciences institutions were the cause of considerable suspicion, with many thrown into the flames as part of punishment rituals. In this sense, thousands of social science books and journals held at home by university scholars and students were requested and thrown into the fire. The possession of “Marxist literature” became a crime, as repression, arbitrariness, and blatant ignorance led to the disappearance of thousands of publications. One of the cruelest university interventions was carried out at the Universidad Técnica del Estado UTE, resulting in the Rector, Enrique Kirberg, and hundreds of academics being thrown into jail, including the singer Víctor Jara, who was tortured and murdered in the following days. Chilean universities came to be directed by “military deans” appointed by the military government. University autonomy, formerly a policy for intellectual freedom, was violated and scrutinized under military power (Rifo, 2017, 2019). It is necessary, however, to point out that in these cases of “purging” and others of human rights violations, there was a close collaboration of civilians who took advantage of the opportunity to impose their conservative ideological approaches and traditionalist epistemological and disciplinary models. Rules were applied that led some universities to adopt hierarchical, authoritarian “garrison” styles of governance. The purpose of these measures was to transform the university environment and redirect it to mere instruction, allegedly in order to eliminate “politics” and “politicians.” Student organizations were banned for a considerable period while, except for the case of the Universidad Católica, as it this institution was in the hands of the gremialistas, a conservative, authoritarian political and ideological current that modeled itself on Franco’s Falangists in Spain (Cristi & Ruiz, 1992). The control of education, teaching, and intellectual freedom is a practice common to all authoritarian regimes. Therefore, the initial strategy of coup plotters with regard to social sciences and sociology was to weaken and dismantle them through the use of violence. Authoritarian intervention and university “purification” aimed at eliminating the advances

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produced by the university reform was instrumental in the “cultural blackout” suffered by the country in the context of the dictatorship, as the scientific field saw a decimation in the numbers of both spaces and scholars. Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (currently ANID, Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo), the national research agency, acknowledged that 639 scientists and researchers left the country between September 1973 and October 1974, as testified by former rector Enrique Kierberg (1978, p. 140) in an interview in the magazine Araucaria, following his arrest at the infamous Dawson Island. In this process of institutional reorganization, universities and sciences in general, and social sciences in particular, experienced a reduction in their critical mass. A large number of national, Latin American and foreign students, teachers and researchers were fired, imprisoned, or murdered, and a substantial number of them saw this as a sudden interruption of their chances of working in academia. Many of them had to leave Chile. Some returned to their countries of origin, and large numbers of Chileans emigrated abroad, being forced to take the path of exile to those countries that facilitated their arrival, such as Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela, in Latin America; and Belgium, France, Italy, and Sweden in Europe. International organizations also suffered pressures from the dictatorship in Chile. Some FLACSO students and professors, such as Joaquín Duque, were jailed and killed (Morales & Garber, 2018). As a matter of fact, FLACSO was forced to move to Argentina, finally creating in 1974 the Buenos Aires Program in order to host Latin American social scientists fleeing the Chilean dictatorship (Algarañaz, 2013). The best known of this group of exiles was Ricardo Lagos Escobar, the future president of the country. In addition, in 1975 another FLACSO branch was opened in Mexico, providing the possibility of academic development in a context of further political stability. Later, in 1979, the FLACSO General Secretariat was transferred to Costa Rica. With regard to its Chilean headquarters, in 1978 the civil-military dictatorship decided to bring the agreement to an end and remove the legal personality granted; nevertheless, as we will see later, this did not prevent the continued work of an important group of sociologists and researchers under the UNESCO shield. Other international organizations that played a major role in the development and institutionalization of sociology and social sciences in Chile and throughout Latin America, such as ECLAC or ILPES, also suffered political pressures, yet they also helped students and teachers accused of subversion to leave the country. However, following their democratic tradition, these centers would not give up their critical vocation afterward.

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Even ECLAC and its heterodox, structuralist, Latin American thinking was persecuted by the General Pinochet dictatorship, which murdered Carmelo Soria on July 14, 1976. This was a wake-up call for the officials of this organization, as well as a reminder for all social scientists in the country, warning against critical thinking. Under this gloomy context, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) played a decisive role in promoting solidarity networks and support in redistributing the exiled social scientists. In this way, systematic relocation programs were created, including the Relocation Program for Social Scientists (CLACSO) and the Refugee Academic Program of the World University Service in the United Kingdom, which hosted more than a thousand social scientists from Chile (Bayle, 2008). In Mexico—another country that helped rescue politicians, professors, and social scientists escaping from the dictatorship—, the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) was created in 1974. This academic center also welcomed many other exiles from the Southern Cone, among them Fernando Fajnzylber (Chilean economist and social scientist), Luis Maira (Chilean academic and founder of the Christian Left party), Armando Arancibia (Chile’s former Undersecretary of the Economy), Jorge Barenstein (Argentinian economist), María Teresa de Conceicao Tavares (Brazilian economist who came from ECLAC), Marcos Kaplan (Argentinian economist), Samuel Lichtensztejn (Dean of the Universidad de la República in Uruguay), Isaac Minian (Argentinian economist who came from the United Nations), José Manuel Quijano (Uruguayan economist), Juan Enrique Vega (Undersecretary of the Chilean party MAPU), and Pedro Vuskovic (Salvador Allende’s Secretary of the Economy). In addition, other Mexican institutions, such as El Colegio de México, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the Universidad Nacional de México’s Center for Latin American Studies, welcomed another group of exiled Chilean sociologists, such as María Luisa Tarrés, Francisco Zapata, and Hugo Zemelman, who would develop outstanding careers and make significant contributions to Mexican sociology in areas such as the sociology of organizations and social movements, the sociology of action, gender studies, labor and agrarian studies, as well as topics related to political culture, ideology, and Latin American political regimes (Tarrés, 1992, 1998; Zapata, 1979, 2013; Zemelman, 1987, 1989). In the face of Chile’s and the entire Southern Cone’s turn toward authoritarianism, Mexico became the new hub of regional sociology and

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social sciences. From Mexico’s powerful universities and scientific institutions, its publishers and magazines allowing institutional accommodation for researchers, and the establishment of networks with other Latin American and foreign countries, the Latin American circuit was re-­ articulated, making it possible to continue the production and circulation of sociological knowledge. Moreover, Agustín Cueva (1988) defined the “watershed” produced in Latin American sociology by separating the concerns of social scientists residing in Mexico and Central America from the interests of sociologists from the Southern Cone. While the former group was more politically committed to the 1979 Sandinista Nicaraguan revolution, which reactivated the critical work of numerous thinkers as it was seen as a feasible response when it came to escaping US domination over the region; the latter were concerned with analyzing the immediate problems and social effects of the implementation of neoliberal economic models, in addition to introducing subjects related to poverty, marginality, human rights, and democratic recovery. The topic of democracy, indeed, permeated a large part of the agenda of Latin American and Chilean sociologies during the 1980s (Martuccelli & Svampa, 1993). The 1970s marked the end of representative democracy in Latin America, both as a form of political organization and as the dominant ideology. Other forms of authoritarianism began to be regarded as possibilities for the much-desired economic development (Solari et al., 1976, p. 541). The military coups in Uruguay on June 27, 1973, and Argentina on March 24, 1976, established neoliberal economic models that were consolidated throughout the region in the 1980s, with Chile as a paradigmatic case for the depth of adopted economic policies and the 17-year duration of the civil-military rule. The coup against the Allende government inaugurated a new development model in Latin America: an exacerbated capitalism and technocratic and neoliberal rationality was installed via the violence and oppression of military dictatorships (Urquidi, 2005: 356). Chile was the first Latin American country of a significant size in which the tendency toward state intervention of the previous years was abandoned, and in which ultraliberal criteria were applied in all fields of the economy and society (Vergara, 1985). The so-called “Chicago Boys” team of economists and experts from the Universidad Católica led the macroeconomic “revolution” of the civil-military dictatorship

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(Gárate, 2012).1 Over the course of a few years, the country went from a closed, interventionist economy to a market-oriented economy open to the world, something that brought about significant disruptions and structural imbalances in productive sectors, the labor market and, above all, in the modes of social and political coexistence (Ffrench-Davis, 2018). The Chilean neoliberal laboratory represented, in fact, the most extreme application of the monetarist, free trade orthodoxy of the Chicago School and the ideas of Milton Friedman, which then served as a background for other Latin American countries and elsewhere, for example, the austerity policies implemented by the governments of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States in the 1980s (Harvey, 2007). The Augusto Pinochet dictatorship’s political project established what was euphemistically termed as a “protected democracy” in order to reduce as much as possible the old reformist, multi-class state (Jocelyn-Holt, 2001, p. 271), and distinguished itself by its re-foundational aim (Garretón, 1984). There was a general withdrawal of the state in the economy through reduction in public spending and state presence in regulating economic processes, as well as a massive reversal of the state role as direct producer, all of which confirmed that the goal of a free market economy admits neither the state nor social improvement as barriers. Authoritarianism was credited for preparing the conditions to true freedom, from which transformations impossible to be carried out within political representative democracy were advanced, proposing in this case a “minimal government” and criticizing the state’s welfare orientations (Moulián, 1993, p.  150). Thus, a socio-economic paradigm rejected for decades was finally imposed. Established in an authoritarian, illegitimate, violent manner, the neoliberal model ended half a century of economic and social development in Chile, based on a democratic, reformist tradition. From then on, the neoliberal technocracy was consolidated in driving the economy and other areas of society (Vergara, 1985, pp. 77 and 85). The imposed triumphant conception was a self-driven society that molds itself through levels of  The “Chicago Boys” group led the entire macroeconomic revolution of the Chilean military dictatorship. Trained at the University of Chicago, they participated in the military regime’s economic team and occupied important positions in the secretaries of Economy, Labor, and Treasury. Leading figures include Pablo Baraona, Álvaro Bardón, Jorge Cauas, Sergio de Castro, Fernando Lens, Sergio Undurraga, Juan Villarzú and José Luis Zavala. Later, Julio Dittborn, Joaquín Lavín, and José Piñera took charge of the complete reform of the pension system (Gárate, 2012; Vergara, 1985). 1

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efficiency and market competitive demands. In this way, the free market was taken as the only way to guarantee high economic growth and create the conditions for the definitive eradication of poverty. At that time, the end of the society of citizens was recognized in favor of a society of consumers and owners. It was this conception of society, in its cultural, economic, and political levels, that became consecrated in the 1980 Constitution, an imposed straitjacket that helps explain even situations experienced today in the country, affecting Chilean society as a whole, and significantly conditioning sociology and social sciences. As mentioned, the process of the de-institutionalization of sociology in universities and academia began immediately after the coup. Along with the prosecution of students and instructors, several sociology careers were closed, while others were maintained with much difficulty. The academic pillars of the Sociology Departments were reduced to a minimum at the Universidad de Chile and the Universidad de Concepción. Only in the Universidad Católica was a significant part of the academic body preserved, but even here the study plans underwent a radical change toward the prioritization of methodological and statistical work and its projection in poll occupations. Furthermore, the abrupt political change also meant the dismantling of its most important social research centers. For example, the military government closed CESO and the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Universidad Chile, Universidad Católica’s CEREN, Universidad de Concepción’s Central Institute of Sociology, while an intervention was made in the Universidad Técnica del Estado (today the Universidad de Santiago de Chile). in the Universidad Católica’s Institute of Sociology, several professors were exonerated, and in the sociology program Pedro Morandé, recently elected by left-wing parties, was dismissed and replaced by José Álvarez, a Christian Democratic academic who managed to defend his colleagues and students from the repressive threats of the regime’s security agencies. The program was closed for two months and reopened with a new curriculum, traditionalist in nature, and in which Chile’s history was included as a fundamental subject. 1974 was the last year in which there was any student admission, and only with the return to democracy the sociology training began again for undergraduates, even when a Master’s in Sociology was opened in the late 1980s. Meanwhile, the sociology program at the University of Chile was quickly closed, and in its place a social sciences program was opened in 1976 on a new campus in La Reina, far from Santiago de Chile’s downtown, and thus from contact with other disciplines. The students, who

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were interested in knowing and learning sociology with broader horizons than those delivered by traditional academic centers, approached the confined FLACSO in order to attend classes. In the second half of the 1980s, the sociology program at the Universidad de Chile was reopened, with professors such as Alfonso Arrau—a doctorate from the Washington University with extensive training in sociological theory—and Ximena Sánchez— a professor of pedagogy at the Universidad de Playa Ancha in Valparaíso, who taught courses in sociological theory (Aguilar, 2020; Sánchez, 2020). In turn, the sociology program at the Universidad de Concepción was closed, and the same thing happened to the sociology course at the Valparaíso branch of Universidad de Chile, created in 1968 but operative only until September 1973. Despite this relatively short duration, it trained important sociologists such as Francisco Encina, Ernesto Ottone, María Luisa Tarrés, Fernando Calderón, and Javier Martínez, among others (Leal Román, 2009). A very singular case happened with the sociology program at the Universidad del Norte in Antofagasta. With antecedents from 1969, this career was institutionalized in March 1972 as the only one in Northern Chile; after the coup it was able to resist the persecution of teachers and students until the early 1980s. Its official closure occurred in 1984 (Donoso, 2020). Prominent was the figure of the Dutch professor Juan Van Kessel, a former FLACSO student who joined the Universidad del Norte in 1974 and remained there until 1978, helping to strengthen the areas of methodology and sociological research, and promoting the creation of the journal Cuadernos de Investigación Social. Furthermore, Van Kessel made significant contributions in the study of popular religiosity and Andean cultural anthropology, topics that help a decimated sociology career navigate those difficult years with a small academic board and few students. These research lines were continued in the 1980s by northern sociologists such as Bernardo Guerrero (2004) from the NGO Research Center for Northern Reality, based in Iquique. Despite this process of academic de-institutionalization of sociology in the authoritarian context, some programs managed to be continued, albeit with considerable difficulties. With no official data available, some authors estimate that “between 1974 and 1985, no less than two hundred young people began their studies in sociology in Chile” (Barros & Chaparro, 2016, p.11). These were individuals who began studying sociology under a social, historical, and political period that forced a process of institutional rearrangement for both the discipline and its practitioners. This led to the

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creation of a generation of students who were left orphaned by professors and teachers, either exonerated from classrooms or simply exiled. These students were also unable to enjoy the intellectual and academic climate of the 1960s or early 1970s, when sociology in Chile was the baseline for Latin American sociology. They found a gradual shift in sociological identity, which moved from the predominance in theoretical and methodological training of Marxism and dependency theory towards more plural frameworks and an increasingly professional profile. In fact, dependency theory entered a “phase of decline” (Marsal, 1979, p.  224), while the Latin-Americanist identity that characterized Chilean sociology declined, although never completely. These changes were a consequence of the new morphology adopted by sociology in the authoritarian context. The dictatorship promoted a process of privatization of the entire higher education system, and the groups of sociologists and social scientists that remained in the country were restricted to work mainly in so-called “independent academic centers” (Brunner, 1985), private institutions dedicated to social research that operated outside the universities’ authoritarian framework. Thus weakened, sociology in Chile was forced to a complete restructuring, founding new institutional homes in independent academic centers. During this period, sociology was practiced and thought of mainly from the private sector, but also from regional organizations that continued operating in the country such as ECLAC, ILPES, UNDP and, above all, FLACSO. Without the dynamism and vitality showed in the past years, the institutional circuits around these institutions was still important in several ways: 1) these regional institutions were an intellectual shelter for sociologists and social scientists in this authoritarian context; 2) they permitted diverse affiliations and favored the circulation of social scientists between different institutions; it was frequently the case, for example, that a researcher worked at the same time on a regional organization’s project and in an academic center; 3) they helped disseminate the sociological knowledge produced within the country to national, regional and international circles by means of the publication of magazines, books, and reports, also serving as protection for the arrival of foreign—mostly Latin American—scholars in the country; 4) they facilitated collaboration channels between international cooperation agencies or philanthropic foundations and national academic centers and researchers, that proved key to funding and sustaining sociology; and 5) especially during the 1980s, they helped install new research agendas related to topics of international interest such as human rights, demography, youth studies, the sociology of

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education, rural and gender studies, as well as studies with regard to political sociology, authoritarianism and democracy. In fact, in these years Chilean sociology turned its focus to popular organizations, social participation at different levels—neighborhood groups, social movements, cultural and folkloric groups, grassroots ecclesial communities—, and civil society more generally (Araujo, 2019, pp. 351–352; Salazar, 2002). Therefore, a number of regional institutions with headquarters in Chile—CEPAL, ILPES, UNDP, and FLACSO—contributed to keeping Chilean sociology active in the difficult, dark 1970s, helping later as important catalysts for ideas, researchers, and financing. For example, during the authoritarian period ECLAC maintained a relatively stable team of sociologists in its Social Development Division, including, among others, those of Adolfo Gurrieri, Jorge Graciarena, Enzo Faletto, Aldo Solari, and Marshall Wolfe, while Rolando Franco, Ernesto Cohen, and Ricardo Cibotti worked in the Social Planning Division of ILPES. With the protective umbrella of the United Nations, they continue studying and thinking about the so-called “Latin American social development” (Bielschowsky, 2009). In fact, these social scientists worked closely with leading Chilean and Latin American economists, such as Fernando Fajnzylber, Osvaldo Sunkel, Enrique V. Iglesias, Armando Di Filippo, or Raúl Prebisch himself, among many others. Furthermore, Revista de la CEPAL was created in 1976 to disseminate works related to the socioeconomic development of Chile and the entire region, and it continues to be published to this day. While it is nowadays more oriented toward analytical and public policy approaches to development, in its beginnings the journal was a fundamental platform for diffusing critical and democratic thinking from numerous intellectuals and social scientists. Consequently, these regional institutions became important critical spots against both the schemes of technocratic domination and the neoliberal structural reforms applied in Chile and Latin America through military dictatorships. They were spaces that protected social sciences and championed democracy and intellectual autonomy. Conversely, they continued to shape a properly Latin-Americanist thought regarding the increasingly transnational, financial, and deregulated capitalist development in the periphery. Among the most significant works of ECLAC and ILPES in this period, the 1976 book Teoría, acción social y desarrollo en América Latina [“Theory, Social Action, and Development in Latin America”] by Aldo Solari, Rolando Franco, and Joel Jutkowitz, summarizes the efforts of Latin Americans to interpret development and change

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processes in the region; Jorge Graciarena’s 1978 Entre realidad y utopía: la dialéctica de las ciencias sociales latinoamericanas [“Between Reality and Utopia: The Dialectics of Latin American Social Sciences”], in which the critical commitment of the disciplines is confirmed; Formaciones sociales y estructuras de poder en América Latina [“Social Formations and Power Structures in Latin America”], written in 1981 by Graciarena and Rolando Franco, in which the important role of the state in the establishment and preservation of an economic development style is stressed; Raúl Prebisch’s important 1981 book Capitalismo periférico: crisis y transformación [“Peripheral Capitalism: Crisis and Transformation”]; Marshall Wolfe’s El desarrollo esquivo. La búsqueda de un enfoque unificado para el análisis y la planificación del desarrollo [“Elusive Development. The Search for a Unified Approach to Development Analysis and Planning”], a report original from 1982; Fernando Fajnzylber’s 1983 La industrialización trunca de América Latina [“The Truncated Industrialization of Latin America”], a book that continues with this characterization of incomplete, unequal development in the region; and, Evaluación de proyectos sociales [“Evaluation of Social Projects”], a 1988 book written by Ernesto Cohen and Rolando Franco, and which stood out for its proposal to improve both decision-making and aims in social projects and programs, in the face of Latin America’s deteriorated living conditions due to the ravages of the so-called “lost decade”. ECLAC and ILPES set the ground for different debates, as the regional reality was itself changing. They were notified of both the democratic setback and the excessive external debt assumed by military dictatorships, which led to a subsequent regional debt crisis that marked the 1980s’ “lost decade”, as all the development and human well-being indicators collapsed across the continent (González, 1986). They helped, in turn, to keep alive in the imagination of the social sciences a regional perspective for approaching social and economic problems linked to peripheral capitalism and its human consequences. In addition, regional organizations offered new alternatives for a further inclusive social development, under what was then called the “development styles” paradigm, from which a clearly heterodox position in economy and commitment to democracy were assumed (Graciarena, 1976; Morales, 2017). The topic of political democratization began to dominate the sociological debate in the region, considered as the main intellectual concern from the late 1970s onwards. In October 1978, Argentinian professor Francisco Delich, at that time the Dean of CLACSO, summoned a group of

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important social scientists from Latin America and elsewhere to a conference in San José, Costa Rica, to reflect together on the future possibilities of democracy. Among them were many leading figures: Fernando H.  Cardoso, Albert O.  Hirschman, Guillermo O’Donnell, Norberto Bobbio, Torcuato Di Tella, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, Gino Germani, Seymour M.  Lipset, Alessandro Pizzorno, Jorge Graciarena, and Raúl Prebisch (Delich, 1985). With their clear regional scope and international implications, democratization debates had a national correlate in another important institution in the historical development of sociology in Chile: FLACSO. In the seminar organized by Francisco Delich and entitled “Social conditions of democracy”, FLACSO scholars Rodrigo Baño, Leopoldo Benavides, Enzo Faletto, Ángel Flisfisch, Julieta Kirkwood, and Eduardo Morales presented the paper “Popular movements and democracy in Latin America”. This text can be considered an actual roadmap, a performative or practical projection of sociology in the country, insofar as it announces the discipline’s duty to reflect on the “crisis of democracy”, to integrate popular sectors and thus improve their life conditions, while being able to vindicate a democratic recovery in which the democratization and the socialist programs are made compatible. As we will see, during the dictatorship FLACSO was not only an intellectual and professional refuge for sociologists, but also a true reference for sociological thinking on the “great issues” of the time—the authoritarian regime and possible paths to a democratic transition; Chilean capitalism and its cultural, social, and political effects; and the contributions and ideas of the “Socialist Renewal as an emergent, prominent ideological current (Moyano, 2011). The undermining work of the dictatorship notwithstanding, in Chile in the 1980s FLACSO brought together an important number of researchers who would be crucial to reflection on the process of transition to democracy from sociology, combining intellectual reflection and political action. The names of José Joaquín Brunner, Norbert Lechner, Manuel Antonio Garretón, Tomás Moulián, Pilar Vergara, Jorge Chateau, or the aforementioned Rodrigo Baño, Ángel Flisfisch and Julieta Kirkwood, pioneered the renewal of sociological studies (Lechner, 1991; Puryear, 1994). From its Santiago de Chile headquarters, FLACSO fulfilled an outstanding role in producing sociological knowledge and channeling it into regional and international debates on democracy, capitalism, and the role of sociology and social sciences in Chile and Latin America. This was partially due to the nature of FLACSO as an institution capable of acting on

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three different levels: internationally, in terms of being an organization linked to UNESCO, which favors the international circulation of authors and ideas; regionally, as instrumental in the institutionalization of Latin America’s social sciences (Beigel, 2009); and, nationally, for its ability to set research agendas, debates and problems related to Chilean society, plus having significant ability to spread and circulate these ideas through articles, books, magazines, reports, or seminars. José Joaquín Brunner served as Dean of FLACSO between 1976 and 1984. He researched into the higher education system and the formation of intellectual and academic fields in the country, mainly in sociology. In the 1980s, he became increasingly interested in sociology of culture and cultural consumption. The influence of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on Brunner is apparent in his use of the notion of field and of categories of reproduction and symbolic violence, as well as in the framework to understand the role of intellectuals. He studied and commented on Bourdieu’s The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Brunner, 2020). Among the books that are representative of Brunner’s ideas in this period are Los intelectuales y las instituciones de la cultura [“Intellectuals and the Institutions of Culture”], written along with Ángel Flisfisch and published in 1983; Universidad y Sociedad en América Latina [“University and Society in Latin America”] of 1985, and El caso de la sociología en Chile. Formación de una disciplina [“The Case of Sociology in Chile. Formation of a Discipline”] of 1988. Incidentally, together with other authors of independent academic centers Brunner pioneered the so-called “new sociology of education” in Chile (Corvalán, 2020). In this field, Cristián Cox was instrumental as a sociologist who was also a bridge in Chile to Pierre Bourdieu via British intellectual Basil Bernstein. Cox was introduced to Bourdieu’s work early in his doctoral training at the University of London, under Bernstein’s supervision. Upon his return to Chile, Cox joined the Center for Educational Research and Development (CIDE), which later became part of the Universidad Alberto Hurtado. In 1984, he published a CIDE working paper in which Bernstein and Bourdieu were integrated to understand the relationships between society, political system and education— “Classes, cultural reproduction and school transmission: an introduction to the theoretical contributions of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein”. The text is indicative of the concern in Chilean sociology for education, and of the transcendence of Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction in

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general—and his criticism of the school system as a reproducer of inequalities and a generator of gaps—for the analysis of Chile’s changing society in the 1980s (Cox, 2020). Conversely, Norbert Lechner was a German-born sociologist who arrived in Chile in 1971 to work at the Universidad Católica’s CEREN. From 1974, and for more than twenty years, he was associated with UNESCO and its various organizations, such as FLACSO and UNDP. Indeed, Lechner was head of FLACSO between 1988 and 1994, and later part of the UNDP Human Development research board in Chile. His most important works of the period include the 1977 book La crisis del Estado en América Latina [“Crisis of the State in Latin America”], and, in particular, Los patios interiores de la democracia [“Democracy’s Inner Courtyards”] of 1988. The latter was oriented to studying the “social dimension of democracy” in a historical and political conjuncture characterized by the transition to democracy in the country and the region, in which the author envisages the opportunity to recover “subjectivity” as a subject of political study. Lechner points out the task of building a new subjectivity and a new political culture, insofar as political subjectivity has been denied subsequently by “revolutionary rationality” first, and by human rights violations by the military dictatorships later (Lechner, 1988). This concern to understand the Chilean authoritarian regime and its repercussions on the cultural, economic, social and political levels from sociological lenses, and then help think about the return to democracy, is what distinguished much of the work carried out by FLACSO during this period. FLACSO may be thus regarded as an authentic sociology school, for its care in sociologically explaining the political phenomena and conjunctural factors that characterized the dictatorship as a historical period, which had their implications in the study of political issues related to the state, civil society, citizenship, and organizations and social movements.2 In this way, the FLACSO sociologists made combined use of sociology and political sciences to analyze the military regime, the country’s new economic organization and its political effects, and new sources of social power. The 2  FLACSO received sociology students from the Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica, who attended classes in order to receive instruction in topics that were not available in their sociology schools. FLACSO provided training in Marxist theory, critical theory taught by Norbert Lechner (Pressacco & Salvat, 2017), Manuel Antonio Garretón’s analysis of the situation, and classes on Max Weber by Raúl Atria and on Chile’s history by José Bengoa (Baeza, 2021).

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works of Tomás Moulián and Manuel Antonio Garretón are perhaps the most important in this regard, especially in studying the authoritarian regime from different angles and perspectives. They were both CLACSO instructors and researchers between 1974 and 1995, carrying out numerous investigations on the crisis of democracy, social transformations, democratization processes, and Chilean reality from a Latin-American perspective. They also carried out studies on social agents and demands and political proposals, standing out also on a more political level, with intellectual contributions to the renewal of socialism in Chile (Moulián, 2018). Briefly speaking, the sociological projects of Garretón and Moulián— each with its individual features—was part of an intellectual and political effort to stop thinking of Marxism as a religion, and give socialist ideas a more definite orientation toward questions of democracy and participation. For example, they were critical of real socialisms and the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, offering in contrast a secularized Marxism, one that was more moderate and linked to a democratic socialism. Without abandoning a participatory socialist project, Moulián and Garretón used comparative historical analysis to look at the country’s recent past and contemplate experiences in other countries—especially from Europe and the so-called Eurocommunism—to enhance Chile’s socialist critical thinking and connect it to newer social-democratic currents. Among the books they co-write, it is important to mention the 1978 Análisis coyuntural y proceso político. Las fases del conflicto en Chile 1970–1973 [“Analysis of the situation and political process. The phases of the conflict in Chile 1970–1973”], and 1983 La Unidad Popular y el conflicto político en Chile [“The Popular Unity and the Political Conflict in Chile”]. In his FLACSO time, Moulián also published in 1983 Democracia y socialismo en Chile [“Democracy and Socialism in Chile”] in 1983, in which he reflects on Chilean leftist politics. In turn, Garretón published important books at the time, such as Las ciencias sociales en Chile. Situación, problemas y perspectivas [“Social Sciences in Chile. Situation, Problems, and Perspectives”] and El proceso político chileno [“Chile’s Political Process”], both published in 1983; Dictaduras y democratización [“Dictatorship and Democratization”] of 1984; Escenarios e itinerarios para la transición [“Settings and Itineraries for Transition”] of 1985, and Reconstruir la política. Transición y consolidación democrática en Chile [“Remaking Politics. Transition and Democratic Consolidation in Chile”] of 1987. Garretón’s work is

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distinctive for its characterization of Chile as a new type of authoritarian regime, as well as by using the dichotomy between authoritarian modernization and democratization to think about the frameworks for a democratic exit and further political reconstruction, and, above all, about the role of social sciences and intellectuals in building new arrangements. A sort of synthesis of FLACSO efforts to analyze the social consequences of the authoritarian regime, Pilar Vergara’s 1985 book Auge y caída del neoliberalismo en Chile [“The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism in Chile”] offers one of the most successful attempts to identify the actors and social groups behind the dictatorship’s entire macroeconomic revolution. Other works by Vergara are Políticas de estabilización y comportamientos sociales. La experiencia chilena 1973–1978 [“Stabilization Policies and Social Behaviors. The Chilean experience 1973–1978”], co-written with Tomás Moulián in 1979, and Las transformaciones del Estado chileno bajo el régimen militar [“Transformations of the Chilean State under the Military Regime”] of 1980. The works of Ángel Flisfisch are also of interest here, as they were more oriented toward the study of Chilean political ideas, political party systems, and possible paths to democracy. We highlight his 1982 work El neoliberalismo chileno: las funciones del dogmatismo [“Chilean Neoliberalism: Uses of Dogmatism”], 1983 “Coaliciones políticas y transición en Chile: notas exploratorias” [“Political Coalitions and Transition in Chile: Exploratory Notes”, and Estudios sobre el sistema de partidos en Chile [“Studies on Party System in Chile”], co-written in 1985 with Moulián. Rodrigo Baño was another FLACSO author dedicated to political sociology. Among his works, the 1985 book Lo social y lo político. Un dilema clave del movimiento popular [“The Social and the Political. A Key Dilemma for the Popular Movement”] stands out. Furthermore, along with other sociologists associated to FLACSO, such as Enzo Faletto, Julieta Kirkwood, Eduardo Morales, Rodrigo Alvayay, and Leopoldo Benavides, Baño organized a Political Analysis Workshop that annually discussed national politics for almost ten years between 1980 and 1989. A “Monthly Report on the Political Situation” was written as a result of the workshop and dispatched to union leaders, student and grassroots organizations, intellectuals, politicians, and priests committed to popular and national causes (Baño, 2016). Complementing this descent into social reality, Jorge Chateau collaborated with NGOs and territorial communities in doing fieldwork and investigating different methodologies of intervention with popular sectors, so as to generate discussions and alternatives

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for redemocratization. On this topic, it is worth mentioning his 1982 book Sobre la sistematización de experiencias de la acción social. Presentación de una metodología [“On the Systematization of Experiences of Social Action. Introduction of a Methodology”], and 1983 La evaluación como medio de conocimiento de los sectores populares [“Evaluation as a Means to Knowledge for Popular Sectors”]. Therefore, FLACSO’s relevance for sociology in Chile in the authoritarian context has been much appreciated, as its international nature allowed an intellectual elite to continue researching and producing valuable sociological knowledge to reflect on and plan for the country’s transition to democracy. Moreover, given its protection as a United Nations organization, FLACSO also managed to encourage disciplinary debate during the 1980s through the circulation of its books, articles and working papers, as well as its influence to convene for seminars and offer postgraduate courses in sociology, in years in which no studies of this type could be seen in universities. FLACSO offered a solid academic hub for sociologists, experts and professionals from independent academic centers to gather together with young people interested in studying sociology. It is possible to assert that this was a central pivot when it came to the convergence of sociology practitioners, at a historical moment in which the discipline needed to re-invent and accommodate itself to the conditions imposed by the dictatorship. Numerous private centers were created in the late 1970s and, above all, the 1980s, some of them associated with NGOs, with funding from international private foundations that also collaborated with some institutions and projects of the Catholic Church. Several centers were oriented to the defense of human rights and support of popular organizations, thereby playing a very important role at the time as spaces for joint work with grassroots political leaders (Bastías, 2013; Lladser, 1986). These organizations served to safeguard the professional work of scholars exonerated by the dictatorship, thus keeping sociological research alive in an extremely adverse context. They provided professional opportunities for sociologists, and an environment of relative academic autonomy (Brunner & Barrios, 1987). On many occasions, they functioned through the establishment of collaboration networks with organizations such as FLACSO, ECLAC or ILPES, in order to benefit themselves from the continuous exchange of knowledge, scientific information, and professional and political experience. For these were also places of resistance and intellectual criticism that

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fulfilled a political function: bringing together a large part of the democratic opposition to the dictatorship (Puryear, 1994). The sustainability of independent academic centers depended on the financial support of foreign institutions, with international cooperation agencies such as the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation (SAREC), Canada’s International Development Research Center (IDRC), and the US Inter-American Foundation (IAF), in addition to philanthropic institutions with a long-term presence in Chile and Latin America such as the Ford Foundation (Morales, 2018). Independent academic centers closest to the Christian Democrats also received support from foundations associated with Germany’s political parties, such as the Konrad Adenauer and Friedrich Ebert foundations. International funding allowed research teams to be created and maintained in a regular manner over time, allowing social scientists to achieve a certain degree of independence. Nonetheless, even when making possible the relative autonomy of independent academic centers in such a difficult authoritarian context, international funding also generated tensions that ultimately ended in their excessive dependence on foreign resources. Furthermore, the international aid introduced a new dynamic into Chile’s sociological field, namely: competition for funding. Indeed, if before the 1973 coup sociologists had become accustomed to working in universities, research centers, and state public institutions, during the dictatorship they had to adapt to a market rationale and compete for resources, as well as to efficient management and accountability. These transformations were not only visible in the professional field, in which sociologists had to offer professional and consulting services to private individuals in the labor market; it also had significant repercussions in academic spaces. Sociologists associated with independent centers obtained external resources by applying to either research projects or social intervention programs. The logic of funding per project was consolidated, and in doing so the relationship between the academic field and foreign funding was, by and large, unstable and contradictory (Beigel, 2010, p.  34). Even if it sustained research teams for a period of time, the uncertainty of not getting new funds affected sociologists’ job stability. International funding, in turn, requested from the centers—especially the most specialized in scholarly activity and social research—permanent scientific production, increasingly oriented toward publication in international reports and journals. Sociological production began to be thought of in a practical way, according to results and criteria such as the “social impact” and “potential

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application” of research (Brunner, 1993, pp.  10–12). The centers were also encouraged to obtain affiliation in national and international associations, with the aim that their researchers become members of the disciplinary community (Brunner & Barrios, 1987, p.  92). As a result, the patterns of American academia were assumed. To a certain extent, foreign funding also shaped the centers’ research agendas, since every donation is an asymmetric relationship and the donor has the capacity to decide on certain topics related to her own interests (Morcillo, 2015). Sociological research progressively became internationalized (Garretón, 1989), something that had an impact on the segmentation of the sociological field that was somehow reproduced and deepened after the recovery of democratic. Thus, we find social scientists well connected and integrated in regional and international networks, with the ability to obtain resources and foreign funding, mainly based in Santiago de Chile after conducting postgraduate training abroad—which gives them linguistic skills in French and/or English. Despite these determinations, foreign funding helped consolidate the institutional field of academic centers and allowed the development of sociology and other social sciences in the authoritarian period. Donations from afar also favored regional mobility for scholars and scientists, giving form to important means of communication, mutual aid and academic cooperation in a context of violence, repression and authoritarianism in Chile and much of the region. This new institutional morphology certainly affected the discipline’s identity and reoriented its agenda. Sociology went from excessive commitment and ideologization to identifying itself more and more with an academic field, a more professional profile, and scientific and practical criteria. Certainly, there were tensions between the “academic” and the “militant” side of the discipline (Garcés, 2010). For some authors (Brunner, 1991), sociology became depoliticized, although it did not lose its critical capacity and, in fact, maintained a sense of responsibility with the democratic values when the authoritarian solution had to be considered during the 1980s. This also speaks volumes about the resilience that the discipline had in those difficult years. The leadership of Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez from the Santiago Archbishopric is a major example of the alliance between international funding, the sustainability of sociology and social sciences, and actions in behalf of human rights and democratic recovery. Cardinal Silva Henríquez was an eager fundraiser well connected to the Catholic international cooperation such as the Interchurch Coordinating Committee for Development

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Projects in the Netherlands; to international agencies such as the Swedish International Development Agency or the US Agency for International Development; and to US philanthropic foundations such as the Ford Foundation (UC Center for Public Policies, 2016, p. 23). All these donations helped create, maintain, and articulate over time different social institutions and independent centers. Only weeks after the coup, Silva Henríquez created the Cooperation Committee for Peace in Chile, an ecumenical body made up of Christian churches to protect the life and physical integrity of politically persecuted individuals. In 1975, it had to be dissolved by direct orders of dictator Pinochet. However, on January 1, 1976, Cardinal Silva Henríquez created the Vicariate of Solidarity (1991), an institution associated with the Catholic Church and which continued the Committee work. In its 16 years of existence, the Vicariate provided legal, economic, technical, and spiritual assistance to the people persecuted as well as to their families, defending lives and advocating for the freedom of the detained. Several sociologists and social scientists participated in this sort of assistance—some of them cruelly murdered because of this work, as in the case of Manuel Parada. Other sociologists provided professional services in institutions associated with the Catholic Church, as long as the post-Conciliar process of renewal incorporated the analysis of the sociocultural reality and the planning of their ecclesial action into their institutional processes (Gómez de Benito, 2014). In response to the systematic human rights violations that affected Chile’s population, Silva Henríquez was seriously committed to the promotion of pluralism and academic freedom. The Catholic Church took advantage of its condition as “the only institution that could act with certain levels of independence and autonomy from the State, and early on it had a vital importance in the protection, defense and promotion of civil society organizations” (Centro UC of Public Policies, 2016, p.  23). In this way, and thanks to external aid, in late 1975 the Academia de Humanismo Cristiano was created in order to bring together a large group of sociologists, social scientists and intellectuals to generate knowledge about the country’s political, economic, social and cultural reality. Other academic centers were created or incorporated under the Academia umbrella, such as the Women Studies Circle, the Economy and Labor Program (PET), the Agrarian Research Group (GIA), or the Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality (CERC) (Huneeus et al., 2014). They shared a clear humanistic orientation and contributed to the consolidation of different disciplinary areas, among others sociological gender studies,

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the sociology of labor, rural sociology and political sociology (Bengoa, 1981; Campero, 1984; Campero & Valenzuela, 1981; Ruiz-Tagle, 1984). These centers were also oriented to social intervention in local communities and organizations, and were responsible for the development of social and training programs in the territory (Hardy, 1986, 1987). The Women Studies Circle, for example, was active from 1979 to 1983 as a space for analyzing issues related to women’s conditions. It organized numerous meetings, debates, courses and workshops, and counted with the Women’s Circle Bulletin to disseminate its activities and analyses. Therefore, together with the international institutions located in the country, such as CEPAL, ILPES and FLACSO, the Catholic Church had a significant role in the protection of sociologists and social scientists, as it managed to articulate a number of academic centers that helped the discipline overcome the critical state in which it stayed after 1973. It was also instrumental in obtaining international funding for assistance and social intervention programs. Of course, other centers unrelated to the Church were created later, along with foundations and grassroots or non-­ governmental organizations also committed to community-oriented projects for which the technical assistance of sociologists was key. In fact, the methodologies of sociological intervention and action research had made significant developments in Chile when it came to strengthening social support and community networks in the authoritarian period. Sociological intervention has the particularity of working together with the subjects of intervention to carry out a complete research from their own perspectives, something that empowers them in making together the needed changes. It is a methodology that allows one to dig deeper in a community’s social tissue and relations with its environment; it also encourages the subjects to discover the meaning of their own action. The sociological intervention methodology, moreover, turned out to be appropriate for the organization of “individuals facing unresolved social problems” in a society in which neoliberal policies were already widely applied (Corvalán, 1996, p. 4). The dictatorship imposed in 1980 a Constitution that cemented a “protected and authoritarian democracy”, a democracy limited and supervised by the military in order to consolidate the economic model (Huneeus, 2016, p. 252). Certainly the new legal institutionality had direct repercussions in the country’s academic and university fields, affecting the subsequent development of sociology and social sciences. On the one hand, the dictatorship promulgated the General Bill of Universities in 1981, a policy

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that dismantled the existing network of public universities and, above all, opened the way for the privatization of higher education at large, allowing the creation of private universities. That same year, 1981, the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FONDECYT) was created, and soon it introduced the logic of competition for funding as the most important mechanism in the distribution of resources for research areas. Ever since, this public policy has been the major source of resources: today sociologists can develop research based on public, competitive contests under scientific and evaluation criteria, but this has also consolidated an evaluation culture that “pushes towards the paper”, to the publication in English indexed journals (Araujo, 2019, p. 356). The early 1980s witnessed not only the new institutional architecture created by the dictatorship, but also the first signals of an economic crisis that unleashed a “climate of generalized crisis”, and that in 1983 took the form of a series of protests and revolts that lasted until 1986 (Colodro, 2020, p. 102). There was “a deep banking crisis, numerous bankruptcies and massive unemployment” from which political discontent spread and “the manifestations of opposition to the dictatorship and criticism of the neoliberal model proliferated” (Ffrench-Davis, 2018, pp. 53–54). In this context, social intervention allowed sociology and its practitioners to work on the ground, in contact with the neighborhoods’s residents of popular sectors, who were suffering the effects of the economic, social and political crisis during those years (Iglesias, 2016). Several independent academic centers were acknowledged precisely for their ability to operate in the territories, linking themselves up with communities and organizations, conducting research, providing humanitarian and technical assistance, and, above all, accompanying and studying the mobilized population under the common goals of producing a way out of the dictatorship. For example, Corporation for Social and Education Studies (SUR), an independent center of social and education studies founded in 1978, brought together an outstanding group of social scientists, among others sociologists Eugenio Tironi, Javier Martínez, Eduardo Valenzuela and Vicente Espinoza, and anthropologists José Bengoa and Francisca Márquez; together, they made outstanding contributions in the field of social intervention. SUR was indeed highly influenced by the ideas of Alain Touraine on social movements, as it worked on issues related to the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to analyze inequality, marginality, poverty and transformations of Chile’s social structure (Tironi, 1990). In the early 1980s, and due to the Francophone training of some of its members, a workshop dedicated to analyzing Pierre Bourdieu’s

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Distinction was held (Aguilar, 2020), organized by Eugenio Tironi, who in 1983 would finish his doctorate at the EHESS in Paris under the tutelage of Alain Touraine. A good synthesis of SUR’s teamwork is the collective book Pobladores. Luchas sociales y democracia en Chile [“Pobladores. Social Struggles and Democracy in Chile”], an account of field research carried out with pobladores (shantytown dwellers) of Santiago de Chile between 1985 and 1986, in which the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion caused in the Chilean society by neoliberalism are analyzed (Dubet et al., 2016). José Bengoa and Eduardo Valenzuela also contributed significant works, such as the one they co-authored in 1983, Economía mapuche. Pobreza y subsistencia en la sociedad mapuche [“Mapuche Economy. Poverty and Subsistence in the Mapuche Society”]; La rebelión de los jóvenes. Un estudio sobre anomia social [“The Youth Revolt. A Study on Social Anomie”], written by Valenzuela in 1984; and Bengoa’s influential Historia del pueblo mapuche [“History of the Mapuche People”] of 1985, and which remains today a must-read for scholars of Mapuche studies. SUR also carried out numerous workshops in which the national and Latin American situations were discussed; from them, two bulletins— Correo del Sur and Hechos Urbanos—and a magazine—Proposiciones— were born and reached a wide audience in the 1980s. Proposiciones continues to be published today; in the years of the transition to democracy, it was an important platform for the dissemination of sociological knowledge produced by sociologists and social scientists from independent academic centers on topics such as social actors and movements, shantytown dwellers, democracy, women and gender, or issues related to economic and social development. Another academic center that also had an outstanding trajectory based on social intervention and fieldwork with communities was the Center for Women Studies (CEM), which was created in 1984 as a continuation of the aforementioned Women Studies Circle. In the 1980s, the CEM (1989) developed different training projects for women from vulnerable sectors, such as the “Study and Training Program for Peasant and Indigenous Women”, the “Women and Labor Program”, and the “Global Vision of Women in Today’s Chile”. These on-the-ground activities were crucial to the collection of data and information on the social conditions in which a good part of Chilean women lived—not only in poverty but determined by different (economic, educational, professional, cultural and housing) inequalities. The CEM provided a general diagnosis in which women were

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subjected to a context of precariousness and discrimination that rests on a sexual division of labor and the country’s historical patriarchal domination. Apart from these activities, the CEM helped introduce in Chile the emergent field of gender studies, with sociologists Teresa Valdés, Ximena Valdés, Julieta Kirkwood, Sonia Montecino, and José Olavarría carrying out research on women, focusing on research into the influence of indigenous problems, women labor, domination and poverty in women’s conditions. From this period are two key collective works: the 1983 book Historias testimoniales de mujeres del campo, [“Testimonial Histories of Rural Women”], and the 1987 book Sinopsis de una realidad ocultada. Las trabajadoras del campo [“Synopsis of a hidden reality. Women workers in the countryside”]. These works provide the important sociological and cultural analysis of women rural labor, peasant women, and private life and gender relations within the traditional family, and also introduced some innovations in Chilean sociology, as they made use of life-history methodologies. In 1981, Teresa Valdés created the FLACSO Gender Studies Area, in which she conducted several investigations and published the book Las mujeres y la dictadura militar en Chile [“Women and Chile’s military dictatorship”] in 1987, in addition to other works related to the role of women in the urban movement and the recomposition of solidarity social tissue more generally (Valdés, 1986, 1993). Julieta Kirkwood would also participate in the FLACSO Gender Studies Area. Julieta Kirkwood, in turn, was an outspoken figure in gender and inequality issues in Chile. She was not only a prominent sociologist, but also a relevant feminist activist who was instrumental to build the feminist movement in the country, being a founding member of the “Feminist Movement of Opposition to Dictatorship”. Kirkwood left several writings on gender studies such as Ser política en Chile: las feministas y los partidos [“Being polítca in Chile: feminists and parties”] of 1986, or his posthumous Tejiendo rebeldías: Escritos feministas de Julieta Kirkwood [“Weaving Rebellions: Feminist Writings by Julieta Kirkwood”], edited in 1987 by Patricia Crispi. Other independent academic centers kept sociology alive by keeping staff who carried out fieldwork with communities, supported research, and conducted surveys or interviews. Sociology was practiced in centers such as CIEPLAN (Corporation of Studies for Latin America), created in 1976; in CENECA (Center for Cultural and Artistic Inquiry and Expression), created in 1977; in ECO-Education and Communications, founded in 1980; and in the Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality

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(CERC), established in 1983 under the umbrella of the Academy of Christian Humanism, as we have seen (Lladser, 1986). Sociologists Dagmar Raczynski and Claudia Serrano worked at CIEPLAN, for example, and conducted studies on poverty, social policies, labor markets, and evaluation of social programs in Chile. The book they co-authored in 1985, Vivir la pobreza. Testimonios de mujeres [“Living Poverty. Women Testimonies”], represented a major contribution to the sociological study of women in Chile, in particular to the understanding of survival strategies in popular sectors. Notwithstanding this sort of work, in CIEPLAN sociology was auxiliary, as the center was, above all, focused on the economic field, being recognized internationally for research perspectives that took a critical stance of the neoliberal policies applied in the country. In this vein, the 1982 collective book Modelo económico chileno: trayectoria de una crítica [“Chile’s Economic Model: Trajectory of a Criticism]” was even censored by the dictatorship. Most of the center’s research was disseminated in its own publications and magazines, Colección de Estudios CIEPLAN, Series Notas Técnicas and Apuntes CIEPLAN, and in those pages sociologists and social scientists from other academic centers collaborated profusely. In turn, in CENECA a research area devoted to “Communications and Sociology” was created. This center was an institutional reference in research in culture, cultural industries, and discourses and social meanings (Munizaga, 1988). Sociologists such as Gonzalo de la Maza worked the direction of historian Mario Garcés at ECO-Education and Communications, developing programs with youth and popular educators, and conducting participatory research with grassroots organizations and social movements, in close coordination with social science professionals who worked in Church parishes and organizations in Santiago (Garcés, 2010). The CERC, even when it was created with a broader aim, has focused since 1986 on studies and surveys of public opinion, with an emphasis on research into political development and economic changes. Sociologists such as Cristián Parker and its director to this day, Marta Lagos, collaborated in CERC with Carlos Huneeus, a prominent political scientist. In 1987, CERC published the report “Changes in Public Opinion: An Approach to the Study of Political Culture in Chile”, one of the first studies in addressing the impact of the authoritarian regime on the culture of Chilean people. Several reports based on surveys and fieldwork on issues of beliefs, values ​​and religiosity in Chile appeared during those years. In addition, in 1988 this center conducted a series of surveys in

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Santiago, Valparaíso and Concepción regarding political opinions and attitudes among Chileans ahead of the October 5 Plebiscite, eventually anticipating the victory of the “No” option. The fact that surveys may be applied in Chile from the mid-1980s onwards is indicative of the interest of sociologists in further developing surveys as techniques for sociocultural and political analysis capable of capturing a society in motion. It is also telling for a society that was gaining some spaces of autonomy, especially in consumption and market terms, although always under the dictatorship’s watchful, repressive gaze. They are also an expression of the acceptance by a large part of the democratic opposition of the electoral path as the way out of the authoritarian regime, as the examination of public opinion was essential to mobilize the electorate against Pinochet. In this, along with the CERC surveys, other social research institutions collaborated, such as the Center for Development Studies (CED), FLACSO and SUR. Of course, the surveys were not a tool exclusive to the democratic opposition, as study centers linked to the business elite and the civil-military dictatorship—such as the Center for Public Studies—also applied electoral surveys and polls between 1987 and 1989 (Jara, 2019). The surveys, therefore, acquired a role of prime importance in understanding the political process in the country (Sunkel, 1989, 1992). Of course, the development of surveys in market studies is also an expression of the adaptation of sociology in a professional, private sector that grew strongly in those years. It was a period in which private agencies of market and public opinion studies appeared, such as DIAGNOS, founded in 1983. The revival of surveys in Chile thus combined a political orientation with the desire to understand new consumption patterns (Cordero, 2009). While the social became politicized, Chile also mutated toward social forms open to consumerism and market logic. Chilean sociology adapted itself to several facets and identities, as the country’s own reality was in motion. Thus, for example, the acknowledgment of sociology as a profession made it possible in 1982 for the foundation of the College of Sociologists of Chile as a legal association. Certainly, the importance attributed to professional associations by the civil collaborators of the dictatorship was a favorable condition for this outcome. The College meant the recognition of the discipline’s professional exercise and a mutual respect among its practitioners; in doing so, the association also helped legitimize sociology. This provided a possibility for meeting, thinking and planning the discipline and the profession in such adverse circumstances. The College organized three conferences in the authoritarian period (in

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1984, 1986 and 1989) that were instrumental in cementing this scholarly and professional community, by considering together the problems and challenges faced by sociology and its practitioners (Arrau, 1984). This panoramic overview has allowed us to observe how Chilean sociology, weakened as it was in the aftermaths of the 1973 coup, resisted in the catacombs and then slowly reasserted itself, thanks to the presence of organizations such as ECLAC, ILPES or FLACSO, the institutional support of the Catholic Church, and the support of international cooperation and solidarity. All this favored the practice of sociology within independent academic centers. Sociology also survived in university classrooms, albeit with much more difficulty at the Universidad de Chile than at the Universidad Católica. At the latter institution, sociology took place mainly at the Institute of Sociology, in which scholars knew how to legitimize the relevance of sociological knowledge in applied research studies for both public and private institutions (companies, schools, associations, NGOs). Later in the 1980s, important elaborations in the sociology of culture, historical sociology, and the sociology of religion were produced around the figure of Pedro Morandé, to which other names such as Carlos Cousiño and Eduardo Valenzuela may be added. This center projected a sociology deeply concerned with the modernization process in Chile and other Latin American societies, studying their particular traces and relating them back to European modernization. It was along these lines that the first Master’s in Sociology was opened. In addition, there was a special focus on the enormous spiritual transformations suffered by Chilean society in those few, yet traumatic years. Some of Pedro Morandé’s most influential works from this period are oriented to study the sacred, religiosity and cultural changes, such as Ritual y palabra. Aproximación a la religiosidad popular latinoamericana [“Ritual and the Word. Approaches to Latin American Popular Religiosity”] of 1980, and the now-classic book Cultura y modernización en América Latina [“Culture and Modernization in Latin America”] of 1984. All of these developments gave sociology momentum to regain its autonomy in the 1980s, mainly in order to maintain its commitment to the concrete national reality, while preserving its Latin-Americanist identity and also its international imprint- The discipline and its practitioners were greatly refreshed with regional and international debates, in times in which there was a wide international interest in Chile, and particularly in the way its society and social sciences were to process the authoritarian legacies. Sociology and its practitioners also contributed to rearticulate

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civil society, helping rebuild the social tissue in the authoritarian period, and working on the ground with organizations, communities, NGOs, and foundations (Bastías, 2013; De la Maza, 2005). Sociology was even capable, as we have seen, of gradually adopting a professionalizing identity, while not excluding other identities. A plural, diverse sociological field with different ways of understanding the very idea of sociology was in the making, even when many of these disciplinary identities and activities of its practitioners shared the aim of recomposing relationships among sociologists, professionals, intellectuals, political opposition to the dictatorship, and civil society. This disciplinary process accounts for a complex renewal of politics, of trust-building and recomposition in the social fabric, and of adaptation within an accelerated transformation. This also speaks to sociology’s ability to find root in new practices of sociability and establish, in turn, platforms in which sociological knowledge can be broadcast. In this context, yet in a still academic vein, in 1986 Universidad de Chile’s Department of Sociology founded the journal Revista de Sociología, the oldest publication of the discipline in Chile. With the aim of widening and improving the social understanding of social phenomena of interest, the appearance of such a specialized journal is an expression of the existence, in the mid-1980s, of a specialized sociological field structured by the codes and logics of disciplinary science. The discipline’s capacity for self-observation is further registered in a series of publications on the development of Chilean sociology (Atria & Lemaitre, 1983), or the aforementioned college-organized conferences. Finally, apart from its more academic facets, sociology also cultivated its public dimension and managed to find spaces in opposition magazines that reach large audiences, such as APSI, Análisis, Hoy, Mensaje and Cauce. Sociologists frequently wrote critical analysis of social reality or allegations against the dictatorship in these magazines, contributing with their reflections to understanding Chilean society, and stimulating the imagination with possible scenarios for a return to democracy. In the authoritarian period, as we have seen in this chapter, sociology was critical of the dictatorship and knew how to overcome its harsh conditions, contributing to a democratic outcome with numerous reflections and social analysis. Not without difficulties, sociology remained aligned in relation to the transitional process and the dispute over the temporality of the political situation. At the heart, established by the 1980 Constitution, the 1988 plebiscite helped to organize the democratic opposition, forming the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (composed of the

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Christian Democracy, the Socialist Party, the Radical Party and the Party for Democracy) as a political bloc capable of massive social and electoral mobilization. Sectors of the left, aligned with the Communist Party and its strategy of social mobilization, resisted the plebiscite and continued operating in favor of confrontation and armed struggle (Colodro, 2020, p. 127). The social mobilizations certainly went on, but were increasingly associated with the electoral mobilization of the people to defeat Pinochet. The “No” campaign, led by sociologists such as Eugenio Tironi, became a unifying, organizing imaginary. In turn, many sociologists consolidated themselves as transitólogos (“transitologists”); mainly gathered in FLACSO, they soon became associated with the CIEPLAN economists and social and political scientists from other centers, especially the Center for Development Studies (CED) founded in 1981 by Gabriel Valdés and where Edgardo Boeninger—former Director of Budgets in the Frei Montalva government, and Dean of the Universidad of Chile before the military coup—also worked (Huneeus et  al., 2014). This cultural and intellectual elite would eventually serve as a bridge with those elites supportive of the regime, in order to make sense of the compromised democratic outcome (Moyano, 2016). The electoral victory of the “No” in the October 5, 1988 plebiscite marked the beginning of the transition to democracy in Chile. A year later, the December 1989 victory of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia was confirmed, and Patricio Aylwin assumed the presidency on March 11, 1990. In these years, Chilean sociology was very enthusiastic about democracy as an actual possibility for building a new social order in a country characterized by severe structural limits, most of them inherited from the dictatorship. On a sociological level, these conditions are expressed in the predominant individualist-consumerist-neoliberal matrix that has broadly characterized Chilean society since the 1980s, in a process that has reduced poverty levels, but continues to be sustained on an ongoing socioeconomic inequality (Garretón, 2012; UNDP, 2017). Furthermore, a new institutional and political context was opened for sociology, defined by the weakening of independent academic centers; a withdrawal of sociology to state offices and the design and formulation of public policies; the return of sociology to universities; and the consolidation of a professional and private field for the sociological profession (Gómez Núñez, 2010). As we will see in the next chapter, sociology will also encounter a sociological pluralism that coincides, at an international level, with the crisis of paradigms, and especially with the crisis of Marxism

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after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the subsequent decomposition of the Soviet Union, and in Latin America with the end of the revolutionary period in Nicaragua in 1990. This pluralism was consolidated during the 1990s within Chilean sociology, making it possible to establish dialogues between perspectives, in a less-totalizing, further-opened framework for the reception of new conceptions and theoretical, methodological, and institutional influences (Gómez de Benito, 2002).

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Ruiz-Tagle, J. (1984). Los trabajadores del Programa del Empleo Mínimo: Condiciones de trabajo, comportamiento, rol socio-político. Programa de Economía y Trabajo. Salazar, G. (2002). La nueva historia y los nuevos movimientos sociales. Revista Temas Sociológicos, 8, 253–266. http://ediciones.ucsh.cl/ojs/index.php/ TSUCSH/article/view/188/138. Sánchez, X. (August 24, 2020). Interview with Ximena Sánchez. Solari, A., Franco, R., & Jutkowitz, J. (1976). Teoría, acción social y desarrollo en América Latina. ILPES. Sunkel, G. (1989). Las encuestas de opinión pública: Entre el saber y el poder. FLACSO. Sunkel, G. (1992). Los usos políticos de las encuestas. Documento de trabajo N° 18. Santiago de Chile: FLACSO. https://flacsochile.org/publicaciones/ documento-­de-­trabajo/usos-­politicos-­de-­las-­encuestas-­de-­opinion-­publica/ Tarrés, M. L. (Comp.) (1992). La voluntad de ser: Mujeres en los noventa. México D.F.: El Colegio de México. Tarrés, M. L. (Comp.) (1998). Género y cultura en América Latina. : El Colegio de México. Tironi, E. (1990). Autoritarismo, modernización y marginalidad: El caso de Chile 1973–1989. SUR. UNPD, United Nations Development Programme. (2017). Desiguales. Orígenes, cambios y desafíos de la brecha social en Chile. Santiago de Chile: Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo. https://www.cl.undp.org/content/ chile/es/home/library/poverty/desiguales%2D%2Dorigenes%2D%2Dcamb ios-­y-­desafios-­de-­la-­brecha-­social-­en-­.html Urquidi, V. (2005). Otro siglo perdido. Las políticas de desarrollo en América Latina (1930–2005). El Colegio de México. Valdés, T. (1986). El movimiento poblacional: La recomposición de las solidaridades sociales. FLACSO. Valdés, T. (1993). Mujeres que sueñan: Las organizaciones de pobladoras: 1973–1989. FLACSO. Vergara, P. (1985). Auge y caída del neoliberalismo en Chile. FLACSO. Vicaría de la Solidaridad. (1991). Vicaría de la Solidaridad: Historia de su trabajo social. Ediciones Paulinas. Zapata, F. (1979). Los mineros de Chuquicamata: ¿productores o proletarios? El Colegio de México. Zapata, F. (2013). El sindicalismo latinoamericano. El Colegio de México. Zemelman, H. (1987). Conocimiento y sujetos sociales: Contribución al estudio del presente. El Colegio de México. Zemelman, H. (1989). De la historia a la política: La experiencia de América Latina. Siglo XXI.

CHAPTER 5

Democratic Recovery and the New Scene for the Academic and Professional Exercise of Sociology (1990–2010)

Abstract  The transition to democracy in 1990 inaugurated a new social, institutional and political framework for sociology in Chile. Independent academic centers declined in number, sociologists were increasingly involved in state institutions and public policies, sociology returned and expanded through both universities and public or private professional practices. This chapter addresses the transformations of sociology, the expansion of undergraduate and postgraduate programs, and the creation of the Network of Sociology Schools (SOCIORED). The evolution of the discipline is contextualized within the framework of a Chilean society characterized by strong social inequalities. Keywords  Neoliberalism • Sociological pluralism • Sociology’s plural identity • Public sociology • Intellectual sociology • Professional sociology The timespan of this chapter covers Chile’s recovery of democracy in 1990, after 17 years of military–civilian dictatorship, while 2010 marked the moment in which the historical and political cycle of 20 consecutive years in office by the Concertación—Patricio Aylwin, 1990–1994; Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, 1994–2000; Ricardo Lagos, 2000–2006;

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Morales Martín, J. Gómez de Benito, History of Sociology in Chile, Sociology Transformed, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10481-7_5

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Michelle Bachelet, 2006–2010—came to an end. This period was strongly influenced by what the 1990s meant for Latin America. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall redrew the map of Europe and the world: the breakdown of the confrontational logic of both the Cold War between East and West and the great narratives that legitimized such conflict. This was the so-called “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992). In Latin America, the end of military dictatorships and the democratic recovery heralded a promising context for social sciences and knowledge production, envisaging a boost for spaces, institutions, researchers and professionals. In Chile, the dictatorship and its “Chicago Boys” implemented a neoliberal market economic model along the lines of Milton Friedman (Gárate, 2012). This model was paradigmatic and followed by other Latin American countries. The return of political rights was complemented by market freedom in the continent’s economies. In order to put behind them the “lost decade” of the 1980s, international organizations imposed the so-called “Washington Consensus” on Latin American countries (Ffrench-Davis, 2005), which were forced to assume these guidelines either by crisis or conviction. In the 1990s, most Latin American countries had applied the principles of this Consensus with varying degrees of intensity. It was a new stake, which defied ECLAC’s trajectory of decades pursuing development, in which these countries faced new challenges in a globalization process that, while hegemonic in financial matters, left the globalization of human capital in the background, with significant implications for migratory flows across the world, including in Latin America. It is also important to note that, despite the steps taken by these countries with regard to the formal aspects of democracy, important gaps and significant obstacles have been faced in the building of comprehensive citizenships that include political, economic, civil and social aspects (Hopenhayn & Sojo, 2011). After 15  years of no citizen participation in politics, the October 8, 1988 plebiscite was the beginning of the end of the military dictatorship. An unprecedented degree of participation, resulted in a victory for the “No” vote, implying the restoration of democracy. As a result, General Pinochet was forced to call presidential and parliamentary elections in the short term, and this put an end to his time in office on March 11, 1990. In turn, the recovery of democracy was a decisive factor in the new and growing development of the social sciences in general, and of sociology more particularly. However, despite a certain degree of euphoria within

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Chile at this time, the country subsequently underwent a process of political transition to consolidate democracy which had to deal with many obstacles and adverse forces. The victory at the ballot did not imply that democracy was automatically consolidated; rather, it subsequently coexisted with a number of authoritarian enclaves that were held and supported by the army, representatives of the business sector, and right-wing political parties (Garretón & Garretón, 2010; Huneeus, 2014, 2016). In addition to these limits inherited from the civil–military dictatorship, Chilean society was still characterized by strong cultural traits which it had inherited from its rural past. At the service of the democratic process and the government that led the transition, a group of social scientists linked to ruling parties assumed the role of “palace advisers’, making them intellectuals who were thereby able to guide a political framework for transversal agreements and consensus based on prudence and compromise, both with the political opposition and within the unsurprisingly diverse coalition that supported the Aylwin government. Social sciences fulfilled the function of conducting rational, methodical analysis of the problems and situations faced by the transitional government, contributing from a variety of different disciplines to the development of strategies in the exercise of power that help to consolidate democracy; for some analysts, this corresponds to a true “transitology” (Joignant, 2012). Those social scientists and sociologists who sustained the centers’ intellectual and analytical strength in the dictatorship, were now the government’s intellectuals who make scientific and political vocation compatible (Montero, 2000; Puryear, 1994), to a degree beyond what Max Weber may have thought. Public and intellectual sociology advocated a process of democratization in two steps: first, “political” or formal democratization, and then “social” or substantive democratization (Canales, 2021). Over the years, however, dissatisfaction and disaffection with a limited, restricted democracy—the veritable support of the dominant economic system—only grew. The new historical period, marked by the return to democracy, established a new framework of social and political coexistence. Undoubtedly, it inaugurated a new democratic stage, with some limits and structural constraints that were legacies of the previous civil–military dictatorship. On a sociological level, such constraints are expressed in a predominant individualist-consumerist-neoliberal matrix that, generally speaking, has characterized Chilean society ever since (Moulián, 1998). This matrix has seen the country grow economically at disparate rates, achieving an

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average growth of 5% in these years (Ffrench-Davis, 2018). For example, in 1960 the per capita income was just over $500; by 1990, it had reached US$ 4160, and in 2020 it stood at US$ 13,231. This helps demonstrate the level of high economic growth in recent decades, which places Chile at the head of the region (World Bank, 2020). Along with effective public policies, in the democratic period the economic growth stimulated significant progress in Chileans’ living standards (UNDP, 2019a). Economic growth made it possible to reduce poverty levels, even if, more than thirty years after the start of the transition, 14.4% of the population still lives below the poverty line, and 4.5% are below the extreme poverty threshold. One of the most highly developed economic sectors has been higher education, something that is manifested in the fact that approximately 40% of young people between 18 and 24 years are currently enrolled in the system (CNED, 2021a).1 Democratic governments persistently played their stakes in education to fight poverty, being backed in this by the student movement. However, Chilean society is still marked by a strong concentration of wealth in a small part of its population, by an ongoing socioeconomic inequality, and by other inequalities in terms of education, access to health, and the labor market. Chile is also characterized by new forms of poverty (cultural, territorial, of social ties, among others), and also by logics of predatory social exclusion (Araujo, 2013; Castillo et al., 2013; Espinoza & Núñez, 2014; Espinoza & Rabi, 2013; Gayo et  al., 2013, 2016; Senado, 2012). These are structural obstacles that hinder social mobility and access to opportunities for a better life (Torche, 2006; Torche & Wormald, 2004), something that puts the sustained growth of the middle class into question (Pérez Ahumada, 2018). Recognizing advances in the country’s development, equity is undoubtedly an outstanding historical debt (Rodríguez Weber, 2017). Since the 1960s, Chile has been the most unequal among both OECD and Latin American countries for whom comparable data are available. This is one of the main vectors for the social unrest reflected in the demands and social mobilizations, especially from the late 2000s onwards. In addition, and despite continued economic growth and rising levels of education, the 1  In addition, programs oriented to generate educational inclusion and overcome illiteracy were applied in Chile. Measured in terms of the population aged 15 or over, in 1992 the country had a literacy rate of 95.1%, by 2017 this figure had risen to 96.4%, which indicates that there is an illiteracy rate of 3.6% (Ministry of Social Development and Family, 2020), a relatively low percentage when compared to the global average—14.7% in 2010, according to the World Bank (2017).

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participation of women in Chile’s labor force is lower than the Latin American average; according to UNDP (2017, 2019b), this is largely the result of cultural reasons. In addition, the average salary of Chileans is still among the lowest in the world, which makes the demand for gender equity in labor conditions and remuneration very significant. Regarding sociology, and social sciences more broadly, the return to democracy inaugurated a new contextual, institutional and political framework defined by the following features: the weakening of independent academic centers; the retreat or repositioning of sociologists at different state levels, and their engagement in designing and formulating public policies; a return to, and strengthening of, universities’ sociology programs, plus the opening and development of such spaces in new private universities; and the consolidation of a new professional and private field for performing the profession. This repositioning context, therefore, further propitiated transformations in the sociology profession in terms of the emergence of new identities, the renewing of fieldwork and practices, and also in the competences of intervention of its practitioners. Consequently, new opportunities were opened up for the profession of sociology. In this context, social sciences intellectuals and professionals with the greater influence on the political field put themselves at the service of different instances in the democratically elected government of Patricio Aylwin. For example, headed by José Weinstein, several sociologists and educators played an important role within the Ministry of Education in the design and implementation of public policies, aiming to reduce the extent to which the school works as a reproducer of social inequities. Sociologist Cristián Cox (2020), a former CIDE researcher, participated in the educational reform during this government, designing and helping implement the Ministry of Education’s Programs for the Improvement of the Quality and Equity of Education (MECE). In these programs, the influence of the sociological ideas of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein can be appreciated. Later, between 1998 and 2006, Cox was in charge of the curricular reform implemented by the Ministry of Education’s Curriculum and Evaluation Unit and the Education Quality Measurement System (SIMCE). Sociologists were also incorporated into secretaries such as of Labor, Agriculture, and other state agencies such as the National Service for Women. This is but a small sample of the commitment of social scientists with important public affairs and the country’s political processes.

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Due to the fact that a large number of social scientists from independent academic centers went on to occupy important tasks in the government, or generated a working relationship with state agencies on issues that had been rigorously studied in the authoritarian period, one may go as far as to assert that independent academic centers served as platforms for political promotion or as spaces for recruiting the administrative personnel of the new state apparatus (Baeza, 2021; Canales, 2021). However, the collateral effects of these displacements were felt at the independent centers, which witnessed how their major referents migrated to public responsibilities. Other sociologists and researchers migrated back to public universities, thus recovering their spaces of academic freedom. Therefore, a hollowing out of centers was produced. Another aspect helping weaken independent centers rested on the fact that Chile ceased to be prioritized by international cooperation organizations (Bastías, 2013). Lower levels of foreign funding were now being invested in the country. This combination of factors caused the closure of several of those centers; others survived but were integrated into universities; others became NGOs and worked in the application of public-policy programs, prominently from action-research paradigms; and others still became private consultancies specializing in solving research needs from the public sector, but occasionally also from the private sector. A new scenario of opportunities and challenges was created for sociologists, who were now able to intervene, investigate, and continuing to produce knowledge about the country’s social reality. And yet, it should be noted that, far from a radical change, the market logic imposed by the military regime’s economic model was maintained and strengthened in this new political period, and was, indeed, even expanded into the academic field, its institutions, and teaching and research. The state established conditions, so that the research it needed for the efficient performance of its public policies can be put out to tender and entrusted to professional consulting teams. This is a type of research that does not promote either self-analysis or essential studies on Chilean society and its transformation processes; rather, it was increasingly dedicated to disciplinary, specialized and sectoral issues, with an emphasis on problem-solving approaches upon diagnosed issues (Canales, 2021). The private sector’s need to understand the habits and behaviors of the population further opened up spaces for research. In sum, the period accentuates the development of professionalizing, rather than promoting analytical or disciplinary, social research.

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With regard to academic sociology, the democratic context stimulated sociology’s development and its return to universities. The discipline found a university field characterized by its private and market imprint, as a consequence of the 1981 Bill on Universities enacted by the dictatorship which allowed private institutions to create universities. The military government had fragmented the state or public university system into regional branches. In addition to the new private universities which appeared as a result of the new legislation, this caused the proliferation of higher education institutions with regional branches all across the country. 29 universities were created in the 1990s. Today, the university system is composed of 56 institutions (CNED, 2021b). A segmented higher-education market has been generated, with elite universities, intermediate universities, and not very selective institutions (Baeza, 2021). Among them, there exists great heterogeneity in quality criteria such as undergraduate enrollment and high scores obtained by students, full-time faculty members, the number of PhDs, and other indicators of scientific productivity.2 Having been used in the dictatorship by groups and organizations close to the regime, the private higher education market opens up in the context of democratic recovery, being now used by new institutions that were then in formation or transformation, offering wider possibilities for the development of social sciences. This is the case with the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, Universidad ARCIS, Universidad La República, Universidad Diego Portales, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, and the Instituto Profesional de Estudios Superiores Blas Cañas, currently Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez. All of them took advantage of the new normative framework as well as the spaces uncovered by public universities, not only in Santiago but also in the regions. These private institutions contributed to the process of democratization of the discipline, as they stimulated the enrollment of students with scores that would not be sufficient to meet the traditional universities’ high demands in the required selection test. This trend was further consolidated as undergraduate programs were opened in other private universities both in Santiago de Chile and in the regions.

2  In recent years, both state and private universities—the latter with more power and economic resources—have made considerable physical and human investments, expanding their presence in regions, improving their teaching quality, and generating both policies for scientific development and postgraduate programs.

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Even though sociology programs at the Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica were not completely closed in the authoritarian period, the democratic context enabled the expansion of sociological training at the university level. In 1990, a sociology program was created at the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano and the Universidad de la República. In 1993, the Universidad de Concepción, Universidad de la Frontera (Temuco), and Universidad Arturo Prat (Iquique) did the same. In 1997, it was the turn of the Universidad Alberto Hurtado; as it was in 1999 for the Universidad Diego Portales and Universidad Central. Finally, in 2001 the Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez created its sociology program. Other institutions continued this trend, which nevertheless was not necessarily accompanied or sufficiently supported by research production, highly-qualified academic teams, or stable labor conditions. The re-institutionalization of scholarly sociology not only brought the discipline back into university classrooms; it also diversified and deepened the fragmentation of the field of sociological teaching. The plurality of careers in public, traditional, or private universities nested different sociological perspectives, something apparent when it comes to understanding both the very discipline and Chilean society itself. This helps explain, for example, the various readings and uses made of different authors, theoretical currents and methodological approaches, which gave particular imprints to institutional projects. For example, Pierre Bourdieu was a reference author at the Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. José Bengoa, the founder and first director of the Anthropology School at that institution, placed Bourdieu as a fundamental instance for the methodological training of the first generations of students. Something similar happened in the Sociology School of the same university: in 1992, Justino Gómez and Cristián Parker (who was at the time the head of the school) made adjustments to the first course programs and included a seminar on Contemporary Theory that was based on Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and Alain Touraine. All these developments set the stage for the incorporation of new approaches and theoretical debates in sociology in the early 1990s. Justino Gómez de Benito—later a sociology professor at the Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez—elaborated the newly sociology program of the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano; in it, Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Craft of the Sociology” played a major role (Gómez de Benito & Sandoval, 2004). Meanwhile, the Universidad Católica gave weight to authors such as Niklas Luhmann and systems theory, relying for this on

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the reception made by Darío Rodríguez, a sociologist whose doctorate was conducted under the direction of the German sociologist between 1978 and 1981. Similarly, Marcelo Arnold was also supervised by Luhmann at the University of Bielefeld between 1983 and 1987, and later was in charge of collaborating in the organization of various postgraduate programs at the University of Chile, such as the Master’s in Social Sciences with mention in the Sociology of Modernization, and the Master’s in Systemic Analysis Applied to Society. Conversely, other schools distinguished themselves by a critical approach to the transition process. This was the case at the Universidad ARCIS’s Sociology School, which, under Tomás Moulián’s direction, formed a stimulating board of critical thinkers with Francophone training, including Nelly Richard, Alfredo Joignant and María Emilia Tijoux. Richard was born in France studied there before arriving in Chile, where she participated in the unofficial cultural sphere of the late 1970s, elaborating one of the best-articulated discourses on arts, politics, and the place of memory in the country’s society. Between 1990 and 2008, Richard directed the Revista de Crítica Cultural, a journal that made an enormous contribution to the emergence and consolidation of cultural and literary studies in post-dictatorial Chile; in these developments, Bourdieu was a fundamental author (Moraña, 2014). Alfredo Joignant and María Emilia Tijoux were trained as doctors in Political Science and Sociology at the University of Paris I and Paris VIII, respectively. They were both members of that generation of Chilean exiles who returned to the country, notable for their studies on political sociology, elites, identities, and cultural practices, but also for their questioning of neoliberal domination and carrying out a sustained critique of mid-1990s Chilean society. A representative work of this period is the book Crisis de los saberes y espacios universitarios [“Crisis of the university knowledge and spaces”], co-edited in 1995 by Universidad ARCIS and LOM editorial house, and consisting of chapters by Pierre Bourdieu, Tomás Moulián, Nelly Richard, and other scholars of the university, such as Willy Thayer and Pablo Oyarzún. This sociological and cultural critique was also materialized in various study programs at Universidad ARCIS, such as the Diploma in Cultural Criticism and the Master’s in Cultural Studies and Social Sciences. During this period, the offer of postgraduate programs in social sciences began, with an emphasis in sociology in some universities. There were two doctorates in sociology, and two more in social sciences, in Santiago de Chile. In addition, courses, specializations and postgraduate

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programs oriented to gender studies began to emerge across the country. At the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, for example, a Diploma in Gender and Society was offered, with instructors who had previously worked as researchers at the Center for Women’s Development Studies (CEDEM), such as Teresa Valdés, Ximena Valdés, and José Olavarría (Olavarría, 2020; Valenzuela, 2020). Another important institution was the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies (CIEG) of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Universidad de Chile, in which the anthropologist Sonia Montecino played a prominent role. A Gender Studies Area was also formed at FLACSO in these years, which carried out research and also offered a range of courses and diplomas. Nonetheless, in the early 1990s the conditions of teaching sociology at the university were marked by precariousness and job instability (Simbürger & Neary, 2016). The rules of the higher education market were still too flexible, with no special concern in the formation of high-level scholarly teams in a way comparable to the knowledge production and analysis of the reality that independent academic centers produced in the past. It is true, however, that the offer of sociology increased the number of students enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate sociology programs (CNED, 2021a). Moreover, this expansion generated a very important phenomenon: the accentuation in the process of democratization and “de-elitization” of sociologists’ social background. This is not unique to sociology, as the expansion of the high education market implied big costs and economic pressures for large sectors of the middle and popular classes, engaged as they were with higher education as a way to achieve better life conditions. We are talking about first-generation university students, who bring with them a sense of awareness about the costs and debts that the university system entails for their families. They will be the carriers of different demands and meanings for mobilization that certainly explain the student movements that happened later in 2006 and 2011. Several decades later, it can be affirmed that today public universities teaching sociology at undergraduate or postgraduate level demonstrate high-quality indexes, if we take quality measurement systems—national or international—into consideration. One of the most significant expressions of scholarly sociology’s consolidation in Chile was the proliferation of specialized scientific journals across universities. As we mentioned, Universidad de Chile’s Revista de Sociología began to be published in 1986; in 1987, Persona y Sociedad was created at

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the Universidad Alberto Hurtado; in 1995, Temas Sociológicos of the Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez began its publication; in 1997, Sociedad Hoy was founded at the University of Concepción; in 1998, Némesis appeared as a journal for sociology students at the Universidad de Chile, to become re-founded in 2002 as the journal for all the students at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Also in 1998, from the Sociology Department of the same university, Revista Análisis was created; in it, every December a group of intellectuals analyze the social and political milestones of the year, and in its initial pages prominent sociologists like Rodrigo Baño and Enzo Faletto wrote. Conversely, other universities opened up journals of social sciences, such as Revista de Ciencias Sociales, created in 1992 at the Universidad Arturo Prat; and Revista Austral de Ciencias Sociales, created in 1997 at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Universidad Austral de Chile. In 2010, the publication of the sociology magazine Kutral (fire, in Mapudungun) began at the Universidad de Viña del Mar.3 Along with these scientific journals, the role played by university publishers and editorials specializing in sociology and social sciences have been instrumental for the circulation and dissemination of sociological knowledge. An outstanding example of this is editorial LOM, founded in 1990, coinciding with the return of democracy. Another milestone of the development of scholarly sociology in Chile was the celebration of a number of important disciplinary conferences. Under the title “The challenges of the social sciences at the threshold of the XXI century”, the 40th anniversary of FLACSO was celebrated on April 28, 1997. In this opportunity, representatives of social sciences and sociology who either had, or who had previously had, responsibilities in the institution addressed their analysis on the situation of social sciences in Chile and Latin America, looking both back at the past and also at the future challenges. This was also the occasion to appreciate the unique contribution made by this institution to the knowledge and development of Chilean and Latin American societies. FLACSO’s regional identity has allowed it to sustain a perspective that integrates national discrete realities  From the 2000s on, it has proliferated the creation of journals devoted to social sciences, particularly sponsored by universities. A journal that has come to contribute to the theoretical debate on sociology has been Cuadernos de Teoría Social, a publication of the Laboratory of Social Transformations of the Universidad Diego Portales; since 2015, it has promoted classical and contemporary thought and pursued links and dialogues of sociology with related disciplines such as philosophy, history, and political sciences. 3

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by means of plural epistemological perspectives and multidisciplinary approaches. As we saw in the previous chapter, FLACSO intellectuals played a leading role in the processes of democratization in various countries, and significantly in Chile, in the 1980s. At the FLACSO celebration, a panel was held with the participation of sociologists Manuel Antonio Garretón and José Joaquín Brunner. Brunner’s paper, entitled “On the twilight of sociology and the beginning of other narratives”, introduced challenging issues and generated important discussions within national sociology. According to Brunner, classical sociology “goes now to nothing but repeat itself, like posters sold at the museum’s gift shops”, while “the other, unofficial, chamber, fictional, lighter sociology—that of Goffman and the situationists—(…) permanently runs the risk of becoming tedious and pedantic”. He argued that “the language of sociology has stopped speaking” and that “great sociology speaks of dead men; the actors of the past: the state, parties, social classes, unions, civilizations, revolutions. However, they do not refer to living men”. He offered a wide list of issues, such as AIDS, the poor and the new rich, and insisted that “the difficulty of apprehending contemporary times via the sociological language, once again encourages an actual flourishing of the novel (…) Faced against these powerful narratives, sociology in its macro and micro aspects seems to be left out of the intellectual scene and the communicative field” (Brunner, 1997a). This provocation raised a public discussion that was unknown so far, with the predominance of a political consensus environment. Gabriel Salazar (1997a, 1997b) and Fernando Robles (1997) discussed Brunner’s presentation, in a controversy that revived the vocation for public debate in Chilean sociology, also generating reflections on the discipline’s various identities and intervention fields (Garretón, 1998; Montero, 2000). Another hallmark in the legitimation and consolidation of sociology’s disciplinary debates occurred in 2008. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Universidad de Chile’s Sociology School, a Conference of Chilean Sociology was convened in collaboration with the Universidad de Concepción. After 16  years without a national academic meeting, this conference started a process of reassociation for Chilean sociology that also resumed its Latin American imprint. The same year, the Sociology Network of Chilean Universities (SOCIORED) was created as a result of the coordination and collaborative, systematic work of a group of

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directors at sociology schools and departments. Not all of them participated, but it is fair to say that the major part has been there. Since its inception, the aim of SOCIORED has been to strengthen inter-university ties. More specifically, its work has been focused on the analysis of the needs and responsibilities in training students—theoretically, methodologically, and practically speaking. SOCIORED articulates alternative approaches for inter-university work that strengthen the effects of sociology in public life, particularly in the areas of research and knowledge-production policy-making, according to the requirements and challenges that the society and its transformations poses to the discipline, both in public debates and in the formulation of development and life-quality policies. At the scholarly level, SOCIORED focuses on the search for excellence in the development of sociology as a discipline, and on positioning it as a relevant academic-political interlocutor at a national level. In doing so, sociology can display further contributions on topics that revolve around social sciences and sociology, such as priorities and emphasis in research and teaching sociology in undergraduate and postgraduate courses, information and knowledge production, the ethical aspects of its practice, and a deeper understanding of the discipline’s spaces of employment. By means of the shared leadership sustained by responsible directors, SOCIORED took off associatively, expanded its activities, and took charge of a collective scholarly representation of sociology. Of great importance was the initiative to resume the organization of sociology’s national conferences, which are today recognized by the Latin American Association of Sociology as preparatory conferences (Pre-ALAS) for the major continental summit (ALAS) every other year. Along the same lines, SOCIORED obtained approval to organize the Latin American Sociology Conference in Santiago in 2013, an effort that also implied the ALAS presidency for a period of two years. Serve this as demonstration of the recognition and appreciation of a collective work in favor of a greater role and leadership for Latin American and Chilean sociology. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Chile’s sociology conferences began in 1981, but the political context made it impossible for them to continue. With the return to democracy, in December 1992, the IV Chilean Conference of Sociology was held in Concepción. Following the V Congress in 2008, the sociology community of SOCIORED organized

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the VI Congress in Valparaíso in 2011.4 The recuperation of a national sociology conference is an instance of the discipline’s invigoration of spaces for professional discussion and reflection, as Claudio Duarte (2011), a professor at the Universidad de Chile, claimed when recalling that we are part of an intellectual tradition that in our country has more than a century of systematic development, and little more than 50 years of institutional university development. We are heirs to a tradition of social thought in Chile and the region. We want to contribute today with ideas and proposals, so that sociology has a relevant impact. We are part of a community that was fractured; this is not the place to bring that situation back. But I do point out that this has been an issue in the network [SOCIORED], and we have agreed to work hard so that what we are building is based on the lessons learned from those experiences. To this end, SOCIORED has made a joint effort to build an academic instance that is grounded in mutual trust and the aforementioned collaborative work, trying to give account of new styles of relationships in the Chilean sociological community. Our aim is to contribute to rebuilding such a community.

From this vision of rebuilding links and community ties, SOCIORED has been able to crystallize efforts to give organic expression to the national community of sociologists. As it was mentioned, the College of Sociologists was created in 1982, in the authoritarian period, and took advantage of these years’ legal loopholes to provide ways of professional protection and union collaboration, with the aims of promoting the discipline, its development and protection, regulating the profession’s proper practice, stimulating scientific research of sociological interest, organizing national and international conferences, stimulating professional improvement and training, and advising and guiding its associates in matters of professional interest (College of Sociologists, 1982, Cf. Title I, Article II). However, the College had difficulties in the 1990s, which led to the formation of an alternative Association of Sociology. The latter was unable to counteract 4  In later years, the following national conferences have been organized: the VII Conference was held in Temuco in 2012, with venues at the Universidad de la Frontera and the Universidad Católica de Temuco; the VIII Conference was held in La Serena in 2014, organized by the Universidad Central’s Sociology School; the IX Conference was held in Talca in 2016, organized by the Universidad Católica del Maule’s Sociology School; and the X Conference was held in Iquique in 2018, based at the Universidad Arturo Prat. The XI Chilean Conference of Sociology is scheduled to be held in 2022  in Concepción, with a venue at the Universidad de Concepción.

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the centrifugal forces that an open higher education market caused in the community of sociologists, which was, at the time, under quite a lot of political pressure. It took some years for SOCIORED to commit itself to “refloating” Chile’s College of Sociologists, which had not been in operation since the return of democracy because of the internal tensions and political and strategic differences that were particularly marked by the regional leaderships from Santiago and Concepción. On the other hand, and based on its convening capacity and unitary will, SOCIORED worked with the Ministry of Economy to overcome the state of latency, and since 2008 steps toward the restoration of trust had been made, so that former leaders called elections and a new directive was finally appointed in 2012. This is how the Association of Sociologists of Chile has become today the professional reference for sociology in the country, participating as the country’s representative body in the Federation of Professional Associations of Chile and the International Association of Sociology (ISA). SOCIORED has further assumed the promotion of a re-articulation of historical links between Chilean and Latin American sociology, through the participation of national researchers in the CLACSO working groups and the networks of the Latin American Association of Sociology (ALAS). In 1999, the XXII ALAS Congress was organized in Concepción; however, the relationship between Chilean and Latin American sociology remained intermittent throughout the 2000s. In this context, SOCIORED was in charge of fostering the participation of sociology scholars and students from different universities in both the pre-ALAS meetings and the ALAS Congresses, as well as at various international meetings of the sociology community in the region. Here it is important to acknowledge the important contribution made by ALAS to Chilean sociology, yet the contribution made by Chilean sociologists throughout history should also be acknowledged (Bialakowsky et al., 2015; Blanco, 2005). Half a century or more of sociology development made it possible to create information and research methodologies across Latin America, along with a huge critical mass that allows us to speak of a Latin American sociology that is entirely focused on global South debates. It is important to acknowledge that, as a scientific discipline related to the complex reality of the continent, Latin American sociology has increasingly become specialized in subjects and debates emerging from political sociology, the sociology of development, the sociology of cultures, the sociology of labor, the sociology of information, the sociology of gender and sexual

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diversity, and many others. This emergence of new subjects led social theorists to search for new elements for analysis, in a wave that produced not only major debates but also profound contributions to the study and understanding of new phenomena and social movements that emerged in Chile, Latin America, and the world in general (Touraine, 1999). Sociology gradually incorporated cultural analysis as a perspective for changing hegemonic cultural definitions, by means of studying, for example, the cultural imaginaries of particular subjects such as sexual minorities, peasant women, migrant populations, and indigenous groups. Latin American sociology has been involved in diverse fields, problems and social groups, from plural approaches or paradigms and regional or local perspectives, both at the macro- and micro-social levels. Even if these features of specialization have made a strong contribution to the adaptation and refinement of theoretical-methodological instruments applied to its research subjects, there has also been a debate on the extent to which they have contributed to losing touch with society, with the region as a whole, and with the common ground that are shared by social phenomena. The handling of the Latin American perspective has been indeed intermittent within Chile’s sociology (Cortés & Morales, 2017). This is also due to the fact that, in the 1990s and 2000s, Chilean sociology became increasingly specialized and concerned with understanding its own society in detail and in a concrete way. In parallel, an evaluative culture that privileges the scientific paper over published books was consolidated. Such an evaluative culture, transmitted academic research policy by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FONDECYT), began to develop in 1999 with the creation of the National Commission for Accreditation (CNA), a public, autonomous organism whose purpose lies in ensuring and promoting quality standards for higher education institutions and their undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Progressively, FONDECYT promoted indicators that measure the quality of scholarly production, working as determinant conditions for competitive funds. A good deal of sociological knowledge disseminated by university or private journals and scientific publishers has been the result of research financed by FONDECYT. From the mid-2000s to the present day, it offers three types of competitive funds for research conducted by Chilean sociologists: Regular Competition, for researchers with demonstrable experience; Research Initiation Competition, which was established in 2006 for young and emerging researchers; and the

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Postdoctoral Competition, for researchers who have recently obtained a doctorate degree and seek to carry out postdoctoral research in Chile. In addition, the state scholarships program Becas Chile proliferated. This allowed young students to carry out their master’s or doctorate studies in national or foreign universities, and resulted in the training of a whole new generation of sociology scholars, instructors and researchers who are already familiar with a more evaluative academic culture oriented toward the publication of scientific papers in indexed, specialized journals. Despite the incentives for writing scientific papers, sociologists in Chile have continued to publish a substantial number of books during this period. It is also true that the analysis of sociological production has shown a slight decline in activity in recent years, when compared to the experience of previous decades. Furthermore, the authors were more individuals than research teams, and few were published abroad or in other languages. A whole group of sociologists with recognized trajectory consolidated in these years, as well as new references opened paths and research lines for Chilean sociology. A systematic review of books confirms the strengthening of “special” sociologies and sociological topics witnessed in the previous years; for example, studies in the sociology of religion (Frías & Mella, 1993; Parker, 1996; Thumala, 2007), social changes, cultural transformations, identity in Chilean society (Joignant & Güell, 2009; Larraín, 2001; Morandé, 1994, 1999), and gender studies (Astelarra, 2003; Iturriaga, 1993; Montecino & Rebolledo, 1996; Montecino, 1997). The sociological and cultural analysis of rural female work continued, with a focus on the changes produced in family relationships and gender relations, especially when women challenge male patronage (Valdés et al., 1995; Valdés, 2007). New reflections on reproductive rights, sexualities and masculinities also appeared (Araujo & Ibarra, 2003; Dides, 2004; Olavarría, 2009). Sociological studies on education will also have great relevance, being one of the major concerns and demands of social mobility for a significant part of the population (Brunner & Peña, 2007; Brunner & Uribe, 2007; Corvalán, 2007; Raczynski, 2009; Raczynski & Muñoz, 2005a, 2005b). Chilean sociology continued the study of former issues with new perspectives in areas related to poverty, labor relations and economic sociology (Frías, 2000; Namuncura, 1999; Ramos, 2009). In turn, it was a period in which research lines were opened to emergent problems that Chilean society endured as a society in the midst of a modernization and social change stage. In this vein, there have been published interesting works on

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unresolved conflicts amidst Chile’s social fragmentation and the difficulties to inhabit society (Araujo, 2009a). Furthermore, this was also a period during which there was an increase in the publication of studies dedicated to examining the incipient migratory phenomenon (Araujo, 2008; Stefoni, 2011); delinquency, lifestyles, and new youth cultures (Asún, 2005; Cooper, 1994, 2002, 2005; Baeza et al., 2009; Zarzuri & Ganter, 2005); the city, urban poverty, and emerging urban cultures (Espinoza, 2008; Tironi, 2003a; Tironi & Pérez, 2009); and local and regional development (Falabella & Galdames, 2002; Raczynski, 2001). From the anthropology field, but employing a sociological perspective, important studies dedicated to indigenous peoples and to the understanding of Mapuche society were also published (Bengoa, 2002; Saavedra, 2002). And yet the sociological production continued to shine in the classic themes that the discipline has historically dealt with in Chile, such as theoretical reflections on the cultural, social and political aspects of modernization in the country (Farías, 2004). Important sociological analyses linked to social theory and critical thinking were published in this period to examine modernity in both the country and Latin America, in an attempt to understand Latin American identity (Brunner, 1992, 1994, 1996; Hopenhayn, 1995; Larraín, 1996, 2005; Morandé, 2007) following sociological debates on modernity, postmodernity and globalization that characterized the moment’s world sociology, there were analyses in social theory and critical thinking that examined the conditions for modernity in Latin America, in an attempt to understand the specific way in which Chile and the wider region was exhibiting modernity (Atria, 1999; Brunner, 1997b). Likewise, there appeared books that, from a Latin-Americanist perspective, were oriented to the examination of social actors, the construction of collective subjects, and the process of individuation in Chilean society (Araujo, 2009b; Martuccelli, 2007, 2010). Collective works that reflected on the status of sociology and social sciences in the face of great historical changes were also published (Giménez, 2010), following the perspective of social representations studies and of individualization as the expression of culture in modern societies. Similarly, outstanding works of contemporary social theory were published, in a confirmation of the systematic ability of Chilean sociology to participate in and contribute to national, regional and international theoretical debates (Chernilo, 2010; Mascareño, 2010; Olavarría & Moletto, 2001; Osorio et al., 2008). These are examples of the trends and perspectives adopted by Chilean sociology when incorporating explanatory concepts such as agency, culture, individuality, invisibility, diversity, differentiation, fragmentation, or

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social representations into theoretical analyzes, in order to characterize the features of society itself and of the actions, practices and situations of individuals. Theoretical influences that can be found here go from phenomenological perspectives, hermeneutics, feminist theories, and Luhmann’s systems theory (Ossandón, 2006, 2011), to readings of Latin American and foreign authors as varied as Guy Bajoit (Sandoval & Suárez, 2007), Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Michel Maffesoli, Walter Mignolo, Alain Touraine, and Aníbal Quijano, among others. However, there was less development in the production of works focusing on research methodologies (Flores, 2009; Porras & Espinoza, 2005). Scholarly sociology adopted its conceptual framework, partially because it received and incorporated international disciplinary debates, but also crucially because it reflected the need to understand the emergence of new actors, subjects or social movements in Chilean society, such as LGBT movements, shantytown dwellers, seasonal workers, evangelical groups, migrants, indigenous peoples, and environmental groups fighting climate change. The emergence of these actors and demands had a necessarily renewing effect on sociology’s theoretical discussions and sociocultural scope, as it was pressed to offer new interpretive keys on subject/structure relationships and the logics of inclusion/exclusion within Chilean society (Valenzuela, 2008). Furthermore, in this period the disciplinary debates had a public dimension and repercussions that helped cement sociology’s legitimacy in the country in the democratic context. Sociology became socialized (that is, linked to society) and sociologists acted as professionals but also as intellectuals performing a public sociology (Brunner, 2014; Burawoy, 2005). The sociological pluralism that distinguished the debate of those years was characterized by the discussions and variegated positions regarding the Chilean socioeconomic model and its relationship with the democratization process. The reflection on the possibilities and restrictions of a democratic transformation in Chile was once again connected to the role that sociology had in this socio-historical process, that is, in the challenging task of reconciling democracy and development (Lagos et al., 1991; Lechner, 1991). From different theoretical perspectives (critical, constructivist, comprehensive, and neo-Marxist, among others), valuable books provided deep, challenging interpretations of the incompleteness of the “transition and consolidation of democracy’s story” (Güell, 2009, p. 18). The successful publication of Tomás Moulián’s, 1997 book, Chile actual. Anatomía de un mito [“Actual Chile. Anatomy of a Myth”], which sold more than 40,000 copies, was indicative of the 1990s unrest, which continued into

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the 2000s. The following year, Moulián himself would publish another outstanding book, El consumo me consume [“Consumerism Consumes Me”], in which he continues to dispel the myth of the success of Chile’s compromised transition, due to the ongoing presence of inherited authoritarian anchorages and the cultural consequences of the market economy (Moulián, 1997, 1998). The 1998 report of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for Chile, entitled “The paradoxes of modernization” and coordinated by sociologists Norbert Lechner and Pedro Güell, provided valuable insights on these contradictions (UNDP, 1998). Since this time these UNDP reports have been a reference point for the sociological analysis of Chilean reality, especially in gender and social groups or subjects that had been previously ignored by the same sociological analysis.5 The public dimension of sociology, therefore, was characterized by discomfort with the so-called “modernization in Chile” (Tironi, 1999). Critical diagnoses about the recent past and the actual changes of Chilean society proliferated (Toloza & Lahera, 1998). Sociology helped society to examine itself (UNDP, 2002; Tironi, 2003b). Sociologists also reflected on the society they lived in, as well as the society in which they wished to live. At the turn of the millennium, there were appealing essays which imagined a “country-project” for the future (Garretón, 2000; Moulián, 2002). In any event, these are voices that speak of a sociological community that continued to gain in autonomy, to consolidate itself, and that committed itself with strengthening the discipline in parallel to its commitment with the processes of social transformation and in the way people and social groups became involved and are affected by them (Garretón & Mella, 1995). Sociology continued to play its historical public function, via the dissemination and circulation of sociological knowledge and its professional contribution among public and intellectual debates, and also in several other public and private institutions across the country’s regions. 5  The UNDP sociology team has demonstrated a real interest in the problems of Chilean development. From an interdisciplinary research framework, they have given theoretical and empirical form to the issues of human development in Chile from the 1990s to date. First, cultural transformations and the discomforts of the modernization process were addressed; in more recent years, there have been penetrating studies on women, subjective welfare, and the multiple forms of inequalities to be found in the country. The UNDP reports constitute the greatest capital for the analysis of the core axes stressing the economic and social development processes in the country, with a marked emphasis on the market’s role and consequences.

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In the 1990s there was both a proliferation of sociological discourse and an increase in the reflexive capacity of Chilean society to understand more about itself. Partially due to the fact that public opinion polls carried out by independent research centers had become increasingly frequent, and as “political marketing” became a powerful tool for political decisions, they were also gaining presence in the business sector, with inquiries about consumption habits and tastes of a population highly segmented into socioeconomic strata based on household income, all of which consolidated commercial marketing in Chile. At the national level, the most important database for all sorts of studies on the country’s reality are the Population and Housing Censuses, carried out every ten years under the direction of the National Institute of Statistics. In this, the work of sociologists has always been relevant not only for design and application matters, but also for the successive data analysis implied. The data produced by the 1992 and 2002 censuses made it possible to give an account of the great transformations in the living conditions of Chilean families, in addition to clearly showing the path to overcoming extreme poverty in the context of democracy, although without showcasing extreme wealth. The data from these censuses also indicated the first signs of some demographic trends that resemble those which can be observed in northern countries. One important development in this sense has been the contribution of the National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (CASEN), carried out by the Ministry of Social Development since 1990 on a bi- or tri-­ annual basis. In essence, this survey is crucial to estimating the extent of poverty, income distribution, and inequality measurement. The discomfort about the persistence of inequality, or more precisely about the new forms of poverty, deprivation and social exclusion, will become accentuated from 2011 onwards. Despite the prevailing socio-economic model’s contradictions and the claims for social justice made against the market, in this period sociologists’ professional role in the private sector was consolidated, as a large portion of these professionals were employed within private agencies, human resources and consultancy offices, and marketing or market research companies (Gómez de Benito, 2002). This was indeed a period in which Chilean society turned from the “success of democracy” into state of “dissatisfaction” (Fermandois, 2015, p. 63). In these years, however, sociology also learned how to talk in the plural about the multiple ways of being a sociologist and doing sociology. Pluralism was consolidated in Chilean sociology. This pluralism can be

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understood in at least two senses: regarding disciplinary theories, methods, and standpoints; or regarding the practices and specific ways sociologists relate among themselves and with the individuals they analyze, even with those who fund their work (Gómez de Benito, 2007). Sociology opened up to a diversity of viewpoints and practices, to a whole multiplicity of social uses—intervention, public policy-making, marketing, opinion and consumer studies—in a scholarly and intellectual way, and also in its most professionalizing forms; in the face of new spaces and new scenarios in which sociologists work, intervene and associate with social groups and worlds. The disciplinary practice and field of action before these new public and private spaces can be synthetically grasped with the image of different identities that become consolidated over the years (Gómez de Benito & Sandoval, 2004). For example, with regard to the sociologist as an intellectual and as a politician, the fulcrum of the sociological task rested mainly in universities and the political parties, and, to a lesser extent, in nascent think-tanks that proliferated in Chile since the 1990s. Since the return to democracy, sociology has been related to political power, with sociologists holding key positions in governments, fulfilling the role of policy-makers or executors or serving as adviser ideologues for presidents and ministers. Sociologists further contributed as influential intellectuals in political parties and coalitions, when it came to constructing power narratives. Regarding scholarly sociology, as we have seen, the increasing number of private universities led to an equally considerable number of sociologists to teach, conduct research and support the management of higher education. Although there are still only a few who hold tenure, the academic world has become a space full of possibilities for the practices of teaching, reflection, theoretical or applied research, and services provision to the state or private sector (Gómez de Benito, 2007). Since that time, universities have become spaces with broad job opportunities for sociologists, especially due to their third mission activities and the legitimacy they have in the national community. In relation to social intervention, in democracy sociologists continued the work carried out since the mid-1980s when it comes to devoting their practical knowledge to participate in leading social intervention processes—human promotion, training, organization, and so on—in grassroots communities, which included contributions made to social knowledge through action-research modalities. The conception of this sociological work, however, shifted toward a more professional way of

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intervening and of collaborating with other professions (especially with social workers), without undermining a more militant approach for which, in addition to interpreting reality, it was inherent that sociology should contribute to a “new order” that produces a fairer, more humane coexistence (Garretón & Mella, 1995). In turn, the professional sociologist at the service of the state—the bureaucrat in its most genuine sociological sense—has historically demonstrated organizational usefulness, making the field of public policy-making and management a legitimate professional space for sociologists with a public service vocation at different state levels and institutions. More concretely, the relevant transformations undertaken by the country in the educational, health, women, family, and childcare areas entailed the incorporation of sociologists with specialized degrees in these subjects. The modernization of the public sector also expanded professional opportunities, as a consequence of the regulation of countless tasks that remained caught by traditional practices. As we saw above, a significant number of sociologists emigrated from the NGOs’ world to the state. Furthermore, in these years the professional practice of the sociologist in the private sphere was established. For example, the practice of a consultant sociologist is conditioned by the supply of clients from either the public or the private sector. It is a sociological practice that contributes to science comes from knowledge made out and for those who need such knowledge for decision-making, to substantiate diagnoses and policies, and to monitor and evaluate projects. It is a form of professional exercise that, even though it is not necessarily oriented to truth-seeking or grand questions about society and coexistence, does shed light on specific problems of society and organizations. This does not necessarily contribute to the accumulation of theoretical knowledge, unless the consulting professional does it separately. Sociologists also successfully insert themselves into private companies, mainly in study departments, human resources and marketing areas, in a process of professional legitimation in this field of employment that continues to the present day (Gómez Núñez, 2010). Sociologists’ skills have proved useful in processes of organization management, strategic planning, and policy designs in all sorts of institutions and companies. It may be stated as a conclusion that, in the twenty years between 1990 and 2010, Chilean sociology was in a transformative process of adjusting identities, toward a plural field more in tune with a changing society in a process of social modernization, characterized by dangers and

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contradictions, but also by opportunities. This was the ground for original sociological reflections and practices from scholarly sociology, but also from its more public, political intellectuals. In this period, sociology not only returned to university classrooms, within an institutional framework created that made it possible for many sociologists to earn a living from academic practice. There was also an increasing trend to exercise sociology outside academia. This extra-university practice of sociology was legitimized, yet it was not without tensions. For sociologists, the labor market was located around the state and state agencies, as well as municipalities, universities, NGOs, and the private, productive and service sectors. As we will see in the next chapter, from this period onward sociology in Chile has endured the tension of its ability, on the one hand, to articulate and coordinate its critical competencies while participating in society’s demands for a multidisciplinary and technical complementation with other disciplines, particularly economics, management, social work, education, and health disciplines (Iturrieta, 2014) and, on the other, of providing technical skills that allowed meritocratic access to decision-making levels in the state and private sector areas.

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la Encuesta Casen. Fecha de actualización: 30-09-2020. https://datasocial. ministeriodesarrollosocial.gob.cl/fichaIndicador/616/1 Montecino, S. (1997). Palabra dicha: Estudios sobre género, identidades, mestizaje. Universidad de Chile. Montecino, S., & Rebolledo, L. (1996). Conceptos de género y desarrollo. Universidad de Chile. Montero, C. (2000). Crépuscule ou renouveau de la sociologie: un débat chilien. Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 108, 37–56. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/40690839. Moraña, M. (2014). Bourdieu en la periferia: Capital simbólico y campo cultural en América Latina. Editorial Cuarto Propio. Morandé, P. (1994). Persona, Matrimonio y Familia. Ediciones UC. Morandé, P. (1999). Familia y Sociedad. Reflexiones sociológicas. Ediciones UC. Morandé, P. (2007). América Latina: Identidad y Futuro. México D.F.. Moulián, T. (1997). Chile: Anatomía de un mito. LOM Ediciones. Moulián, T. (1998). El consumo me consume. LOM Ediciones. Moulián, T. (2002). Construir el futuro. Aproximaciones a proyectos de país. 2 volúmenes. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones. Namuncura, D. (1999). Ralco. ¿Represa o pobreza? LOM Ediciones. Olavarría, J. (2009). Masculinidad/es y globalización: Trabajo y vida privada, familia/s y sexualidad/es. Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. Olavarría, J. (June 3, 2020). Interview with José Olavarría. Olavarría, J., & Moletto, E. (2001). Observando Sistemas. Nuevas Apropiaciones y usos de la teoría de Niklas Luhmann. Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. Osorio, F., Arnold, M., González, S., & Aguado, E. (2008). La nueva teoría social en Hispanoamérica: introducción a la teoría de sistemas constructivista. Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México. Ossandón, J. (2006). Observando sistemas. Nuevas apropiaciones y usos de la teoría de Niklas Luhmann. RIL Editores. Ossandón, J. (2011). Comunicaciones, semánticas y redes. Usos y desviaciones de la sociología de Niklas Luhmann. Editorial Universidad Iberoamericana. Parker, C. (1996). Las iglesias y su acción social en Chile. Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. Pérez Ahumada, P. (2018). Clases sociales, sectores económicos y cambios en la estructura social chilena entre 1992 y 2013. Revista de la CEPAL, 126, 171–192. https://www.cepal.org/es/publicaciones/44308-­clases-­sociales­sectores-­economicos-­cambios-­la-­estructura-­social-­chilena-­1992. Porras, J. I., & Espinoza, V. (2005). Redes. Enfoques y aplicaciones del análisis de redes sociales. Ediciones Universidad Bolivariana. Puryear, J. (1994). Thinking politics: Intellectuals and democracy in Chile 1973–1988. Johns Hopkins University Press. Raczynski, D. (2001). Descentralización. Nudos Críticos. CIEPLAN.

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Raczynski, D. (2009). La Asignatura Pendiente. Claves para la Revalidación de la Educación Pública de Gestión Local en Chile. Uqbar Editores. Raczynski, D., & Muñoz, G. (2005a). Supervisión Educacional en Chile. Experiencias Públicas y Privadas. Santiago de Chile: Ministerio de Educación. http://bibliorepo.umce.cl/libros_electronicos/magister/mag_24.pdf Raczynski, D., & Muñoz, G. (2005b). Efectividad Escolar y Cambio Educativo en Condiciones de Pobreza en Chile. Santiago de Chile: Ministerio de Educación. https://bibliotecadigital.mineduc.cl/bitstr eam/handle/20.500. 12365/2108/mono-­925.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Ramos, C. (2009). La transformación de la empresa chilena. Una modernización desbalanceada. Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado. Robles, F. (28 de septiembre de 1997). ¿Agonía o renacimiento de la Sociología? La Época. Rodríguez Weber, J.  E. (2017). Desarrollo y desigualdad en Chile (1850–2009). Historia de su economía política. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones de la Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos. https://www.centrobarrosarana.gob. cl/622/articles-­75886_archivo_01.pdf Saavedra, A. (2002). Los Mapuche en la sociedad chilena actual. LOM Ediciones. Salazar, G. (21 de diciembre de 1997a). Deber de la Sociología. La Época. Salazar, G. (1997b). ¿Crepúsculo de la Sociología o capitulación de sociólogos? Sociedad Hoy, 1, 225–229. Sandoval, M., & Suárez, H. J. (Coords.). (2007). Sociología, sujeto, compromiso. Homenaje a Guy Bajoit. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez. Senado. (2012). Retrato de la desigualdad en Chile. Santiago de Chile: República de Chile. https://obtienearchivo.bcn.cl/obtienearchivo?id=documentos/ 10221.1/29929/1/PDF_librodesigualdad_ultima_version.pdf. Simbürger, E., & Neary, M. (2016). Taxi Professors: Academic Labour in Chile, a critical-practical response to the politics of worker identity. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour, 28, 48–73. https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index. php/workplace/article/view/186212 Stefoni, C. (2011). Mujeres inmigrantes en Chile. ¿Mano de obra o trabajadoras con derechos? Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado. Thumala, M.  A. (2007). Riqueza y piedad. El catolicismo de la elite económica chilena. Debate. Tironi, E. (1999). La irrupción de las masas y el malestar de las elites. Chile en el cambio de siglo. Grijalbo. Tironi, M. (2003a). Nueva Pobreza Urbana. Vivienda y Capital Social en Santiago de Chile, 1985–2000. RIL Editores. Tironi, E. (Ed.). (2003b). ¿Cuánto y cómo cambiamos los chilenos? Balance de una década de censos: 1992–2002. Editorial Comisión del Bicentenario.

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Tironi, M., & Pérez, F. (Eds.). (2009). SCL: Espacios, prácticas y cultura urbana. Santiago de Chile. Toloza, C., & Lahera, E. (Eds.). (1998). Chile en los noventa. Editorial Dolmen. Torche, F. (2006). Una clasificación de clases para la sociedad chilena. Revista de Sociología, 20, 15–43. https://semanariorepublicano.uchile.cl/index.php/ RDS/article/view/27529. Torche, F., & Wormald, G. (2004). Estratificación y movilidad social en Chile: Entre la adscripción y el logro. Serie Políticas Sociales, N° 98. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL. https://www.cepal.org/es/publicaciones/6089-­estratificacion­movilidad-­social-­chile-­la-­adscripcion-­logro Touraine, A. (1999). ¿Cómo salir del liberalismo? Editorial Paidós. United Nations Development Programme, UNDP. (1998). Las paradojas de la modernización. Informe de desarrollo humano en Chile. Santiago de Chile: Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo. https://www.cl.undp.org/ content/chile/es/home/library/human_development/las-­paradojas-­de-­la-­ modernizacion.html United Nations Development Programme, UNDP. (2002). Nosotros los chilenos: un desafío cultural. Informe de desarrollo humano en Chile. Santiago de Chile: Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo. https://www.cl.undp.org/ content/chile/es/home/librar y/human_development/nosotros-­l os-­ chilenos%2D%2Dun-­desafio-­cultural.html United Nations Development Programme, UNDP. (2017). Desiguales. Orígenes, cambios y desafíos de la brecha social en Chile. Santiago de Chile: Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo. https://www.cl.undp.org/content/ chile/es/home/library/poverty/desiguales%2D%2Dorigenes%2D%2Dcamb ios-­y-­desafios-­de-­la-­brecha-­social-­en-­.html United Nations Development Programme, UNDP. (2019a). Evolución de la pobreza 1990–2017. ¿Cómo ha cambiado Chile? Santiago de Chile: Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo. https://www.estudiospnud.cl/ informes-­d esarrollo/evolucion-­d e-­l a-­p obreza-­1 990-­2 017-­c omo-­h a-­ cambiado-­chile/ United Nations Development Programme, UNDP. (2019b). Una década de cambios hacia la igualdad de género en Chile (2009–2018). Avances y desafíos. Santiago de Chile: Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo. https://www.cl. undp.org/content/chile/es/home/library/womens_empowerment/una-­ decada-­de-­cambios-­hacia-­la-­igualdad-­de-­genero%2D%2D2009-­2018-­.html Valdés, X. (2007). La vida en común: Familia y vida privada en Chile y el medio rural en la segunda mitad del siglo XX. LOM Ediciones. Valdés, X., Rebolledo, L., & Wilson, A. (1995). Masculino y femenino en la hacienda chilena del siglo XX. FONDART, CEDEM. Valenzuela, E. (Coord.) (2008). Vínculos, creencias e ilusiones. La cohesión social de los latinoamericanos: CIEPLAN.

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Valenzuela, M. E. (May 12, 2020). Interview with María Eugenia Valenzuela. World Bank. (2017). Tasa de alfabetización, total de adultos (% de personas de 15 años o más). https://datos.bancomundial.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS World Bank. (2020). PIB per cápita (US$ a precios actuales)  – Chile. https:// datos.bancomundial.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=CL Zarzuri, R., & Ganter, R. (Comps.). (2005). Jóvenes: la diferencia como consigna. Ensayos sobre la diversidad cultural juvenil. Santiago de Chile: Centro de Estudios Socioculturales.

CHAPTER 6

The Return of Society in the Twenty-First Century (2011–2021)

Abstract  This chapter analyzes how new social movements challenged both the compromised transition process and a political and economic model that deepened social inequalities. Reflections on neoliberalism and its social consequences monopolized sociological production. A new moment was opened, in which concepts and theories about Chilean society transcended academia, first with the 2011 student mobilizations, and then with the 2019 social explosion, all of which helped reinvigorate the bonds of sociology with its own society. In parallel to the diversification of professional spaces, there was an “elitization” of scholarly sociology. In the context of the Covid-19 health crisis, sociology was requested by public opinion as a pertinent expert knowledge. Keywords  Social movements • Feminist movements • Scholarly sociology • Elitization • Sociology’s fragmentation • Social explosion The more recent stage in the history of sociology in Chile covers the decade from 2011 to 2021 and is marked by important events on a global, regional and national scale, some of them deeply interrelated. The chapter’s timespan is justified as 2011 was characterized by the so-called “student spring” (Muñoz and Ponce, 2019, p. 11), while 2021 sets the moment of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Morales Martín, J. Gómez de Benito, History of Sociology in Chile, Sociology Transformed, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10481-7_6

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installment of a Constitutional Convention with the duty of writing a new Constitution, as a possibility to fulfill the desires for democratization within Chilean society. In 2011, the student movement began what some sociologists (Garretón, 2014, pp. 207–210) have called a “new historical and political cycle” that projected itself throughout the decade, in which the political-cultural and economic agenda was clearly signaled by the constitutional debate from the need to overcome the enforced 1980 Constitution, with the tension between the “refounding” or the “reforming” of Chilean society. On December 19, 2021, Gabriel Boric was elected as president of the Republic for the period 2022–2026. His political trajectory, which began under the wing of the student movement in 2011, continued later as a deputy, and finally as leader, of the new Chilean left, is a representation of the period’s narrative. In a nutshell, this period was characterized by the alternation of different governments and the strains of their respective projects. Sequentially, the first government of Sebastián Piñera (2010–2014) failed to meet the modernizing, economic growth expectations that were promised in his campaign to the middle classes. Later, under the leadership of Michelle Bachelet, the Nueva Mayoría government (2014–2018) managed to unify the Concertación and the Communist Party in a new and unprecedented political coalition with an ambitious program and a parliamentary majority in both chambers (Brunner, 2016). However, the proposed structural reforms—education, welfare, tax reform, constitutional change—did not achieve the desired effects due to drops in investment, economic stagnation and, principally, cases of corruption and the illegal financing of politics. Finally, Piñera’s second government (2018–2022) started with the promise of better economic and social times, yet it ended up collapsing under the greatest institutional, social and political crisis experienced in the country since the return to democracy. All this resulted in a crisis of legitimacy of institutional politics and a loss of prestige among political parties. There were different processes of the politicization of the social sphere going on in the so-called “times of politicization” (UNDP, 2015), with the emergence of new social and political subjects in a context that shook Chilean society with two different events. The first event is the financial crisis in large banks and its impact in terms of generating uncertainties in economies and global flows. This phenomenon had an enormous impact on the countries of Latin America and Chile, raising important questions about the factors that originated it, with several issues pointing to the viability of the ways in which

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globalization was becoming present at every social level. For the region, it was a decade definitely less encouraging than the first years of the twentyfirst century. The dramatic fall in raw material prices—the main support for the distributive policies of the region’s progressive governments of the time—, and the 2008 global financial crisis, reduced the economic activity levels in all of these countries. Consequently, inflation and social discomfort increased together, leading to an electoral shift toward conservative, right-­wing governments. Although the so-called progressive cycle involved the political recovery of a regional project, at the disciplinary level there were questions not only about its ability to overcome old challenges— such as neo-extractivism or populism, but also the very validity of the idea of Latin America (Cortés and Morales, 2017, p.  10). The multidimensional crisis of global capitalism and its regional and local effects was addressed as a sociological issue in the main Latin American forums, concretely in the Latin American Association of Sociology (ALAS) conference held in 2013 in Chile, which was dedicated to reflecting on the “Crisis and Social Emergencies in Latin America”. Since then, interpretations around neoliberalism in Chile and its environmental, cultural, economic, social and political consequences have proliferated and dominated much of the research agendas, as we shall see later. On the other hand, in 2011 social movements came to the fore in various countries as a result of the same crisis of global capitalism. These movements assumed different forms and styles in different countries and cities around the world, including, among others, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Madrid, New York, Istanbul, and Athens. It was a worldwide protest cycle that was described as “squares movements” or the “newest social movements” (Muñoz and Ponce, 2019, p.  13). These very new social movements were described as being distinct from the “new social movements” that sociologists such as Alain Touraine (2006) had dealt with previously, formed around identities beyond the capital–labor conflict and classic labor movement, with origins as diverse as the environment, indigenous, women (particularly indigenous) and feminists, gender and sexual diversity, and student movements, all of which appeal to the so-called “alter-activism” (Pleyers, 2010). They are also characterized by their horizontality, the absence of political organizations, and new ways of understanding the political practice (Castells, 2012). In the Latin American case, there were similar mobilizations in Mexico, Colombia, and Chile. Indeed, the critical moment in Chile occurred in the year 2011, which gave form to a break in the peaceful, “consensual” trajectory of the

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post-­dictatorship period. As early as 2006, the so-called “penguin movement” of high school students had questioned the educational system’s functioning. In 2011, the movement went deeper and questioned its funding logic, while claiming for the need of free, public, quality education (Fleet, 2011, 2021; Fleet and Guzmán-Concha, 2017; Gómez de Benito and Gómez, 2012). There are also wide protests against the social security system of AFP, closely linked to the engine of the country’s neoliberal economy—the financial system. The student mobilizations were joined and supported by middle-class dissatisfied citizens (Barozet and Fierro, 2014), who pay the costs of almost everything but receive no subsidies of any kind, while suffering from growing labor and social precariousness (Julián, 2014). This was a concrete expression of the widespread criticism directed toward the exclusionary, fragmenting neoliberal economic-social model. They also symbolized the incipient formulation of a project of society aiming to promote social democratization through public education, abolishing hence the dictatorship’s inherited institutionality (Muñoz and Durán, 2017). The challenge reaches the Constitution itself, as the questioning deepens and new forms of “social pact” are proposed for the future. From 2011 onward, the new social movements took to the streets to protest against the game rules of the transition agreement, which is seen as a protection of Chile’s economic model that has successfully turned the society into a market-like realm. In addition, they are expressions of the different inequalities that plague social life. In this way, there were further student mobilizations in 2012, and in 2016 massive rallies against the social security system were organized around the No+AFP Movement (Rozas and Maillet, 2019). In turn, 2018 witnessed the so-called “Chilean feminist May”, which protested about the experiences of inequality of women and sexual diversities: “the modest protocols against sexual harassment in university institutions, as well as the reduced laws in human rights for women and sexual minorities, thereby realizing the need to focus on the relationships between gender, power and social inequalities” (Mora and Cáceres, 2018, p. 20). Women and LGBT+ movements have had a significant public and political impact when it comes to considering gender as yet another dimension of inequality and social exclusion, materialized in the conditions of existence and in domestic, legal, labor, identity, and social care policies (Valenzuela and Mora, 2009; Mora, 2013). These movements have also helped to raise awareness about the structural and cultural issues associated to femicides in Chile (Cáceres, 2016), and in the

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debates surrounding free, safe and free abortion (Larrondo and Ponce, 2019; Ponce, 2020). Therefore, they have pointed out the need to incorporate gender perspectives in institutional and social spaces, while making visible the positions of religious groups regarding the control of women’s bodies. These abovementioned social movements put different historical demands—some of which were more visible at the time, while others were usually obscured—in the national agenda, an indication of the extent to which the social had become politicized and the accent was placed on the cultural dimension. Accordingly, in the past decade we have witnessed different transformations in the relationships between the state, politics, economy and society. Chilean society has also changed in terms of life expectancy growth and values.1 The country has moved slowly in recent decades from a very traditional axis toward a society more open to modernity. On the welfare dimension, Chile has been more rapidly moving toward higher levels of prosperity, with the increase in the recognition of post-material values such as individual autonomy, freedom, free time, leisure, and participation or interest in ecological and environmental issues, among others (CERC-Mori, 2006, 2018). Important cultural transformations have taken place, especially among younger generations. In addition, old social identities re-emerged alongside new social identities which increasingly reflected the diverse social world we live in, in terms of its territories, cultures, classes, sexualities, genders and ethnicities. The diversity of the social world also reflects the migratory phenomenon experienced in recent years, which has certainly enriched the country. For all these reasons, the politicization of Chilean society is related not only to the discomfort around the economic model, but also to the experiences of people living in a deficient democracy and state, with public policies that fail in the acknowledgment of such diversity and cultural changes (Thayer, 2019; Thayer et  al., 2020). The mobilizations and protests of October 2019 were expressions of discomfort that had accumulated over the years, felt in their motivations and origins as plural and diverse. In the view of some authors such as Martuccelli (2021, p.  5), on October 18, 2019, a “plural movement” was started in Chile that ended up being labeled, for lack of a better designation, “the social explosion”. 1  According to the National Statistics Institute (2021), “in Chile, life expectancy at birth has tripled. In 1900 it was estimated at 23.6 years for women and 23.5 years for men, while for the period 2015–2021 it is 82.1 years for women and 77.3 years for men”.

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From that day and well into the end of 2019, enormous demonstrations, performances, cultural interventions, self-convened councils, and social reform projects took place in the country’s streets with amazing speed and intensity. There were also cases of looting and violence, in the face of clear and manifest human rights violations perpetrated by the Chilean state. The institutional way out of this social and political crisis entailed, first, the Agreement for Peace and a New Constitution of November 2019, in which a plebiscite to change the Constitution was established; and second, the results of the plebiscite held on October 25, 2020, in which a resounding 78% of the votes Chile decided to replace the 1980 Constitution imposed during the civil–military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In 2020, social mobilization decreased, due to the Covid-19 health crisis, although “political life continued to be marked by the breath of the social explosion” (Martuccelli, 2021, p. 5). In May 2021, the constituent representatives were elected and the Constitutional Convention was installed on July 6. This outcome undoubtedly symbolizes a deep questioning of the representative political system and claiming for a further participatory democracy. After this socio-historical outlook, we proceed to analyze how Chilean sociology has adapted itself to a society enduring a process of cultural, social and political transformation. While the previous period (1990–2010) saw sociology stand out for its ability to intervene in different fields, this process was consolidated during the next decade (2011–2021). Regarding the academic field, in recent years the discipline has been further institutionalized in university spaces, although this has also, as we shall see later, led to the strengthening of some of the contradictions mentioned in previous chapters.2 To begin with, it normalized the belonging of universities and scholarly sociology to a higher education system turned into a marketoriented system, in which public institutions with state-bureaucratic rules and limited resources dispute space with private institutions that enjoy little regulations—even when they are non-profit institutions, at least formally speaking. In this period, there was also a consolidation of the National Accreditation Commission’s quality standards for universities. The indicators used to certify quality in areas such as institutional 2  In addition, sociologists were recognized in consecrated academic spaces. The National Award for Humanities and Social Sciences was obtained by Manuel Antonio Garretón in 2007 and Tomas Moulián in 2015. In turn, José Joaquín Brunner and Eugenio Tironi are current members of the National Academy.

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management, undergraduate and postgraduate instruction, research and third stream activities have become increasingly complex, meaning that there exist today universities without institutional accreditation and others that range between two and seven years of accreditation. Similarly, private agencies offer services of quality “measurement” for undergraduate programs and postgraduate and doctoral degrees, via market services that evaluate educational projects (Díaz Crovetto, 2018, p. 30). Consequently, the market shows an unequal value in diplomas, depending on the university and program at issue. Sociology in Chile is already part of this higher education market characterized by its segmentation as well as its ability to establish and then normalize a model of evaluative culture that is measurable, quantifiable, that generates rankings that legitimize the unequal competition for students and public resources for teaching and research. Today, some 16 universities offer an undergraduate sociology program, 5 of them public and 11 private. In this context, sociology has also continued its territorial features, as its presence in some areas of the Chilean North has given an account of the cultural and productive peculiarities of the Atacama desert and its mineral wealth. It is also present in Southern universities, with positions in the tasks of social integration and ethnic conflicts. Sociology’s presence is also apparent in coastal and rural areas, with works focusing on the challenges faced by local communities from ecosystems and climate change. However, as yet another indicator of Chile’s urban concentration, most of the sociology programs are located in Santiago, a city which contains the largest quotas of research teams, centers and resources. One decisive event that helped cement a newer social origin for sociologists was the implementation of free higher education since 2016, allowing first-generation students to enroll in the university system and be trained as sociologists. In turn, during this period different postgraduate and doctoral degrees in sociology were also consolidated in the country. Therefore, we are witnessing a new moment of sociology in Chile. The massification of university teaching of sociology, on the one hand, and the diversification of specialized practices and services from both the public and private sector, on the other, have projected the practice of sociology from the university outward. Leaderships in the discipline’s academic field (SOCIORED) have raised questions about the new challenges involved in training new generations of sociologists. The market proliferation of undergraduate sociology has done more to reinforce the disciplinary nature rather than the professional exercise or the research of social

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problems, as the latter demands a necessarily multidisciplinary, or even interdisciplinary, approach. Furthermore, sociological training has met the tension between undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, or between specialized production for public and private interests. Concerns also arise about the need to innovate in theoretical and methodological perspectives, as well as in broader, more inclusive debates regarding new groups and emerging social movements. Indeed, the sociology curricula has been updated and broader views on social issues have been incorporated, with subjects related to socio-environmental problems, new dynamics of the state–citizenship relationships, and the recognition of native peoples. Technological and scientific changes have been also included, and the curricula now engages with the sociological study of local and regional communities. Teaching sociology has emphasized the socio-cultural transformations of contemporary Chile, assuming the task of training new generations by fostering new skills to identify, create, and integrate knowledges and visions of the future world. Despite the tensions and challenges described, over the past decade Chile’s scholarly sociology has endured an auspicious process of growth and consolidation that is made apparent by positive elements such as, for example, the increase in scholarships for postgraduate studies both in Chile and abroad; the increase in doctoral students and research projects sponsored by FONDECYT; the participation of Chilean sociologists in international research projects; the consolidation of membership and participation of sociologists in international conferences (such as those organized by ISA, ASA or LASA); the regular publication in specialized journals of international prestige; the opportunity to publish books in prestigious, especially Anglo-Saxon, editorials; the attraction of Latin American and other countries’ postdoctoral students; and the opening of job opportunities for Latin American and foreign researchers and academics. An internationalized Chilean scholarly sociology has become an attractive place in terms of the recruitment of foreign sociologists, in parallel with sending national sociologists to continue academic training or develop professional careers in Latin American institutions and other universities across the world. Nonetheless, this process of the internationalization of scholarly sociology has demonstrated negative aspects that must be considered, such as the excessive appraisal to the academic paper published in international journals of certain indexing (WOS, SCOPUS, Scielo, and, more recently,

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ERIH Plus), the predominance of English in publications, and the establishment of mechanisms of academic consecration whose logics come from different scientific disciplines. All of this has provoked a deep change in the generation of prestige of groups (universities and sociology schools) and individuals (scholars and researchers). This logic for academic productivity has been established by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FONDECYT) (Díaz Crovetto, 2018, pp. 30–33), which promotes competition for public research funds under criteria that privilege the publication in indexed journals of articles, rather than books or other devices for disseminating sociological knowledge. Researchers receive further financial incentives from their universities when publishing in these journals. To a certain extent, this incentive structure discourages sociologists from publishing in specialized national journals (Beigel, 2014a; Gilbert, 2015). All these elements mean that scholarly sociology in Chile has been subjected to a growing fragmentation, meaning that sociologists dialogue less and less with each other (Araujo, 2019a), weakening the exchanges at a local level. It is possible to speak not only of a trend toward fragmentation, but also of the “elitization” of Chilean scholarly sociology, due to the unequal value between national undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, and the highly positive assessment of degrees obtained abroad, which operate as true “titles of nobility” in Bourdieu’s sense (2013). In addition, as sociologists we are also responsible for producing and reproducing this elite logic of production promoted by FONDECYT, as we have been changing our own criteria for applying to competitive funds, from the positions and interests we hold in the academic field (Canales, 2021). In a nutshell, the reproduction mechanism of the logic of academic domination consolidated in this period may be described as follows: scholars with dominant positions and prestige in the field impose the logic of publishing articles in English onto would-be or “dominated” sociologists; they establish these criteria in the FONDECYT indicators, in parallel with training undergraduate and postgraduate students in this logic. Those who study at prestigious universities, those with more years of accreditation, have far more possibilities of accessing scholarships than those from other universities, even when they may have outstanding grades. Moreover, not all universities have resources or favorable environments for research, and sociologists as researchers are hired, categorized and fired by universities with basis on the “indexed” academic production, and not by of what they are proposing or analyzing in their writings (Díaz Crovetto, 2018, p.  33).

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This “elitization” of scholarly sociology has found more recent instances in other important contests for public research, such as the funds to establish Millennium Nucleus or specialized centers, which tend to favor sociologists who are well established in the field. Therefore, Chile’s sociology field conceals power relationships between dominant and dominated, along the lines of inclusion/exclusion criteria based on the possession of academic credentials (overseas degrees), language skills (speaking and/or writing in English), demonstrated success in applying for competitive research funds, and paper productivity. In a way, scholarly sociology has “ended up producing a community in which the country’s situation is somewhat repeated. Some who have too much; others who have little or nothing. That is, concentration in a few [scholars]. It is not just a question of justice: it is a matter of seriousness” (Araujo, 2019a, p. 356). One noticeable consequence of this logic of social reproduction in the academic field comes from the paradoxical fact that this state of affairs has been promoted with public resources—resources that, a priori, should favor greater equality in conditions and opportunities. This logic produces marginalized and peripheral sociologists, and also threatens the public access to sociological knowledge funded with public resources. This is not about being against evaluation or scholarly production, but of verifying the contradictions and pernicious effects of the fact that Chile— unlike other Latin American countries—lacks a state or public agency for the promotion of scientific and research careers. The competitive logic of public-funded sociological research makes Chile a particular case in Latin America, as in it these forms of measuring, quantifying and organizing scholarly productivity-based on scales and models that usually are non-scholarly in nature—are exacerbated (Beigel, 2014b; Beigel and Bekerman, 2019; Lamont, 2012). This is one of the major contradictions that “academic capitalism” has provoked in Chile (Valdebenito, 2020), certainly fostered by the universities’ enormous pressure, but also stimulated by the sociologist’s incorporation and naturalization of hyperproductivity as a way to gain recognition. Another consequence of these conditions for knowledge production and sociological recognition has been the not-always-critical adoption and reception of foreign authors, ideas, approaches and sociological theories, often to the detriment of the reading and citation of national and Latin American sociologists. This practice also undermines theoretical debates and the production of original ideas and approaches.

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The pressures for publishing abroad imply that foreign journals, especially the most prestigious ones, require a certain percentage of citations of scientific articles from mainstream indexed journals. This practice privileges the citation of works of consolidated, foreign authors, fostering a limiting, self-referential, and certainly encapsulated international circuit of journals, authors, theories, and citations (Beigel and Gallardo, 2021). What is more, several of them are not open-access journals, so one needs to pay for reading their content, which prevents Chilean society—the one that paid for these researches—from free access to such knowledge. Consequently, the national space for sociological debate becomes weakened, the legacies of the national and Latin American sociological tradition are less and less considered, and the number of monographic and solid based-research books prove increasingly scarce, as the entire scientific system pushes “towards the paper” (Araujo, 2019a, p. 356). The feebleness of national sociological debate, plus the relative disconnection between society and sociological knowledge—symptoms of the so-called “colonialism of knowledge” or “academic colonialism” (Lander, 1993)—, help explain the way in which Chilean sociology hindered its ability to interpret and challenge the contemporary society, something that had precisely been one of its main constitutive features (Canales, 2021). This is undoubtedly a consequence of the development of a private market for higher education. It is also a feature typical in sociological training, which has an effect on the historical influence of the discipline on macro-social public affairs. Within university spaces, with sociology among them, a double dynamic is perceived at several intersecting vectors: on the one hand, a public-oriented research production on issues that concern society; on the other, research of particular interest oriented toward the most acknowledged journals. The negative influence of established authors and sociologists who have not allowed the emergence or recognition of new academics with new ideas and more contemporary ways of approaching society has also played a role. Similarly, Chilean sociology has certainly had difficulties in maintaining its historical Latin American vocation. Latin America as a sociological problem or topic occupies a minor place in Chile’s production, although it is fair to acknowledge the reception of decolonial and postcolonial theories in recent years (Villalobos, 2017). Chile’s sociology can be considered thus a strongly internationalized rather than regionalized sociology, insofar as it is more attentive and interested in what happens or is published in the academic metropoles—the USA and Europe—than in the periphery or

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in the neighboring countries’ sociologies. Despite this, SOCIORED organized the Latin American Congress of Sociology in Santiago in 2013, which also implied assuming the presidency of ALAS for a period of two years. It was the recognition and mutual appreciation of a work made for the development of sociology in Chile and Latin America. Since then, the links with Latin American sociology and other regional sociologies have remained latent, mainly by CLACSO’s study groups and centers network.3 Notwithstanding these conditions, it is fair to point out that in the last decade important contributions have been made by sociologists in emergent social problems, with debates both public and within the discipline. Sociology continued to study and analyze the most important contemporary social processes in Chile. In doing so, the discipline evolved by gradually incorporating foreign and Latin American social thinkers from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Sociology in Chile left classical sociology behind and opened itself up to newer theoretical and conceptual frameworks, analytical categories, and methodological approaches and data-collection techniques (Valenzuela, 2020). Studies based on intersectionality became more frequent, and this paradigm for analyzing structural social inequalities made it possible to articulate research with different variables at stake, such as gender, age, ethnicity, and class. Macro- and micro-social perspectives have proliferated, with a focus on the subjects and their actions, and also on social movements and collective subjects related to cultural, economic, social and political structures. Chilean sociology has continued to open itself up to regional concerns from remote territories and communities, despite the fact that the higher education 3  Currently, 33 Chilean centers are associated with the CLACSO network. Among the institutions dedicated or related to sociology, the following stand out: the Inter-institutions Center for Studies on Conflict and Social Cohesion (COES), Universidad de los Lagos’s Center for Studies on Regional Development and Public Policies (CEDER), Universidad de Valparaíso’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Social Theory and Subjectivity (CEI-­ TESyS), Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez’s Center for Research in Social Sciences and Youth (CISJU), Universidad de Concepción’s Center for Regional Studies and Public Policies (CERPUDEC), Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano’s Department of Research and Postgraduate Studies, Universidad de Chile’s Sociology Department, Universidad de Concepción’s Sociology Department, Universidad Alberto Hurtado’s Faculty of Social Sciences, FLACSO, Universidad de Santiago de Chile’s Institute for Advanced Studies (IDEA), Universidad de la Frontera’s Nucleus of Sciences Social and Humanities, and Universidad Arturo Prat’s Institute of International Studies (CLACSO, 2021). The CLACSO membership of various regional centers also stimulates links and bridges between Chile’s local sociologies and Latin America’s sociological production.

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system and research funding sustains a strongly centrist bias in favoring Santiago de Chile and the Metropolitan Region (Sanchez, 2020). Moreover, sociologists maintained fruitful dialogues and collaborations with practitioners of related social sciences, particularly with regard to anthropology, political science, economics, history, and psychology. A systematic review of the books published in this period confirms the evolution of the discipline and also points to a greater boom in sociological topics not addressed with such preponderance before, such as health, emotions, and sociology of the body (Chuaqui, 2016; Pincheira, 2012), aging and the quality of life of elderly people (Herrera Ponce et al., 2017; Herrera Ponce and Kornfeld Matte, 2018), migration studies from multiple dimensions (Imilan et al. 2015; Pávez, 2017; Ramírez et al., 2021; Stefoni, 2011), and discrimination, racism, segregation, domination and stigmatization in Chilean society (Tijoux, 2016). The sociological study of the environment has been also strongly emerging (Aliste and Urquiza, 2014; Molina et al., 2021), an expression of the growing disciplinary concern for climate change and the destruction of the planet, certainly as a global agenda, but, above all, with concern on its particular effects on the country and its most disadvantaged sectors, especially the livelihoods of artisanal fishermen, indigenous peoples, and small agricultural owners, as or in fruit companies’—mostly American multinationals—appropriation of water (Valenzuela, 2020). Chilean sociology is now beginning its presence in the debates of these crucial problems around the climate emergency. In this period, important works have been published in Chile on human development, social inequality, the middle classes, vulnerable groups, poverty conditions and urban analysis (Araujo, 2020; Márquez Arellano, 2017; Ramos, 2016; Ureta, 2017; Wormald et al., 2013). The sociological production on issues related to labor flexibility and precariousness, labor relations and economic sociology was also consolidated (Atria, 2014; Foladori and Guerrero, 2017; Galliorio and Julián, 2020). Research on indigenous peoples also strengthened (Vergara et al., 2013).4 The discipline has taken the indigenous question seriously, and the interest in gender studies has also increased. Indeed, key works have appeared in the field 4  In 2016, the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies (CIIR) and Pehuén Editores created an editorial series oriented to publish relevant research in fields such as narrative, poetry, anthropology and public policy, with an emphasis on matters related to indigenous peoples. This editorial collaboration has made it possible to publish various titles; however, the presence of sociology in this collection is still marginal.

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of gender studies, making it possible to grasp the transformations experienced and endured by Chilean society in recent decades (Olavarría, 2017; Valdés, 2020). Reflections and research related to identities, masculinities, sexuality, and gender debates in both Chilean and Latin American youth have also flourished (Duarte and Álvarez, 2016; Madrid et  al., 2020; Mora, 2013). Furthermore, the sociological interest in topics of historical importance has been maintained, as it happens with subjects related to sociology of education, cultural studies and political sociology. In the field of education, the main concerns have been placed on the system in general, its cultural practices, curricula, and analysis of its tasks in citizenship education (Corvalán et al., 2016; Cox and Castillo, 2015; Weinstein and Muñoz, 2018). There have also been important contributions in topics related to sociology of culture, cultural criticism and cultural fields theory, youth cultures, relationships between culture and religion, and the individual and collective factors giving shape to Chilean national identity (Gayo, 2017; Güell and Peters, 2012; Moraña, 2014; Peters, 2020; Tsukame, 2017). And, of course, the sociological concern in national politics has been present, from different approaches and perspectives that nonetheless converge in their common concern for the institutional political system’s crisis of legitimacy and representation. There have been studies on the state, on political ideologies—especially of the Chilean right—, and critical analyses of public policies (Alenda, 2020; Larraín, 2011, 2018); studies on crime and insecurity have been published (Dammert, 2013); insightful contributions have been made on the crisis of Chilean democracy from a historical perspective (Moulián, 2020) and on the Chilean political system since the return to democracy (Huneeus and Avendaño, 2018); the sociological study of elites has been recovered (Güell and Joignant, 2011); works on actors, capitals and positions in the field of politics have been published (Joignant, 2019); the sociological and political criticism of neoliberalism has been maintained (Ruiz, 2019; Undurraga, 2014); and contributions have appeared that precisely point to the “great rupture” between political institutions and new social actors (Garretón, 2016). In addition, important analyses of social movements and protest repertoires in Chilean society have appeared, in accordance with the new political cycle that the country is on (Donoso and Von Bülow, 2017). Regarding theoretical and methodological elaborations, there has also been an interesting and varied set of publications. We can count Chilean

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sociologists’ important reflections on theoretical aspects related to globalization, modernity, and the contemporary society as a whole (Cordero and Mascareño, 2017; Martuccelli, 2014; Mascareño and Araujo, 2012). Actually, several authors have formulated their own theoretical approaches, with high degrees of originality. The names of Kathya Araujo, Danilo Martuccelli and Daniel Chernilo stand out here. Araujo and Martucelli (2012) have portrayed Chile’s contemporary society from general theoretical interpretations based on empirical research, giving account of the enormous effort that living in society means in Chile, of the difficulty for establishing social ties, and of the withdrawal of the state and its institutions. Araujo (2016), has been also concerned with the study of authority, reflecting on the difficulty of exercising authority in contemporary societies and the legitimacy that power exercise must have. Conversely, Chernilo’s books (2011, 2013, 2017, 2021) attempt to explore the relationship between sociology and universalism, the legacies of natural law onto sociological theory, and the idea of philosophical sociology that revolves around questions of the human, secularization, cosmopolitanism, and new constitutionalism. In the past decade, other outstanding theoretical books have appeared about classical sociology authors (Avendaño et al., 2012) and already-classical contemporaries such as Luc Boltanski (Basaure, 2012), Niklas Luhmann (Arnold et al., 2014; Mascareño et  al., 2012), and the formation of sociological thought (Jiménez, 2018). As for books on research methodology, sociologist Manuel Canales has been one of the authors who has excelled. He introduced group discussions in the country in the 1980s, and has remained as a major reference in qualitative research, coordinating an important number of books about data production and analysis conditions in sociology and social sciences (Canales, 2013, 2014). Originally published in 2007, his book Metodologías de investigación social. Introducción a los oficios [“Social Research Methodologies. Introduction to Craft”] has been reprinted several times and has gained a reputation in sociology instruction. Other books dedicated to the epistemology of the social sciences have appeared, with emphasis on sociological theory and the relationship between society and social science (Gibert, 2012; Gibert and Otero, 2016). Similarly, a sociological production emerged around the interest in sociology itself and its transformation processes. Questions around what sociologists research, the transformations of sociologists’ identities, professional profiles, fields and competences, and the relationship between

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social science and society, have occupied much of the sociology reflection. Works on the uses of social sciences in modern Chile (Aritzía, 2012), the performative capacity of sociology and social sciences (Ramos, 2012), the development of social sciences in the country and its relationship with socio-political transformations (Garretón, 2014), and social-science-based instruments and procedures to measure poverty in Chile (Ramos, 2016) have also appeared. Claudio Ramos has been one of the leading sociologists in developing, through his books and research, this field of reflection on sociology and its uses. His last and important book, Relatos sociológicos y sociedad [“Sociological Stories and Society”], addresses the interweaving of sociologists’ interpretative elaborations and the meanings that give shape to social life, by means of following the academic, intellectual, and public trajectories of three outstanding Chilean sociologists: Tomás Moulián, José Joaquín Brunner, and Pedro Morandé (Ramos, 2019). In a context characterized by collective discomfort, collective works have been published under Ramos’ reflective perspective (Rebolledo, 2016) with the aim of thinking about Chile and its society from the fruitful dialogue between social sciences, the humanities and arts and communication. Recently, several volumes have appeared with the selected works of major sociologists—who are already our contemporary classics—such as Pedro Morandé (Biehl and Velasco, 2017), Enzo Faletto (2016), and Juliet Kirkwood (2019). These titles are added to the editorial endeavors initiated at the early twenty-first century to publish the complete works of authors such as Enzo Faletto (2007, 2009) and Norbert Lechner (2007). In parallel, some classic works dedicated to modernization and the place of religiosity and culture by Pedro Morandé (2011, 2017) and Carlos Cousiño and Eduardo Valenzuela (2012) have been reissued. Commemorative books have also been published by sociologists best known for their public intellectual facet, such as Antonio Cortés Terzi, who authored in 2000 the book El circuito extrainstitucional del poder [“The Extra-Institutional Circuit of Power”] and was a notorious character in public debates (Águila and Monsálvez, 2021). Furthermore, an anthology published by CLACSO on Chilean critical thinking appeared, including the writings of Juliet Kirkwood, Manuel Antonio Garretón, Pedro Morandé, Enzo Faletto, Hugo Zemelman and Tomás Moulián, among others (Benavides et al., 2015). One feature maintained by sociology in Chile over time has been its capacity for self-observation and self-reflection, and also its traditional participation in public affairs. Despite the constraints of academic production

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and sociological research which damage the relationship between society and sociological knowledge, some of the concepts, ideas and theories about Chilean society went beyond academia in two recent historical moments: first, the student mobilizations of 2011, and then with the 2019 social uprising. In between, as we have seen, the demands from citizen movements were clearly questioning the development model, demanding state response to abuses and inequities, the right to quality education and to good universal healthcare. Environmental groups also began protests against environmental depredation, while indigenous peoples demanded a recognition denied for decades, and the regions raised their voices claiming for development and integration of their populations and territories. It is possible to draw a line of continuity between the 2011 student mobilizations and its derivations and repercussions in the 2019 social explosion, a subject of sociological interpretation in its own right. A fundamental book to understand the 2011 mobilizations, and which connected citizenship beyond the education question, was sociologist Alberto Mayol’s (2011) bestseller El derrumbe del modelo. La crisis de la economía de mercado en el Chile contemporáneo [“Collapse of the Model. Crisis of the Market Economy in Contemporary Chile”], which casts a radical criticism of the entire socioeconomic model. Mayol continued his critical reflection with No al lucro. De la crisis del modelo a la nueva era política [“No to Profit. From the model’s crisis to the new political era”] (Mayol, 2012). These works helped revive the reflection and public debate on the neoliberal economic model, offering sociological accounts of the unrest and frustration in Chilean society. Later, a whole series of books appeared that deepened the problematization of the neoliberal model, its social aspects and some of its consequences, such as the capture of the state by elite groups (Mayol and Ahumada, 2015; Ruiz and Boccardo, 2015). However, it is the book De nuevo la sociedad [“Society, Once Again”] by Carlos Ruiz (2015) which, in addition to continuing to question the model, projected a sociological account and general theorization of Chilean society with clear intellectual and, above all, political motives when it comes to suggest turning indignation into an emancipatory force for social change. This was a sociological narrative that found its place in the political coalition Frente Amplio, formed in 2017, and in which Ruiz himself was an influential ideologue. Sociological writings on Chile’s social unrest intensified after the social explosion of October 2019. This major event in the country’s contemporary history has given rise to numerous and diverse interpretations.

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Regarding sociology, different books have appeared that, in one way or another, take neoliberalism and its cultural, social, economic and political consequences as their analytical framework (Araujo, 2019b, 2020; Garcés, 2020; Mayol, 2019; Ruiz, 2020; Tironi, 2020). Furthermore, there have also been published works attempting to explain the rearticulation between social movements and politics after the social explosion (Garretón, 2021). However, one of the latest and most lucid interpretations of this event is proposed by sociologist Danilo Martuccelli (2021) in his book El estallido social en clave latinoamericana. La formación de las clases populares-­intermediarias [“Outbreak in a Latin-American code. The formation of the popular-intermediary classes”]. Based on a classic Latin American approach that combines historical perspective and rigorous sociological analysis, he explains the visible heterogeneity in the peaceful marches that toured Chile on October 25, 2019. Interesting are his explanations on how different claims, which few analysts or specialists thought could be brought together, converged on that journey: students, young professionals upset by indebtedness, displaced middle classes, the laggards of meritocracy, the No+AFP Movement (a movement against the current, privatized pensions system operated by corporations whose acronym reads AFP), feminist and sexual minorities, environmental and health claims. In addition, we must add social groups such as migrants and millions of Chileans who continue to live in poverty. Despite these interpretations, it is still early to make more in-depth evaluations of the 2019 social explosion and its aftermaths on Chilean society. In the coming years, it will surely continue to be a fundamental topic of sociological research. What is already apparent is that, with the Constitutional Convention in progress and the election of Gabriel Boric as president, in Chile the transition has ended and a new political stage has begun. Following the terms used throughout this book, one may be witnessing a new “social and political laboratory.” In the new cycle the country is experiencing, the public dimension acquired and assumed by sociologists as public intellectuals will continue to be important (González Jiménez, 2021), as they participate in the media, radio and television programs, and also write op eds in newspapers or websites. Their opinion is often required to explain, for example, the current problems of national political life, public security’s objective and subjective issues, inequalities and exclusions, migratory flows, expressions of racism and claims of multicultural education, new social, youth and gender-identity movements, demographic transformations and imbalances, among others. Furthermore,

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in the face of the Covid-19 health crisis, sociologists were turned to by the media and public opinion as sources of pertinent, expert knowledge. Sociologists have offered diverse perspectives on Chilean society, with interventions capable of articulating different styles and registers. Some elaborate discourses on power, culture and intergenerational transmission; others, in turn, have a more combative stance and alternative critical commitments, more linked to popular sectors, social movements and non-­ mainstream media, sparking debates and discussions about resistance against power and neoliberal domination in the country. They are examples, in any case, of the varied intellectual styles that co-exist, revitalizing the goal of observing Chilean society while subjecting it to critical analysis and sociological judgment. Another feature of sociology in Chile’s twenty-first century is the expansion of demands toward sociological knowledge. On the one hand, it is the state and its public policies, ministries and territorial areas, to the extent that each of the ministries has transformed into a research center on social issues. On the other hand, the private sector has been opening research and think-tanks with the aim of influencing public opinion and also the government in office. To this end, public opinion polls are periodically carried out. Currently, in Chile an average of 20 polls are deployed per month by various companies and universities, the most relevant being the ones carried out by CADEM, Adimark and the Center for Public Studies. With the advent of the internet, it is already common for most polls to be conducted online; however, a certain data fragmentation can be seen. The traditional prestige of the National Institute of Statistics as an official state body has lost credibility in this field, especially after the mistakes made in the last 2012 census, which forced its partial restaging in 2017. It is therefore common for sociologists to intervene and practice in very different fields, ranging from companies to schools, local communities, the family, rural development, the city, health institutions, social insertion and the various territorial organizations. Over the past decade, the range of options for professional employment has expanded; consequently, sociologists have had to develop a set of knowledge and skills quite different from those demanded in academia (Dubet, 2012). Frequently, they participate in guiding and designing public policies, advising communication strategies or human resource management offices, and forming part of work teams with professionals from social work, psychology, economics or urban planning. The activities and intervention spaces of sociologists in

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Chile are already heterogeneous, something that speaks of the remarkable versatility and enormous ability of sociologists to venture into diverse fields and adapt to different demands onto sociology’s professional practice. Some of these changes are clearly related to broader social transformations linked to the society of knowledge and the appreciation of technical, technological and communicative knowledge. Today, the practice of sociology is marked by practical requests. The skills and competences of professional sociologists must adapt to the labor market and its new rules, which most of the time challenge the sociologists’ adaptability to different roles and tasks. The versatility of the sociology profession in Chile alludes, therefore, to the plural nature taken by the discipline in recent years, which distinguish it as such: a plural sociology for a plural and diverse society, but determined by the market imprint on the society as a whole. This social context has led, as we have seen, to a deep redefinition of sociology’s intervention fields and scenarios, which are now characterized by the consolidation and multiplication of a varied set of sociology “crafts” with specific work styles, receivers and duties. It is this set of audiences and publics that allowed sociology to gain in social relevance and professional density (Blois and Oliveira, 2019). This versatility, however, which from a positive viewpoint emphasizes the discipline’s plural nature, also has some troubling, negative elements such as labor flexibilization and insecurity. On the one hand, flexibilization drives sociologists to compete with other social science professionals, such as psychologists, anthropologists, and social workers, in the labor market. Therefore, they sometimes carry out competences similar to other professions (Iturrieta, 2019). In addition, labor competition means that job requirements increasingly value experience, postgraduate training, specialization in practical knowledge, and expertise in quantitative software. Sociology’s methodological knowledge may be an advantage, but the request for higher academic qualifications is also an obstacle for many sociologists who cannot invest in specialization courses, diplomas, or postgraduates. These labor market competitive requirements and conditions have an impact on the sociologists’ employability, especially for recent graduates, who find it difficult to be incorporated, or who are often driven to accept jobs for which they are overqualified. Flexibilization leads to job insecurity for sociologists, a situation that disproportionality affects women sociologists (College of Sociologists, 2020), who are the ones who suffer the most from job instability, since they tend to have fewer rates of long-time

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contracts, are paid in fees, and by and large it is more difficult for them to obtain stable, well-paid jobs. It is also difficult for them to reconcile their professional and personal lives. The gender problem is evident within sociology’s professional practice, something that can be extrapolated to the Chilean labor market as it reproduces these gender asymmetries and generally makes it difficult for women to work (Mora, 2013). They are surely disciplinary challenges, but they also are challenges for the whole of Chilean society. To conclude, it can be pointed out that sociology’s plurality has led to other tensions about disciplinary identities, practices and professional roles, according to the contexts and work spaces in which it is exercised. One of the most visible tensions has been over the understanding and exercise of sociology, with one side supporting a sociology of applied nature and oriented toward client requests, and the other viewing a scientific sociology that answers to paradigmatic outlines and academic development policies in universities (Gómez de Benito, 2007). For many sociologists, this division is still present, even when the politicization of Chilean society has helped highlight the public and intellectual dimension of sociology over the last decade, as we have seen in this chapter. In any event, the open challenge of sociology’s pluralism is key to the future of the discipline in its ability to integrate, acknowledge and value different ways of understanding the practice of sociology. The future of sociology in Chile will also be highly conditioned by the requests, issues and specific needs of Chilean society itself.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusions: A Plural Sociology for a Diverse Society

Abstract  Sociology in Chile followed a trajectory of consolidation from the 1950s until the collapse of the 1973 military coup. The post-1990s democratic context stimulated the development of the discipline, which expanded its presence in new university spaces from the global North and the global South. It is noteworthy how Chilean sociology has been chameleonic and changes its identities and practices vis-à-vis its own society. Over this period sociology has been modernized, professionalized, and knows how to link macro-­ social dynamics with local processes. Furthermore, it is simultaneously an international and Latin American sociology, yet it remains conditioned by the competition codes imposed by dominant logics of academic productivity. Keywords  Academic field • Power field • Socio-historical process • Social diversity • Sociological production • Amphibious sociology Sociology in Chile has been framed by the close relationship between the academic field and the field of power. If it is true that there is a correspondence between scientific thought and social configurations, this is especially valid for the process of development and institutionalization of sociology, given the historical bonds of the discipline with social and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Morales Martín, J. Gómez de Benito, History of Sociology in Chile, Sociology Transformed, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10481-7_7

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political processes. From this analytical framework, the chapters of this book have been organized in an attempt to point out trajectories, discontinuities and projections for sociology in this Latin American country. In this way, we have offered an account of the discipline’s development and evolution by means of studying the field, but also highlighting the interdependences between sociopolitical context and the exercise of sociology. These pages have tried to make a small contribution to such a collective heritage, by remembering the events of this historical period, as well as focusing on events, actors, and sociological production. The narrative we have produced is very particular, as it is based on our biographical, intellectual and professional trajectories as foreign professors who analyze Chilean society and its sociologists. This observation of what is observed by those who observe Chilean society has epistemologically conditioned the reflective nature of this book. Given our narrative’s relevance but also its limitations, this approach made it possible to start from an understanding of how sociology, at least in Chile’s case, has been associated with different historical events. Furthermore, in its first decades it was involved in developmentalist, modernizing, and reformist political projects. Consequently, sociology intervened in the fundamental political debates of the country in the last 70 years; broadly speaking, it has been characterized by topics related to poverty, marginality, development, democratization, inequalities, and social change. This book has also contributed to a retrospective look at the discipline, helping identify its classic authors, its most representative institutions, and its most original ideas and contributions into each socio-­ historical moment. The contribution of Chile to Latin American sociology has also been emphasized, as well as the discipline’s developments at the national level, and the theoretical-methodological influences coming from the United States, and especially from Europe, have been incorporated. It is possible to observe, therefore, how sociology’s trajectory in Chile was framed by the auspicious process of expansion and consolidation from the beginning of its institutionalization, back in the 1950s. This process was intermittent, especially as a result of the 1973 democratic breakdown. Not without difficulties, sociology was able to overcome its previous “armchair” stage of a more essayistic nature, and to move on to a more scientific and empirical stage—and also to a period of clearer political commitment. The military coup and the subsequent dictatorship hindered the marked rise that sociology was acquiring, both in the academic field and in government posts and the more general public sphere. Before the tragic

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events of 1973, sociology approached society and the political realm by advising, diagnosing and influencing as much as possible. It was a moment of intense relationship between sociology and politics, as it was also a period in which Chilean sociology displayed a distinctive Latin-Americanist vocation. From the characterization of development as a complex process not limited to economic results, the discipline began to be concerned with dependency first, and later, already in the authoritarian period, with the return to democracy. The dictatorship did not prevent the discipline from subsisting in alternative institutional spaces beyond academia and university locations. Independent academic centers allow the development of a free, critical sociology capable of building its own working spaces. International solidarity funding was crucial to keeping sociology alive, in a heterogeneous movement that converged around the denunciation of human rights violations and from which sociology analyzed, interpreted, and criticized the societal and cultural models imposed by the dictatorship. In the 1980s, in turn, there was widespread debate oriented to understanding the social and political crisis that led to the authoritarian turn. However, sociologists were also concerned with analyzing the ongoing social changes brought about by the neoliberal capitalist revolution. They offered interpretations on what was happening with new actors, subjects and social movements. There was a general consensus that the dictatorship’s economic, social and political transformations were the source of both poverty and the accentuated exclusion and inequality. Sociologists also began to decipher the first cultural effects of the neoliberal model established by the authoritarian regime. In this adverse context, sociology was able to reflect on and participate in the democratic movement for the return to democracy. Once again, Chilean sociology became involved in the country’s socio-historical and political processes; sociologists redefined their intellectual role, intervened in public debates, and were linked to social movements. The discipline was committed to democracy. The dictatorship in Chile was capable of sowing the seeds of fear, exercising state terrorism, and isolating the country internationally; but it could not end with something more profound, that is, the roots and memories of freedom. Once democracy returned in 1990, sociology became normalized in the new political scenario, as well as returning to universities. Sociology had high expectations of democracy as the framework within which it

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would be possible to build a new social order for Chile, a country still marked by strong structural limits inherited from both its traditional history and the civic–military dictatorship. Public and intellectual sociology opted for a two-step democratization process: first “political” or formal democratization; then “social” or substantive democratization. Over the years, however, dissatisfaction and disaffection with the narrow, restricted democracy –a political framework giving support to the dominant economic system– would grow. On a sociological and sociocultural level, these conditions became reflected in the predominant individualist–consumerist–neoliberal matrix that, broadly speaking, characterized Chile: a society that reduced poverty levels, and yet continues to be marked by social and cultural exclusion and socioeconomic and other inequalities, such as educational, cultural, territorial, gender, ethnic, and of birthplace. With regard to scholarly sociology, the democratic context restimulated the discipline’s development and, above all, its return to university classrooms. Sociology accommodated itself to a university field characterized by a private and market footprint. Numerous university institutions began to offer sociology degrees in the early 1990s. This helped fragment the field of sociological education, as the plurality of careers in different public, traditional and private universities gave rise to different sociologies and perspectives when it comes to understanding both the discipline and Chilean society itself. Sociology, moreover, started to re-open its regional, territorial and community concerns, despite the fact that the higher education system and its research funding schemes imposed strong centralist biases. Today, the discipline is present from North to South, being taught from and for the regions. Therefore, the democratic period made possible an expansion throughout the country of sociological studies at the university level; there were also other opportunities for the practice of sociology: in the state, private companies, and civil society organizations. Sociologists gradually occupied professional positions beyond the university classrooms. At the beginning, the topics of sociological interest revolved around the transitional process of democratization; later, state modernization and public policy studies dominated the agenda. Sociologists returned to deal with and worry about public affairs. There were also sociologists working on domination, resistance, exclusion, intervention, social movements, indigenous movements, and cultural and social diversity. Others dedicated their work to building particular interests with a discoursive basis, while yet others studied marketing, consumption patterns, and public opinion. Today, all of these are

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habitual practices in the exercise of the profession; hence, they constitute different ways of interpreting sociology. The plurality dilemma stressed the discipline from the 2000s onwards. Pluralism not only stimulated the dialogue among different theoretical and methodological perspectives within scholarly sociology from less globalizing positions, but this also had to do with the various ways of professional exercise in a society under a clear modernization process. Sociology multiplied their identities. The challenge of pluralism alludes to a sociology that is a scientific and professional, scholarly and intellectual discipline that knows how to intervene, is acknowledged and generates competent professionals for a society with specific problems, needs and fragmentation such as Chile’s. The economic development experienced in this period certainly deepened cultural, social and political contradictions that soon began to take the form of social unrest. Development also produced inequalities that put sociologists on alert. Neoliberalism deepened existing issues such as exclusion, inequality, environmental destruction, and the appropriation of indigenous lands. Both Chile as a country and its sociology were inserted in Latin America and in a globalized world. Sociological research also became internationalized during this period. Chile has only recently established a national scientific policy; in this context, scientific development—including sociology—has been strongly determined by economic interests and priorities. In practical terms, global pressures have brought institutions, disciplines and researchers to prefer subjects of interest for indexed journals of international prestige, and publish their results in them. The close relationship between sociological research and social development—understood in a broad sense—is not made evident. Scholarly sociology has dealt increasingly with rankings and academic productivity, and has paid less attention to contents, ideas and data analysis. This scholarly approach has been preferred over the course of the book. It was difficult to maintain the practice of sociology as a craft. The Latin-Americanist vocation that historically characterized Chilean sociology was also undermined, and Latin America has ceased to be a meaningful horizon. To a certain extent, this is understandable due to the discipline’s specialization and the attention that is paid to specific questions. The academic field of sociology expanded, with its contradictions becoming more acute or stronger depending on the subfield; on other occasions, the achieved academic autonomy put difficulties in its proximity to society.

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The 2011 student mobilizations gave birth to a whole series of protests demanding changes in the political and economic models; eventually they had important impacts on social institutions. A variety of claims were later added to the demands for public and free higher education. Demands coming from ethnic, gender, sexual diversity and dissidence, environmental, and territorial logics were increasingly in tension, generating asymmetries in access to social positions and different goods (cultural, symbolic, economic, political participation), and resulting in a lasting sense of loss in dignity and welfare. In Chile, social fabrics struggle to weave themselves and make a difference in areas such as identities, values, aspirations, relationships with the state or markets, consumption patterns, education, work, the pension system and environmental destruction. All these mobilizations also expressed the social change that Chilean society had suffered in recent decades. The change was palpable, but also was the conflict and the social and institutional crisis experienced by the country. The emergent social actors and movements demanded new professional practices from sociologists that could no longer satisfy these expectations from traditional positions of theoretical and disciplinary knowledge. Along with these mobilizations, a new social origin of the sociologist was verified thanks to the public policy of free universities established in 2016. Young people, particularly women, are beginning to arrive in university classrooms to study sociology. They come from middle, intermediate and popular classes, and on many occasions are the first generation in their families when it comes to pursuing higher education. In a society and higher education system in which socioeconomic origin has a decisive impact on social, academic and intellectual trajectories, new generations of sociologists bring other experiences, concerns and expectations. They are the new explorers of society. Little by little, the relationship between sociology and society is being recomposed. Sociology also follows the path of important contemporary processes grounded on social structures. If the discipline’s development has been closely linked to the contradictions and consequences of the prevailing socioeconomic model—and to the accelerated modernization process and its connections to democracy and state rebuilding—, sociology has gradually adapted its concerns to the emergence of new social processes. In an attempt to serve its society, the discipline gradually left classical sociology behind and incorporated the influence of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century social thinkers from Latin American and other latitudes. Chilean sociology opened up to new theoretical-conceptual

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frameworks and categories of analysis, as well as to different methodological approaches and data collection techniques. Its development will surely come vis-à-vis with the analysis of emerging and latent social processes that the country is experiencing, such as, for example, environmental concerns, rethinking labor, the regions and development itself, also feminism, gender, the indigenous question, health, emotional welfare, suicide, education, childhood, youth, drug addiction, care and ageing, neighborhoods and territorial integration, drug trafficking and violence. We can intuit that the discipline will continue to revolve around these and other debates, discussions and contributions, as Chilean sociology is once again listening to society. Indeed, the relationship between sociology and society resurfaced strongly after the social explosion of October 2019. Before that, there were numerous contrasting sociological studies that already cautioned of the growing social unrest. Certainly, the task of sociology was neither to predict nor to make futurology of an event that decidedly situated the country in a contemporary moment that is experienced as an interregnum and transition to a new social cycle. Sociology regained its public presence and recovered the ability to offer powerful sociological narratives about both Chilean society and the discipline itself. Sociology once again associated itself with its essential historical identity of “awareness” for broader socio-historical projects and with being part of them. Whether by formulating narratives and global views, proposing subjects and issues for intellectual debates, assuming the programmatic design of political parties and social movements, or recovering its ability to generate visions of what society is wanted, sociology resumed its performative nature of interceding in society to transform it as much as possible. Nonetheless, questions arise on how close or distant sociologists shall be from power, how much they will continue to have influence in public debates, or, in more disciplinary terms, how much sociology is read, to what extent Chilean sociologists read and cite each other, and what is the actual circulation and repercussion of national magazines, conferences, forums and seminars. In brief, these are sincere questions of the real social and political impact of sociological research, of the explanatory and mobilizing power of the discipline, as well as of how much autonomy or independence sociologists have. Consequently, these are questions that point to the relationship between the most scholarly social research and the one that is carried out from social demands. Perhaps we sociologists fell into the temptation of overestimating the transformative capacity of the

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discipline, thinking that major claims and desires for transformation could be placed on its shoulders. There was perhaps a lack of more thorough reflection on the discipline, a broader understanding of its nature and conditions. In these pages, we have tried to present a sociology with various fields of action and intervention, which goes beyond academia and the intellectual or political sphere and is related to people. Further consideration and sobriety would be convenient in both the diagnoses and the goals the discipline can offer, along with recognizing its limits in the face of a hopeful but uncertain historical time. This, to the extent that sociology in Chile is today no longer conceived solely from intellectual vocation or political commitment, notwithstanding the fact that these were areas in which traditional sociology historically bestowed the country. If a suggestion is allowed here, it is not about preventing political questions, but rather about being more aware of what studying society means, and of the extent to which such study is crucial to think about the political challenges of the present in a deeper and more rigorous way. This is especially the case when it comes to understanding Chilean society itself while analyzing a specific social problem from its historical roots. Similarly, the privatization of research and knowledge requires a more professionalizing knowledge for the exercise of sociology. Well into the twenty-first century, with an open, borderless sociology that faces the characteristic challenges of our times—globalized economy and culture, development of new technologies that facilitate access to knowledge, open borders and migratory flows, demands in interculturality and decentralization, and, above all, the necessary democratization of the country—, the contrast with the past should encourage us to look to the future with relative optimism. Before a new socio-historical cycle that started in 2021, with the Constitutional Convention, sociology will surely continue to actively participate in this “social and political laboratory”, given the closeness of sociology and society in this country. Future opportunities may emerge for the discipline that strengthen the links between academia, research and social demands. For it is no longer possible to think of sociologists as a privileged group that looks at reality from the ivory tower of absolute criticism and only engages with it from a totalizing perspective. Society demands growing professionalization of sociological activity, which is not to say that the disciplinary dimension is excluded—quite the contrary: sociology will continue to receive more demands. Far from merging with the status quo, the most genuine profile of the sociologist will be that of interpreting and

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advising on the processes of change, making himself present as either intellectual or professional in social institutions, without giving up criticism, but without imposing the belief that our mission is to radically change society, because—as the historical trajectory we have gave account in this book demonstrates—the contemporary nature of Chilean sociology lies in its plurality and diversity, features that, of course, remain linked with the diversity and heterogeneity of its own society. Therefore, we are facing an chameleonic sociology, which changed its skin and identities in parallel with its own society. A sociology that was modernized, became professional, was capable of complementing and integrating the structural or relational perspective with links between the macrosocial, historical dynamics with local processes observable in the daily life of personal biographies, as well as in subjective meanings. A sociology that has been simultaneously both international and Latin American, and that shall overcome both the pressures and the precariousness of the private sector and the competitive grammars imposed by the current logic of research based on academic productivity. If all this is accomplished, it is something that the next historians of the discipline will have to evaluate. However, and to conclude, we modestly consider that, in the short, medium and long run, sociology in Chile will become necessary to explain and interpret the country’s historical moment, which hopefully leads to a fairer, solidary society with an improved democratic coexistence, and in which new forms of social relationships and bonding emerge.

Index1

A Aguirre Cerda, Pedro (president), 15, 16 Ahumada, Jorge, 20, 23, 24 Alessandri, Jorge, 27, 40n2 Allende, Salvador (president), 27, 44–46, 49, 52, 53, 56–58, 63, 66, 67 Chilean road to socialism, 37 Popular Unity, 37, 45, 50, 56–58 Almeyda, Clodomiro, 52 Álvarez, José, 69 Alvayay, Rodrigo, 78 American Sociological Association (ASA), 138 Arancibia, Armando, 66 Araujo, Kathya, 72, 84, 102, 115, 116, 139–141, 143, 145, 148 Arnold, Marcelo, 107, 145 Arrau, Alfonso, 70, 89

Association of Sociologists of Chile, 113 Aylwin, Patricio (president), 91, 99, 101, 103 B Bachelet, Michelle, 100, 132 Bambirra, Vania, 50–52 Baño, Rodrigo, 74, 78, 109 Becas Chile (scholarship), 115 Belgium, 29, 65 Université Catholique de Louvain, 29 Benavides, Leopoldo, 8, 74, 78, 146 Bengoa, José, 76n2, 83–85, 106, 116 Boltanski, Luc, 145 Boric, Gabriel (president), 132, 148 Bourdieu, Pierre, 4, 75, 84, 103, 106, 107, 117, 139 Briones, Guillermo, 18, 25, 28, 29

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Morales Martín, J. Gómez de Benito, History of Sociology in Chile, Sociology Transformed, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10481-7

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INDEX

Brunner, José Joaquín, 2, 8, 14, 15, 17, 17n1, 18, 28, 43, 45, 71, 74, 75, 79, 81, 110, 115–117, 132, 136n2, 146 C Calderón, Fernando, 70 Canada, 80 Canadian International Development Research Cooperation (IDRC), 80 Canales, Manuel, 101, 104, 139, 141, 145 Caputo, Orlando, 50, 51 Cardoso, Fernando H., 37, 38, 46–48, 56, 74 Castells, Manuel, 56, 133 Center for Cultural and Artistic Inquiry and Expression (CENECA), 86, 87 Center for Development Studies (CED), 88, 91 Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE), 66 Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies (CIIR), 143n4 Center for Public Studies (CEP), 88, 149 Center for Studies on Conflict and Social Cohesion (COES), 142n3 Center for Women Studies (CEM), 85, 86 Chateau, Jorge, 74, 78 Chernilo, Daniel, 6, 116, 145 Chile 1967 University Reform, 44, 47 1980 Constitution, 69, 132, 136 1988 Plebiscite, 91 2006 students mobilization, 108, 134

2011 students mobilization, 108, 133, 147, 166 2018 feminist May, 134 2019 social explosion, 135, 147, 148, 167 Agrarian Reform, 40, 40n2, 43 authoritarian enclaves, 101 Chicago Boys, 28, 67, 68n1, 100 civic-military dictatorship, 164 Constitutional Convention, 132, 148 and the Covid-19 health crisis, 136 crisis of legitimacy, 132, 144 General Bill of Universities, 1981, 83 higher education market, 137 as “laboratory” of sociological knowledge, 3 No+AFP movement, 134, 148 as “peripheral center” for social sciences, 36 as “sociopolitical laboratory,” 34, 148 transition to democracy, 5, 74, 79, 91 Chilean Society of Sociology, 22 Chilean sociologists as consultants, 5 de-elitization of, 108 flexibilization of labor, 143, 150 as militants, 5 new social background, 108 and organization management, 121 as “palace advisers,” 101 as policy-makers, 120 and the private sector, 8, 137, 149 professionalization of, 6, 22, 34 as public intellectuals, 5, 6, 146, 148 and the public sector, 27, 137 and social intervention, 44 and social planning, 37, 56

 INDEX 

Chilean sociology and academic capitalism, 140 and action-research methodologies, 83 “armchair” period, 13–30, 162 and the Catholic Church, 82, 89 and Cold War, 5, 17, 34 and competition for funds, 80 and the Cuban revolution, 34, 40, 47, 48, 53 and the cultural blackout, 65 as a craft, 165 de-institutionalization of, 69, 70 and development agenda, 5 diversification of, 137 elitization of, 139, 140 field’s autonomy, 4 and gender asymmetries, 151 generational contestation, 36 independent academic centers, 71, 75, 80, 89 and indexation, 115 institutionalization of, 4, 6, 8, 16, 27, 33, 44, 65, 161, 162 and international funding, 80 and the labor movement, 15, 56 Latin American tradition of, 8, 35n1, 36, 39, 141 and market studies, 88 and opinion polls, 27, 28, 149 origins, 1, 13, 18 and paper productivity, 140 period of political radicalization, 33–58 plurality of, 106, 164, 169 return to universities of, 7, 91 “scientific” period, 13–30, 33–58 and Second World War, 16 and secularism, 5 self-observation, 8, 90 and social change, 14, 41, 42, 115, 166

173

and social planning, 37, 56 and the “social question,” 15, 29 and the “sociology agreements” period, 5 training of, 38, 138 Chile Hoy (weekly), 50 Christian Left (political party), 44, 66 Cibotti, Ricardo, 72 Cohen, Ernesto, 72, 73 College of Sociologists of Chile, 88, 113 Communist Party (political party), 52, 91, 132 Concertación (political coalition), 132 Corporation of Studies for Latin America (CIEPLAN) Apuntes CIEPLAN (journal), 87 Colección de Estudios CIEPLAN (journal), 87 Cortés Terzi, Antonio, 146 Cousiño, Carlos, 89, 146 Cox, Cristián, 75, 76, 103, 144 D de la Maza, Gonzalo, 87, 90 Dependency theory development of underdevelopment, 49–50, 52 neo-Marxist trend, 48, 49, 53 non-orthodox Marxist trend, 48 specific situations of dependence, 48 structuralist trend, 48 unbalanced peripheries, 55 Desarrollismo (developmentalism) “Cepalino” thought, 38 import substitution industrialization (ISI model), 20 Dos Santos, Theotonio, 50–52 Duarte, Claudio, 112, 144

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E Economía y Sociedad (journal), 53 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) Latin American Demographic Center (CELADE), 26 Revista de la CEPAL, 72 Education and Communications (ECO), 86, 87 Encina, Francisco, 70 Espinoza, Vicente, 84, 102, 116, 117 F Fajnzylber, Fernando, 48, 66, 72, 73 Faletto, Enzo, 18, 34, 38, 39, 43, 46–48, 53, 56, 72, 74, 78, 109, 146 Fanta, Mario, 53 Faria, Vilmar, 38 Fernandes, Florestán, 38, 39 Ferrer, Aldo, 48 Filgueira, Carlos, 38 Flisfisch, Ángel, 74, 75, 78 France, 18, 19, 29, 41, 56, 65, 107 CNRS-CCFD, 41 Franco, Rolando, 18, 25, 26, 34, 37, 38, 46, 56, 64, 72, 73 Frei Montalva, Eduardo (president), 24, 27, 29, 35, 40, 42, 43, 91 revolution in freedom, 42 Frente Amplio (political coalition), 147 Friedman, Milton, 68, 100 Furtado, Celso, 19, 20, 48 G Garcés, Joan, 56 Garcés, Mario, 81, 87

Garretón, Manuel Antonio, 3, 8, 35, 54, 57, 68, 74, 76n2, 77, 81, 91, 101, 110, 118, 121, 132, 136n2, 144, 146, 148 Germani, Gino, 3, 25, 27, 38, 39, 74 Germany foundation Adveniat, 41 foundation Konrad Adenauer, 41, 80 foundation Misereor, 41 Friedrich Ebert foundation, 80 Giddens, Anthony, 106, 117 Godoy, Hernán, 6, 8, 14, 18, 22, 29, 35, 43, 53–55 Gómez, Justino, 106 Gómez Millas, Juan, 18, 25, 40n2 Graciarena, Jorge, 38, 45, 53, 57, 72–74 Güell, Pedro, 115, 117, 118, 144 Guerrero, Bernardo, 70 Gunder Frank, André, 49, 50, 52 Gurrieri, Adolfo, 37, 38, 72 Gustavo Lagos Matus, 26 H Hamuy, Eduardo, 17, 18, 25, 27, 28 Harnecker, Marta, 50 Hinkelammert, Franz, 54, 55 Huneeus, Carlos, 40, 82, 83, 87, 91, 101, 144 I Ibáñez del Campo, Carlos (president), 27 Iglesias, Enrique V., 72 International Sociological Association (ISA), 113, 138

 INDEX 

J Jaguaribe, Helio, 48 Joignant, Alfredo, 101, 107, 115, 144 Jorge Fuentes Alarcón, 53 Juan Enrique Vega, 66 Jutkowitz, Joel, 72 K Kirkwood, Julieta, 74, 78, 86, 146 L Lagos Escobar, Ricardo (president), 65, 99, 117 Lagos, Marta, 87 Latin American Association of Sociology (ALAS) conference, 57, 133 pre-ALAS conference, 111, 113 Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), 36, 66, 73, 77, 113, 142, 142n3, 146 Relocation Program for Social Scientists, 66 Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) Institute for the Coordination of Social Research (ICIS), 26 Latin American Journal of Social Sciences (journal), 55 Latin American School of Political Science and Public Administration (ELACP), 26 Latin American School of Sociology (ELAS), 26, 27 Monthly Report on the Political Situation, 78 Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES), 34, 36–39, 41, 45–48, 65, 71–73, 79, 83, 89

175

Latin American Institute of Doctrine and Social Studies (ILADES), 36, 42, 45 Latin American sociology, 3, 4, 18, 22, 38, 67, 71, 113, 114, 142, 162 Lechner, Norbert, 54, 74, 76, 76n2, 117, 118, 146 Letelier, Valentín, 13, 14 LOM (editorial), 107, 109 Luhmann, Niklass, 106, 107, 117, 145 M Maira, Luis, 66 MAPU (political party), 44, 54, 66 Marini, Ruy Mauro, 50–52 Márquez, Francisca, 84 Martínez, Alberto, 49 Martínez, Javier, 70, 84 Martuccelli, Danilo, 67, 116, 135, 136, 145, 148 Mattelart, Armand, 54 Mayol, Alberto, 147, 148 Medina Echavarría, José, 21, 22, 26, 37–39, 48, 57 “structural porosity” thesis, 39 Millenium Nucleus, 140 MIR (political party), 52 Montecino, Sonia, 86, 108, 115 Morales, Eduardo, 74, 78 Morandé, Pedro, 6, 69, 89, 115, 146 Moulián, Tomás, 46, 50, 53, 54, 68, 74, 77, 78, 101, 107, 117, 118, 136n2, 144, 146 N National Accreditation Commission (CNA), 114, 136 standards of quality education, 136 National Award for Humanities and Social Sciences, 136n2

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INDEX

National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FONDECYT), 84, 114, 138, 139 National Institute of Statistics (INE), 119, 149 National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (CASEN), 119 Netherlands, 19, 29, 41, 82 NOVID-CEBEMO, 41 Noyola, Juan, 20 O Olavarría, José, 86, 108, 115, 116, 144 Ottone, Ernesto, 70 Oyarzún, Pablo, 107 P Parker, Cristián, 87, 106, 115 Paz, Pedro, 38, 53 Pehuén (editorial), 143n4 Piñera, Sebastián (president), 132 Pinto, Aníbal, 20, 23, 24, 48 Pizarro, Roberto, 50, 51 Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Center for Educational Research and Development (CIDE), 42 Center for the Economic and Social Development of Latin America (DESAL), 29, 41 Center for the Study of National Reality (CEREN), 54, 69, 76 Corporation of University Promotion (CPU), 42 Cuadernos de la Realidad Social (Journal), 54 Institute of Sociological Research, 17, 28

Latin American Center for Population and Family (CELAP), 41 Research and Social Action Center (CIAS), 29 Porcel, Néstor, 49 Prates, Susana, 38 Prebisch, Raúl, 20, 22, 23, 37, 72–74 Punto Final (fortnightly), 53 Q Quijano, Aníbal, 19, 36, 38, 117 R Raczynski, Dagmar, 87, 115, 116 Ramos, Claudio, 8, 115, 143, 146 Ratinoff, Luis, 18, 38, 39 Revista de Crítica Cultural (journal), 107 Reyna, José Luis, 38, 46, 58 Richard, Nelly, 107 Robles, Fernando, 110 Rodríguez, Darío, 20, 107 S Salazar, Gabriel, 72, 110 Salcedo, Danilo, 18, 27 Samuel, Raúl, 18, 27, 29 Sánchez, Ximena, 70, 143 Santa Cruz, Hernán, 19 Sepúlveda, Osvaldo, 18, 27, 28 Sergio Aranda, 49 Serra, José, 38 Serrano, Claudia, 87 Silva Henríquez, Cardinal Raúl, 45, 81, 82 Soares, Glaucio, 56 Socialist Party (political party), 50, 52, 91 Sociedad y Desarrollo (journal), 53

 INDEX 

Sociology and authority studies, 145 of the body, 64, 113, 143 and center-periphery theory, 23 and chilean identity, 3, 71, 88, 110, 121 and class studies, 76n2 and cosmopolitanism, 145 of crime, 144 and cultural studies, 144 of culture, 8, 75, 89, 113, 116, 144 and democratization studies, 101, 108, 162, 164 of development, 26, 50, 113 of economic, 22, 115, 143 of education, 14, 26, 72, 75, 108, 115, 136, 144 of elites, 107, 144 of emotions, 143 and epistemology of the social sciences, 145 and Gender and Women Studies, 86, 108, 115, 134, 143, 151 of health, 28, 143 and human development, 118n5, 143 and human resource management, 149 and human rights, 71, 81, 163 and indigenous studies, 116, 117, 143 of inequality, 6 and intersectionality, 142 and liberation theology, 55 and Marxism, 35, 35n1, 45, 53, 55 and migration studies, 143 and neoliberal model, 68, 84, 163 of political, 26, 72, 78, 83, 107, 113, 144 and postcolonial theories, 141 and public policies, 37, 91, 103 of religion, 89, 115

177

and research methodologies, 113, 117, 145 and social movements, 5, 6, 66, 84, 117, 167 of sociology, 2, 8, 35 and statistics, 24, 26 and transition studies, 37 and youth cultures, 144 Sociology Network of Chilean Universities (SOCIORED), 110–113, 137, 142 Solari, Aldo, 27, 38, 67, 72 Sulbrandt, José, 28 Sunkel, Osvaldo, 20, 48, 53, 54, 72 SUR Correo del Sur (bulletin), 85 Hechos Urbanos (bulletin), 85 Proposiciones (magazine), 85 Sweden, 65 Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation (SAREC), 41, 80 T Tarrés, María Luisa, 66, 70 Teresita de Barbieri, 56 Thayer, Willy, 107 Tijoux, María Emilia, 107, 143 Torres Rivas, Edelberto, 56 Touraine, Alain, 26, 48, 56, 84, 85, 106, 114, 117, 133 U United Kingdom Refugee Academic Program of the World University Service, 66 University of London, 75 United Nations Development Program (UNDP), 71, 72, 76, 91, 103, 118, 118n5, 132

178 

INDEX

United States 1965 Camelot affair, 45 Alliance for Progress, 34, 37, 43 Ford Foundation, 37, 41, 82 Fulbright Program, 41 Rockefeller Foundation, 41 University of California, 28 University of Chicago, 28, 68n1 US-AID agencies, 41 Washington University, 70 Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano Agrarian Research Group (GIA), 82 Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality (CERC), 82, 86–88 Center for Women’s Development Studies (CEDEM), 108 Department of Research and Postgraduate Studies, 142n3 Diploma in Gender and Society, 108 Economy and Labor Program (PET), 82 Women’s Circle Bulletin, 83 Women Studies Circle, 82, 83, 85 Universidad Alberto Hurtado Faculty of Social Sciences, 109, 142n3 magazine Mensaje, 29 Persona y Sociedad (journal), 108 Universidad ARCIS Diploma in Cultural Criticism, 107 Master’s in Cultural Studies, 107 Master’s in Social Sciences, 107 Universidad Arturo Prat Institute of International Studies, 142n3 Revista de Ciencias Sociales (journal), 109 Universidad Austral de Chile, 109 Revista Austral de Ciencias Sociales (journal), 109

Universidad Católica del Maule, 112n4 Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, 22 Universidad Católica Silva Henriquez Center for Research in Social Sciences and Youth (CISJU), 142n3 Temas Sociológicos (journal), 109 Universidad Central, 106, 112n4 Universidad de Chile Center for Socioeconomic Studies (CESO), 50, 53, 69 Institute of Sociological Research, 17, 25, 27, 28, 54 Master of Systemic Analysis Applied to Society, 107 Némesis (journal), 109 Pedagogical Institute, 13, 17 Revista Análisis del Año (journal), 109 Revista de Sociología (journal), 90, 108 Sociology School, 27, 110 Universidad de Concepción Center for Regional Studies and Public Policies (CERPUDEC), 142n3 Central Institute of Sociology, 29, 53, 69 Sociedad Hoy (journal), 109 Universidad de La Frontera, 106, 112n4, 142n3 Nucleus of Social Sciences and Humanities, 142n3 Universidad del Norte, Antofagasta, 53, 70 Cuadernos de Investigación Social (journal), 70 Universidad de los Lagos, 142n3 Center for Studies on Regional Development and Public Policies, 142n3

 INDEX 

Universidad de Playa Ancha, 70 Universidad de Santiago de Chile, 22, 69, 142n3 Institute for Advanced Studies (IDEA), 142n3 Universidad de Valparaíso, 142n3 Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Social Theory and Subjectivity (CEI-­ TESyS), 142n3 Universidad de Viña del Mar, 109 Kutral (journal), 109 Universidad Diego Portales, 105, 106, 109n3 Cuadernos de Teoría Social (journal), 109n3 Universidad La República, 105 Universidad Técnica del Estado (UTE), 22, 64, 69 Urquidi, Víctor, 19, 20, 67 Urzúa, Raúl, 28

179

V Valdés, Teresa, 86, 108, 144 Valdés, Ximena, 86, 108, 115 Valenzuela, Eduardo, 84, 85, 89, 117, 146 Van Kessel, Juan, 70 Vekemans, Roger, 27–29, 35, 40–45 Venturino, Agustín, 14, 15 Vergara, Pilar, 67, 68, 68n1, 74, 78 Villablanca, Hernán, 49 Vuskovic, Pedro, 66 W Weffort, Francisco, 38, 49 Weinstein, José, 103, 144 Wolfe, Marshall, 38, 72, 73 Z Zapata, Francisco, 56, 66 Zemelman, Hugo, 49, 56, 66, 146