Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Gino Germani legitimately stands as one of the founding fathers of academic sociology in Latin America. From the start of his academic career, Germani affirmed the need to overcome the two “anti-positivist” dominant traditions in Latin American social analysis: abstract philosophical speculation and conceptually poor empiricism. To many scholars, Germani was the pioneer and leading representative of structural functionalism and modernization theory in the region. Nevertheless, scholars have often missed the complexity of Germani's work, particularly its rich theoretical eclecticism (including, among other influences, those of Max Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Merton, Freud, Mannheim, and José Medina Echavarría) as well as its innovative empirical studies and comparative historical sociological analyses of Latin American development. In the context of an ideologically polarized Argentina of the 1960s and 1970s, many of his contemporaries, particularly a younger generation of critical Marxian and dependentista scholars, singled him out as a stalwart defender of the capitalist status quo and a reactionary sociologist. However, from an early twenty-first-century post-Cold War perspective, Germani emerges as an advocate of liberal democratic development. Throughout most of his personal and professional life, Germani struggled against what he conceived as the retrograde forces of tradition ... log in or subscribe to read full text