Brazilian Social Thought As Global Sociology? Challenging the Hegemonic Imagination of Modernity from the Margins

Notwithstanding the long tradition of social thinkers who produced a massive amount of works dedicated to explain social life under modern conditions, Brazilian sociologists are most commonly perceived as little more than subsidiary to the hegemonic centers of the West. Given their peripheral position in the world order, it would be natural for them to abide by the programs and cognitive tools designed in Europe and North America. Such an arguably passive adherence to alien parameters would be furthered by the modest circumstances of research institutions in Brazil, a hindrance to the local progress of science. The end result of this intricate combination of factors would be a sort of failed version of a “Global North” standpoint, captive to theories disconnected from their own realities. My paper intends to defy this general diagnosis by revisiting the formulations of Caio Prado Junior (1907-1990), a prestigious social thinker who paved the way for a quite productive thread of investigation in Brazilian sociology. I contend that instead of merely reproducing, with minor modifications, the hegemonic perceptions of modernity, his works constitute an alternative source of images of social life under modern conditions of existence. What I mean to suggest is that, while striving to respond to the challenges posed by a scenario largely viewed as foreign to modernity, Prado Junior put to the test an alternative set of analytical parameters that, in the end of the day, are useful to grasp the living situations of a wide variety of nonconformist contemporaneous experiences – namely, non-secularized world views, de-differentiated social dynamics, public-private entanglements, de-centered subjectivities and culture-nature ties of cooperation. In this case, one can legitimately contend that rather than a crippled version of a Global North scientific perspective, Brazilian sociology offers some promising hints for a critical and counter hegemonic understanding of modernity.