New classics for the new science – re-reading the basis of sociology in Ecuador until the 1950s

ABSTRACT

Professional sociology in Ecuador started with the first chair in sociology in 1915. This led to a series of foundational texts during the 1920s and 30s that sought to define what sociology is while applying it to core aspects of Ecuadorian society. While this time was – in the Global North- marked by a growing centralization on the theories of Durkheim and Weber, the Ecuadorian sociologists preferred other thinkers in order to understand society. The result was a mixture of different theories that were not always clearly articulated but did sustain the first relatively coherent sociological readings of Ecuadorian society. This text will shed light on how the first professional sociology in Ecuador used the classics of sociology in a particular way to build local sociology. The focus will be on the four most relevant sociological thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, Agustín Cueva Sáenz, Ángel Modesto Paredes, Víctor Gabriel Garcés, and Luis Bossano. They worked with Tarde, Worms, Durkheim, and some German, US-American, and Latin American authors. The creation of the first School for Sociology in the 1960s meant a break from this tradition that has not been reflected adequately until today.

RESUMO

A sociologia profissional no Equador começou com a primeira cadeira em sociologia, em 1915. Isto levou a uma série de textos fundacionais durante os anos 1920 e 30 que procuraram definir o que é sociologia enquanto a aplicavam a aspectos centrais da sociedade equatoriana. Enquanto esta época foi – no Norte Global – marcada por uma crescente centralização nas teorias de Durkheim e Weber, os sociólogos equatorianos preferiram outros pensadores a fim de entender a sociedade. O resultado foi uma mistura de diferentes teorias que nem sempre foram claramente articuladas, mas sustentaram as primeiras leituras sociológicas relativamente coerentes da sociedade equatoriana. Este texto esclarecerá como a primeira sociologia profissional no Equador utilizou os clássicos da sociologia de uma forma particular para construir a sociologia local. O foco será nos quatro pensadores sociológicos mais relevantes da primeira metade do século XX, Agustín Cueva Sáenz, Ángel Modesto Paredes, Víctor Gabriel Garcés e Luis Bossano. Eles trabalharam com Tarde, Worms, Durkheim e alguns autores alemães, norte-americanos e latino-americanos. A criação da primeira Escola de Sociologia nos anos 60 significou uma ruptura com esta tradição que não foi refletida adequadamente até hoje.

RESUMEN

La sociología profesional en Ecuador se inició con la primera cátedra de sociología en 1915. Esto dio lugar a una serie de textos fundacionales durante las décadas de 1920 y 1930 que buscaban definir qué es la sociología y aplicarla a aspectos centrales de la sociedad ecuatoriana. Mientras esta época estuvo marcada – en el Norte Global – por una creciente centralización en las teorías de Durkheim y Weber, los sociólogos ecuatorianos prefirieron otros pensadores para entender la sociedad. El resultado fue una mezcla de diferentes teorías que no siempre fueron claramente articuladas pero que sustentaron las primeras lecturas sociológicas relativamente coherentes de la sociedad ecuatoriana. Este texto arrojará luz sobre cómo la primera sociología profesional en Ecuador utilizó los clásicos de la sociología de manera particular para construir la sociología local. Se centrará en los cuatro pensadores sociológicos más relevantes de la primera mitad del siglo XX, Agustín Cueva Sáenz, Ángel Modesto Paredes, Víctor Gabriel Garcés y Luis Bossano, quienes trabajaron con Tarde, Worms, Durkheim y algunos autores alemanes, estadounidenses y latinoamericanos. La creación de la primera Escuela de Sociología en los años 60 supuso una ruptura con esta tradición que no se ha reflejado adecuadamente hasta la actualidad.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology
• canon
• classics
• Spencer
• Tarde

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Sociologia
• cânone
• clássicos
• Spencer
• Tarde

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Sociología
• canon
• clásicos
• Spencer
• Tarde

1. Introduction

Academic sociology was created in Ecuador in the second decade of the twentieth century, several decades after the neighboring countries Colombia and Peru (Albornoz 2022, 163–64). It was in 1915 that the first sociology chairs appeared at the four universities of the country at that time, most noticeable and productive at the Central University of Ecuador in Quito. With this, the need to define this new discipline arose. Unlike other countries, Ecuador had no sociological tradition before the last years of the nineteenth century. Due to the heavy influence of a radically Catholic conservativism around Gabriel García Moreno, president on several occasions between 1860 and 1875, texts on liberalism, sociology, and positivism were forbidden in Ecuador, and the corresponding debates and authors were systematically excluded (Albornoz 2022, 164–67). This is why the question of what classical authors and theories would define sociology was more urgent and more visible than in other places where this selection happened over a long period of time. Sociology in Ecuador was created by a few people who needed to provide reasons why they were using this theory and not that other. However, the legitimation was not so different from modern-day canonizations – it was also about functionalist, historicist, and humanist justifications. The new classics had to be able to integrate sociology as a discipline, play a relevant role in defining sociology, and offer texts of a high intrinsic value (Silver et al. 2022, 288). This affects sociological research and introductory courses (Silver et al. 2022, 289). Both are institutionalized in organizations that produce rules of how research and teaching have to happen (Shils 1970, 763). The construction of one defined canon of sociology was tied to professional positions that allowed some people – members of cultural organizations, professors of sociology – to prevent the construction of competing canons (Holzhauser 2021, 100). As the canon survives its creators, it is a way to define an academic discipline for a long time and independently from the creators themselves (Holzhauser 2021, 115).

This tradition was formed in Ecuador during a complicated time. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the old classics were left behind in global sociology, and the new canon still needed to be established. Furthermore, while references to nineteenth-century social thought were obligatory (Shils 1970, 760), this pre-classic sociology had no clear canon beyond general references to Comte or Darwin (Connell 1997, 1513). There was no defined canon that the first professional sociologists could simply adapt in Ecuador but rather an encyclopedic view on the discipline and a pragmatic use of theoretical references (Connell 1997, 1514). This is why the establishment of sociology through the first sociologists in Ecuador is to be considered an act of selecting relevant references and, thus, creating a canon in a context where the treatment of references was less strict than nowadays (Shils 1970, 762). It is striking that the founders, as defined by Shils (1970, 766), are mostly absent in this enterprise. Tönnies, Pareto, and Max Weber are entirely ignored, Durkheim is used as a “punching bag” (Connell 1997, 1514), and Simmel is only introduced by some members of a second generation during the 1920s and 1930s. This is also related to the limited availability of Spanish translations due to a rather philosophical approach by the relevant publishing houses in Spain, excluding many of today’s classics until the 1940s (Asún Escartín 1982).

The attempt to trace the construction of a canon of sociology in the periphery and without direct contact with the debates on a global level seeks to contribute to the construction of a non-hegemonic sociology that takes into account the particular conditions of doing sociology in the Global South (Dufoix and Macé 2019, 119–20) like the impossibility to produce big volumes of social theory as the classics of the Global North used to do (Go 2020, 94). This text aims to further the possibility of overcoming the epistemic exclusion of modern sociology, allowing a “transformative epistemic pluralism” (Go 2020, 91) that helps to open up canonization. Instead of understanding everything beyond the dominant Northern canon as defective, alternative canons like the Ecuadorian one can offer different perspectives on social reality and different readings of shared conceptual references that contextualize the Northern canon and allow to break with some exclusionary effects of hegemonic canonization.

The canon created by early Ecuadorian sociologists needs to be understood as three independent yet interrelated elements: authors, theories, and topics. In what follows, the independence and interrelation of those elements will become clear. In Ecuadorian sociology, as elsewhere, not all possible authors are used, not all concepts of a given author are applied, and the adaptation of a given author and his concepts does not imply an adaptation of the topics he considers important. The canon of sociology in Ecuador will be revised in two moments in time, divided here into two chapters: the first generation between 1910 and the early 1930s, and the second generation of sociologists between the 1930s and the 1950s and 1960s. In each case, their conceptual developments are embedded in institutional settings. The relationship between those generations is one of teachers and students. Note that the pioneers of Ecuadorian sociology were all well-off men of the elite, lawyers, most of them close to the Liberal Party, and all held high government positions at least once. Until the 1960s, all university positions in sociology were part-time, albeit well-paid. This excludes the proletarian sociology that developed simultaneously, studied by scholars like César Albornoz and Valeria Coronel. After the second generation, a sharp break and reconstruction of a radically different and Marxist sociology happens. Another canon is established, and women sociologists appear for the first time in the mid-1970s with Jessica Ehlers and Bertha García.

2. The references of early sociology in Ecuador

Before the first chair of sociology was created at the Central University of Ecuador in Quito in 1915, only a few intellectuals worked with sociological texts. This is why Alfredo Espinosa Tamayo, a medical doctor from Guayaquil, is considered a pioneer of sociology in Ecuador. His posthumous book (Espinosa Tamayo 1979), published in 1918, is a sharp-tongued and polemical revision of the most diverse aspects of Ecuadorian society and is especially critical towards the elites and their inability and unwillingness to lead the country. However, he does not apply sociological theories at all, even if he mentions Spencer, Ward, Giddings, Tarde, and others in the final chapter. Since the first years of the 1900s, some law students at the Central University of Ecuador in Quito had already written their thesis on sociological topics or using sociological theories (Albornoz 2022, 175–77; Roig 1979, 65). Through them, we know that Spencer, Giddings, Comte, Tarde, Gumplowicz, Durkheim, Le Bon, and Worms were known in Ecuador, even if they were usually understood in a rather psychological manner and mainly from the position of Spanish krausismo (Albornoz 2022, 191–92; García Ortiz 1945, 148; Roig 1979, 68–72). It should be noted that only a few books by those authors were present at the library of the Central University, notably Gumplowicz and Tarde. So, we can assume that privately owned texts were constantly exchanged between students and professors at the law department.

It was only with the first sociological publication of Agustín Cueva Sáenz, chair of sociology in Quito, between 1915 and 1931, that a coherent set of mandatory references was established. In 1915, he participated in an ongoing debate in the journal of a cultural organization, the Juridical-Literary Society. In this debate, the semi-feudal institution of concertaje – a form of bonded labor based on accumulating debts that affected the indigenous population living and working on haciendas – was criticized. The first take by Quevedo (1913) was defined by a positivistic reading of Marx and Engels. Yet, it was only with the contribution of Cueva Sáenz that sociological theories were systematically employed in order to understand this phenomenon. For him, the central perspective on this topic was national unity and the possibility “to harmonize the ethnic elements of our nationality” (Cueva Sáenz 1915, 32). He saw concertaje as the main hindrance to this. Cueva Sáenz rejected the biologistic racism of his time, represented by Gobineau or Gumplowicz, in favor of a more culturalist take on ethnic difference where “race is simply a product of history and environment.” (Cueva Sáenz 1915, 47). Thus, the assimilation of different ethnic groups into one nationality is possible and actually an idée force in the sense of Fouillée (Cueva Sáenz 1915, 42). However, nothing was done to further the integration of the indigenous population, hence, limiting “the ability to imitate and absorb the models of social heritage” (Cueva Sáenz 1915, 48) mainly due to the exclusion of indigenous persons from the economy. The effect of these constraints was a delay in the formation of national unity (Cueva Sáenz 1915, 50). The fact that the salaries of rural workers did not increase despite a growing demand was proof of those “artificial barriers” (Cueva Sáenz 1915, 51).

In his answer, Quevedo shifts to a Spencerian take on the issue, demanding the study of the laws of social reality to adequately understand and be able to change the situation of the indigenous population and the broader mechanisms of servitude within Ecuadorian society (Quevedo 1916). Cueva Sáenz himself would retake the issue in even more Spencerian terms. In a speech held in 1920, he understood society as “a true spiritual organism” (Cueva Sáenz 1985, 66) defined by solidarity and morals and adapting to its physical, economic, and spiritual environment (Cueva Sáenz 1985, 67). In this sense, the colonial institution of the Real Audiencia has to be understood as a creator of national cohesion.

Thus, this debate established a powerful reading of national history and ethnicity and the primary references to be used. Society was understood as something similar to an organism that develops following fixed rules. This conception would remain stable until several decades later. The explicitly Spencerian take led Cueva Sáenz and Quevedo to a political conclusion: the need to abolish imprisonment for unpaid debts, something achieved a few years later.

Cueva Sáenz introduced US American sociologist Franklin Henry Giddings in Ecuador with his second sociological publication. Here, his understanding of society is marked by the idea of progress following natural laws of social evolution (Cueva Sáenz 1919a, 19). He follows Spencer closely with his concept of forces or energies that define the inorganic, the organic, the psychological, and finally, the social level. This implies the necessity of a psychological reading of society, just as Giddings promises with his theory of consciousness of kind (Cueva Sáenz 1919a, 20). This concept, developed in his books Principles of Sociology and Inductive Sociology, explains the “energy that produces human solidarity” (Cueva Sáenz 1919a, 23) that defines all other motives of social organization and, thus, allows to “determine the elementary social fact” (Cueva Sáenz 1919a, 22). Consciousness of kind starts in the individual mind and allows the recognition of other human beings as similar. Giddings follows Spencer in understanding social aggregates as primarily formed through external conditions (Cueva Sáenz 1919a, 22). The identity of those external stimuli defines similar reactions in human activity (Cueva Sáenz 1919a, 24). The result is an instinctive organic sympathy between human beings exposed to the same stimuli that turns into reflexive sympathy as human intelligence becomes involved. This latter “intensifies the collective psyche” (Cueva Sáenz 1919a, 25) of a given group of people. In the second part, he presents Giddings’ reflections on political parties that consist of a half-unconscious majority and a conscious minority. The latter group is more volatile but can regulate the party around transcendental concepts (Cueva Sáenz 1919b, 70–72). Interestingly, the other sociologists in Ecuador did not receive this last part at all. The same happened to the methods championed by Giddings, most notably statistics (Chriss 2006, 125). While Cueva Sáenz gave at least one course in statistics (Cueva Sáenz 1916), neither he nor any of his students worked with statistical methods.

However, this canon was installed at least as much through classes as it was through publications. While Cueva Sáenz was the most productive writer amongst the sociology professors of the 1910s and 1920s, it was mainly his classes that influenced his students and Ecuadorian sociology as such. Some of his students that turned into sociologists themselves remember his vast knowledge and social compromise as well as his focus on French sociology, especially Durkheim and Tarde, completed with Spencer, Roberty, and Ward, and some Latin American sociologists like Bunge, Ramos Mejía, and Ingenieros (Bossano 1948, 5; García Ortiz 1945, 147). A teaching plan from his classes in 1918 shows that Durkheim, Spencer, Fouillée, and Sales y Ferré are mentioned by name, and concepts by Wundt, Ward, Giddings, and Tarde appear (Cueva Sáenz 1918).

The central references for early Ecuadorian sociology were the notoriously individualistic Spencer and thinkers close to the International Institute of Sociology (IIS)¹, created in 1893 by René Worms (Schuerkens 1996, 7). This institute was the place of encounter of early global sociology and included several sociologists that would remain important until today. Nevertheless, it did not provide a further agreement on how to do sociology beyond some essential points connected to positivism and political reform (Geiger 1975, 238). While Worms himself is mentioned but hardly used, Ward, Tarde, and Le Bon are influential in the Institute (Schuerkens 1996, 19) and classics of the new Ecuadorian sociology. This is interesting because the Ecuadorian sociologists had no connections to the IIS – instead, they would co-found the competition, the International Sociological Association, in 1950 (Campuzano Arteta 2005, 439). Only one relatively marginal sociologist, Humberto García Ortiz, did engage with IIS and had access to its journal. In any case, the early Ecuadorian sociologists agreed with the IIS in a philosophical and positivistic conception of sociology and its relation to social reform and scientific progress (Schuerkens 1996, 20). This early international sociology was generally engaged with the idea of moral betterment and political reform in the context of classical liberalism (Connell 1997, 1528).

With these first texts and classes in sociology, the binary structure of sociology (Go 2020, 83), especially the opposition of – and conflict between (Shils 1970, 801) – mass and elite, and knowledge and ignorance – all those at the same time legitimating mechanisms for the sociologists themselves – was present. In each case, this binary structure moves around the general idea of evolution (Shils 1970, 798–99), defined, in the Ecuadorian case, especially by Spencer but including references to Darwin and social evolution in other authors. This “evolutionary narrative” (Connell 1997, 1517) meant an obligatory – and mostly rather lengthy – inclusion of a general historical revision of the development of a given phenomenon that was not speculation as Connell has it, but instead was based on the products of early professional historiography (Collins 1997, 1559). This historical embedding follows the idea of “moral, intellectual, and material improvement of society” (Connell 1997, 1519–20) in the context of a conception of social evolution that naturalizes differences caused by colonialism (Connell 1997, 1530). However, while early Ecuadorian sociology is defined by this general idea of progress based on historical data, it does not openly mention the binary opposition of metropole and colonial other as Connell claims for US-American sociology.

This problem is reflected in academic sociology in Ecuador, namely by Belisario Quevedo. He puts sociology into relation with the philosophy of history and historiography. For him, the idea of progress is connected to Hegel and his take on human development as a “process of self-realization” (Quevedo 1917, 145). This idea is taken over by Spencer and his followers like Gumplowicz, Giddings, Tarde, and Ward, in the sense that, within social evolution, “the social process is explained by the growth of the individual value” (Quevedo 1917, 150). This leads him to criticize the inherent Eurocentrism of the sociology of his time and especially of the version of history that is used for evolutionary arguments:

The history of the white race in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, and modern Europe has been taken for the history of mankind, and on this partial basis, it has been attempted to erect the edifice of the philosophy of the human race. Without knowing history, it has been attempted to penetrate the idea of it, or by deducing from a transcendental system the historical idea it has been attempted with arbitrary violence of facts to accommodate to it the human process. (Quevedo 1917, 148)

3. Continuation and disruption in the second generation of Ecuadorian sociologists

Cueva Sáenz ceased to publish sociological texts in 1920, and Quevedo died in 1921. With this, the field was open for the second generation of Ecuadorian sociologists, all students of Cueva Sáenz and familiar with the work of Quevedo. The first, with more than 6,000 published pages (Quintero 1988, 12), and the most productive young sociologist of this second generation, is Ángel Modesto Paredes. In an influential early text of the mid-1920s, The Social Consciousness, he defines how he connects to the work of his teachers. For Paredes, sociology needs to take into account psychology, against Durkheim, who focuses on social facts as “a reality that is outside of us” (Paredes 1988, 200). In this sense, Durkheim understands the social as above and beyond the individual and establishes an absolute difference between the social and the psychological order. This take is reductionist for Paredes; for him, it is instead about “forces that make up or decompose into energy systems within society” (Paredes 1988, 203). This Spencerian view makes it necessary to consider biological and chemical elements and, above all, psychological forces (Paredes 1988, 205). In this sense, Paredes contradicts Durkheim. He accepts that the human being “is the fruit of collective living” (Paredes 1988, 205) but sees social coercion as limited by internal determination and individual acceptance. Paredes goes against his teacher Cueva Sáenz in the idea that race, in the biological sense, defines how people relate to their environment (Paredes 1988, 212). Under those circumstances, Tarde allows studying the psychological energies and the inter-mental processes that are the basis of any collective social action. With this, a psychological sociology becomes necessary (Paredes 1988, 214) that goes beyond Tarde and his focus on the inter-mental level with innovation and imitation to include the intra-mental level. It is here where biological and social heritage comes into play as the individuals react to nature, producing hereditary mental similarity (Paredes 1988, 223). The result is the formation of an organic sympathy that is defined, in the first place, by environmental conditions but turns into a properly social spiritual sympathy and, finally, following Giddings, into a consciousness of kind (Paredes 1988, 224–28). In this sense, and including the theories of Ward and Worms, every social act is both individual and social, and defined by organic mechanisms that condition the organic, psychological, and social levels. However, while Paredes insists on the tight relationship between those three levels, he highlights with Roberty and Spencer the autonomy of the superorganic level (Paredes 1988, 229). Paredes would remain true to his ideas and understand social classes with the same framework still in his last sociological book in the 1950s (Paredes 1953).

The social consciousness was the only book of early Ecuadorian sociology reviewed outside the country. The quite destructive review by Guillaume-Léonce Duprat, editor of the journal and close to Worms, appeared in the IIS journal Revue Internationale de Sociologie.² For Duprat, even if the book is full of references and quotations, Paredes lacks knowledge of the relevant authors (Duprat 1928, 89). The takes on social consciousness “are presented from an intermediate point of view between that of Durkheim and that of Tarde, closer to that of R. Worms and Roberty” (Duprat 1928, 90). The organicist take of Paredes, especially, leads to confusion. Not only is it understood as an influence by Worms and not Spencer, but it poses further questions: if the social is defined by the psychological and biological, does it still make sense to talk about society as something other than an accumulation of individuals? Paredes answers this review in a short article, clarifying his theoretical stance. He repeats his focus not on concrete social facts but the forces behind them, including psychology (Paredes 1928, 37–38). While he accepts a certain closeness to Roberty, he rejects any relation to Worms, who is not even an organicist in the sense that the social is understood as a work of nature and not individual will (Paredes 1928, 40–41).

This misplaced exchange of ideas reveals how some classics were discussed in early Ecuadorian sociology. The criticism of Durkheim and his concept of social facts corresponded with his reception in global sociology until the 1930s (Connell 1997, 1514). But in the concrete case of Paredes, his limited reception of Durkheimian ideas is connected to the absence of books by this author during this time. Beyond The Rules of Sociological Method and one short later text (Durkheim 1922), Durkheim was unavailable to Ecuadorian sociologists. This is why the application of his theory in books like Suicide – considered as a necessary implementation of the paradigm (Geiger 1975, 242) – was completely ignored, and his theory considered as mechanistic and abstract (Quintero 1988, 22). This leads Paredes to stick to Tarde and Spencer against Durkheim, reaffirming the IIS version of sociology (Schuerkens 1996, 19). Spencer helps to introduce a conception of socially minded individuals capable of altruism and, therefore, able to change society (Offer 2015, 338). However, society is not based on the individual will but on natural development that needs to be studied in order to be able to govern it – an argument also found in Quevedo (1916). In this sense, there is a correspondence between individual organisms and societies, and the increasing heterogeneity allows for stronger integration (Offer 2015, 339–41). The super-organic evolution of societies happens based on their members’ organic and psychic conditions and in adaptation to their natural environment. As it develops, it changes its environment and its members (Offer 2015, 342–43). This adaptation and its changes are heritable and affect the psychic and organic structure of the members of a given society (Offer 2015, 350). This explains the strong reaction of Paredes against the judgment of Duprat that he was close to Worms. Worms’ “eclectic organicism” (Geiger 1975, 239) lacked the conceptual force and applicability of Spencer's take. Spencer served in early Ecuadorian sociology as a counterweight against the voluntaristic readings of liberalism and the role of providence in the conservative understanding of society. With Spencer, society could be understood as an entity with measurable influences from its members and environment that developed following universal rules. This take allowed to introduce a more complex understanding of the role of the environment – adaptation instead of determination – and to grasp the ethnic differences that define Ecuadorian society as based on heritage in the matrix biology-psychology-society. Tarde is introduced with his theory of innovation and imitation as a way to understand social interaction better. The similarities Spencer explains with adaptation can also be explained with imitation, reintroducing individual will. At the same time, the separation of innovation and imitation gives the elite, in general, and the sociologists, in particular, the role of genial inventors that influence the masses (Geiger 1975, 240) – just like they saw themselves and were seen in the university, they were educators of the nation towards constant self-improvement (Campuzano Arteta 2005, 413). Tarde’s “rigorously individualistic and antideterministic sociology” (Geiger 1975, 240–41) allowed for more concrete explanations of individual behavior. With this, the early Ecuadorian sociologists could easily explain phenomena on both the macro and the micro levels highlighting different theoretical approaches in order to describe different elements of the social.

Paredes is considered by both his contemporaries (Bossano 1948; García Ortiz 1945, 150) and later generations (Quintero 1988) as a pioneer of sociology in Ecuador as he was able to apply in his many publications a vast theoretical knowledge to problems of Ecuadorian society such as ethnic diversity or inequality. However, Paredes worked most of his life as a law professor and diplomat; he was a professor of sociology only for a few years in the 1930s.

This canon was challenged only once by Víctor Gabriel Garcés, a sociology professor at the Central University, for a short time in the early 1930s (Bossano 1948, 6; García Ortiz 1945, 150). In his doctoral thesis, based on an ethnography of the indigenous population in the province of Imbabura, he shows a broad knowledge of the sociological and anthropological theories of his time, including the classics established by Cueva Sáenz, Quevedo, and Paredes. However, Garcés rejects the organicism of Spencer as simplistic (Garcés 1932a, 163). Instead, he connects belonging to the same group and piece of land with a process of reciprocal influences in the sense of Georg Simmel that ultimately lead to mutual sympathy (Garcés 1932a, 164). Simmel is combined with the other established classics, namely Tarde, Ward, and Giddings. The situation of the indigenous population presents itself thus as defined by a social and moral distance that does not allow reciprocal action and imitation and hinders the formation of sympathies (Garcés 1932b, 148). They are excluded from the play of reciprocal influence and cannot enter a broader socialization that would include all people in Ecuador (Garcés 1932c, 542) – something that correlates with the specific attitude of the middle classes that, again following Simmel, reject any approach from lower classes to be able to get closer to the higher classes (Garcés 1932c, 558). Garcés was even able to recruit students for his take on society. They would publish synopses of the works of Simmel or strictly Simmelian approaches to society in local journals (Ávila Garrido 1933) – however, without relevant continuation. As Garcés was forced to move on to another chair and then leave the university altogether, the Simmelian school in Ecuador was cut short. The only exception is Humberto García Ortiz, professor of sociology at different departments of the Central University between the 1930s and 1960s. He uses Worms, Tarde, Simmel, and several more up-to-date sociologists close to the IIS, like Sombart, Tönnies, and von Wiese (García Ortiz 1945, 149; Schuerkens 1996, 19). While García Ortiz has a considerable conceptual creativity, the core of his proposal forms the idea of system, derived from Simmel (García Ortiz 1942a, 213), and the notion of a geographically based culture, taken from Spengler (García Ortiz 1942b, 358). With those two inspirations, he traces the history of human civilization as a series of changes from system to system following centrifugal and centripetal forces. Yet, precisely this creativity and his connection to the Socialist Party left him without influence in academic sociology in Ecuador.

This is especially interesting as Ecuador was one of the first countries on the continent to discuss Simmel, especially connected to the role of women (García 1925) and the inherent conflicts within culture (García 1927). Texts like “The Conflict in Modern Culture,” translated only a few years earlier (Vernik 2020, 9), arrived quickly in Ecuador. However, the already closed canon of sociology at this time made connections to philosophy, in the case of García, and to cultural anthropology, in the case of Garcés, necessary. Therefore, Simmel could not be introduced into Ecuadorian sociology beyond a marginal role – unlike other countries of the continent, like Argentina, Brazil, or Peru (Vernik 2020, 10–11).

Luis Bossano, professor of sociology between 1937 and the 1960s, had a pragmatic take on sociology. Most of his texts are rather descriptive; the connection to Spencerian concepts around the idea of both organic and spiritual energy remains on a general level (Bossano 1933, 308–9). However, it is interesting that Bossano already early on goes against the racist takes on society that he identifies with an imperialism of German inspiration (Bossano 1933, 303). A book he wrote for his classes (Bossano 1941) and the classes themselves (Bossano 1943) offer a general panorama of sociological theories guided by metaparadigms without presenting his own position. In this, Bossano sticks mainly to the theories he had studied with Cueva Sáenz, such as Spencer and Durkheim, giving Comte relatively much space and including some more contemporary authors like Pareto (Bossano 1941, 39) – this lack of actualization also could be found in the University of Cuenca at the same time (Barsallo 1942). Bossano himself blames the reduced space of only one course in sociology that necessarily leads to a limitation to a general introduction (Bossano 1948, 6–7). However, still in the 1940s, Comte and Spencer were the most relevant classics for Ecuadorian sociology. This only changed with one of Bossano’s last texts. Unlike Paredes, who still in the 1950s would stick to Spencer’s writings about professions in order to understand the formation of social classes and would include contemporary sociologists such as Alfredo Poviña and Gino Germani only to criticize their takes as superficial and materialistic (Paredes 1953, 14), Bossano does actualize his approach. He understands the formation of mass society from a Malthusian point of view as a resource problem caused by industrialization, urbanization, and access to medicine (Bossano 1962, 9) that translates into a political problem as the mass becomes a stable factor of politics (Bossano 1962, 10–12). It changes how political parties work. Following the contemporary Mexican sociologist Lucio Mendieta y Núñez, they condense opinions in principles held against the state (Bossano 1962, 13). In this sense, political parties are divided, generally due to intelligence and preparation, into a leading group and a mass of followers. Note that with this, Bossano repeats what Cueva Sáenz wrote about Giddings – however, he does not mention either of those authors. A complex set of mechanisms within the given party binds the two groups together (Bossano 1962, 18). Yet, with modern mass society, politics develops into a “resource for personal ascent” (Bossano 1962, 19). This leads, following Wright Mills, to a demagogic political style that tends to trick the masses and not to fulfill the promises given – a major hindrance for the development of political parties (Bossano 1962, 25). Yet, even with this modernization in his references, Bossano sticks in this first description of populism in Ecuador – what less than a decade later would become a significant research topic – to one classic that Cueva Sáenz introduced: “The power of suggestion spreads in increasing waves with maximum force and some forms of imitation of those pointed out by Gabriel Tarde consolidate the root and the outline of a collective conscience.” (Bossano 1962, 33) The only possibility to counteract this is that the intellectual elite furthers the understanding of human rights in the social consciousness.

What could have been the institutionalization of Ecuadorian sociology in the 1950s, with the third conference of the Latin American Association of Sociology in Quito in 1955 (Campuzano Arteta 2005, 439) and the first Ecuadorian sociological conference in Cuenca in 1957, was, in fact, a step back. The conceptually refined debates of 1930s had been left behind, the new faces did not go beyond mere descriptions of society, mainly along the lines of inequality or on the censuses of the 1950s, and the old ones, like Paredes, Bossano, and Garcés proved unable to introduce new topics or references into the debate. Only a few years later, they would retire and leave no legacy, prompting the introduction of a completely different Marxist sociology in the late 1960s.

4. Conclusion

When academic sociology was established in Ecuador, it quickly formed a fixed canon. Of the diversity of pre-classics available then, Spencer and Tarde were naturally used as primary references to understand Ecuadorian society. Other authors, such as Giddings, Ward, and Gumplowicz, were integrated in order to strengthen the explanation of specific social phenomena. Historicist and humanist forms of legitimation (Silver et al. 2022, 288) are present and comments on the role played by the pre-classics employed in the development of sociology as a discipline (the historicist form of legitimation) as well as the genius of Spencer, Tarde, and the like (the humanist form) are frequent. However, the most relevant form of legitimation is the functionalist in the sense that a sociological theory derives its value from the explanatory capability it develops applied to Ecuadorian society. The canon chosen was self-explanatory: Spencer and Tarde offered concepts to understand what was happening in Ecuador in a way that was consistent with how the early sociologists understood themselves and what academic sociology should be doing. Their combination excludes largely takes that would contradict this enterprise. This is why biologist racism is mostly absent, but culturalist racism prevails in the sense that one aspect of national unity would be cultural adaptation for the minorities that during that time were, in fact, majorities, namely, the indigenous population. This naturalization of certain takes as obviously apt to do the work made renovations especially complicated. Why include Simmel if you can explain the same thing with the thinkers already known?

This implies that Connell is wrong in assuming there was no canonical view on sociology before the 1920s (Connell 1997, 1514). This might be true in the US, but it is certainly not in Ecuador. In Ecuador, “a shared language” (Connell 1997, 1544) of sociology has existed since the 1910s. The fact that there was no break in the sociological canon until the 1960s can also explain why the US-inspired empirical sociology could never develop in Ecuador, unlike other Latin American countries. This position out of time of Ecuadorian sociology meant that an engagement in global debates was never actively searched. Instead, it was about explaining Ecuadorian society from Ecuadorian universities and with connections to the Ecuadorian state. The fact that transnational networks broke down during the first world war, that the optimism in progress came to a halt (Connell 1997, 1532), or that it was now different people – actually, the third generation of global sociology – that were in charge, did not affect Ecuadorian sociology at all.

The canon of early Ecuadorian sociology is complete and coherent in the sense that it allowed sociologists to do what they did as sociologists. It produced relevant research that was understandable within and beyond the sociological debates and able to impact politics, culture, and other debates. And it was marked by alternative readings of some of the classics of the global sociological canon. This is why a revision of early Ecuadorian sociology could allow for a deeper criticism of the processes of canonization in an unequal world, as well as reintroducing creative readings of society that are forgotten now.

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Philipp Altmann

Philipp Altmann, has studies in sociology, cultural anthropology, and Spanish philology at the University of Trier and the Autonomous University of Madrid (2001–2007). He finished his doctorate in sociology at the Free University of Berlin in 2013 with a work on the decolonial aspects of the discourse of the indigenous movement in Ecuador. Since March 2015, he is Professor of Sociological Theory at the Universidad Central del Ecuador. He works on how ideas spread, on the intersection of discourse analysis, history of concepts, and sociology of knowledge. At the moment, he is studying the diffusion of the political concepts of the indigenous movement in Ecuador – Buen Vivir/Sumak Kawsay at the center – and the development of Ecuadorian sociology in relation to global sociology and other national/local traditions. His research interests are: indigenous and social movements, decoloniality, identity, social exclusion, systems theory, political sociology, sociology of science.

Notes

1 Thanks to Stephen Turner for pointing this out to me.

2 With thanks to an Anne-Sophie Nussbaumer Schmutz of the Bibliothèque de Genève for finding this text and sending it to me.