The Reception of Latin American Dependency Theories in European Sociology during the Cold War

The dependency theories configured the Latin American approach to the social sciences with the greatest transregional circulation in both the south-south and south-north directions and became – from the sixties until the end of the eighties – a relevant argumentative support for sociological debates. The two central breaks shaping the long-term transregional epistemological and political impact of dependency theories had to do with the construction of an idea of Latin America outside the modernizing teleological horizon of both classical liberalism and Marxism and, in parallel, as more historically aligned as a periphery with the other regions of the Third World than with Europe. The proposal of my presentation is to reconstruct the productive reception of Latin American dependency theories in sociology produced in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and France. I will focus on entangled processes of translation and different forms of reception including application in empirical research, modification and rejection. The aim is to provide an innovative empirical comparative case study regarding the conditions and forms of South-North exchanges within sociology.