Seminal ideas for old and new problems in Latin America: José Medina Echavarría and his legacy

ABSTRACT

José Medina Echavarría is known as one of the most important sociologists of the twentieth century in Latin America. During his exile in México, Puerto Rico, and Chile, he developed vast intellectual networks that contributed to the complex process of institutionalization of sociology in our countries. In this paper, we explain how this was possible through new editorials, translations on social science topics, seminars, debates, and the foundation of important departments of Sociology. These included a double contribution of Medina Echavarría: a reflection on sociology that required a precise conceptual language, and what he called vertical and horizontal theories. And second, his guiding efforts with the critical analysis of the modernization processes in this continent, after the Second World War. We analyze in both these contributions the clear legacy of Weber’s theory of action and his economic sociology.

RESUMO

José Medina Echavarría é conhecido como um dos sociólogos mais importantes do século XX na América Latina. Durante seu exílio no México, Porto Rico e Chile, desenvolveu amplas redes intelectuais que contribuíram para o complexo processo de institucionalização da sociologia. Neste artigo, explicamos como isso foi possível por meio de novos editoriais, traduções em ciências sociais, seminários, debates e a criação de importantes Faculdades de Sociologia. Neste texto, analisa-se a dupla contribuição de Medina Echavarría: sua reflexão sobre a importância dos conceitos e teorias verticais e horizontais. Em segundo lugar, são analisadas as críticas aos processos de modernização neste continente após a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Em ambos os temas, será examinado o claro legado da teoria de ação e da sociologia econômica de Max Weber.

RESUMEN

José Medina Echavarría es conocido como uno de los sociólogos más importantes del siglo XX en América Latina. Durante su exilio en México, Puerto Rico y Chile, desarrolló redes intelectuales amplias que contribuyeron en el complejo proceso de institucionalización de la sociología. Lo anterior tuvo lugar a través de nuevas editoriales, traducciones en ciencias sociales, seminarios, debates y la creación de importantes Facultades de Sociología. En este texto se analiza la doble aportación de Medina Echavarría: su reflexión sobre la importancia de los conceptos y las teorías verticales y horizontales. En segundo lugar se analizan las críticas a los procesos de modernización en este continente, después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. En ambos temas se analizará el claro legado de la teoría de acción y la sociología económica de Max Weber.

KEYWORDS:

• José Medina Echavarría
• Latin American sociology
• economic sociology

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• José Medina Echavarría
• sociologia latino-americana
• sociologia econômica

PALABRAS CLAVES:

• José Medina Echavarría
• sociología latinoamericana
• sociología económica

We share a time in which our regime of historicity is focused on the continuous present, with an experience of the past that seems remote, and under a future horizon that is uncertain and risky for the new generations. Under these circumstances, we should ask why it is important to remember the legacy of José Medina Echavarría, considered one of the most outstanding sociologists of the Spanish exile in Latin America.

We believe that the best way to convey the truncated generational transmission of his thought is to formulate some crucial questions for sociology and the social sciences. One of the many aspects of sociological thought lies in conceptual reflection and its ability to represent social events. In this sense, we could ask: How have we conceptually processed the novelties of daily social experience in sociology? To what extent do concepts become anchors, the construction of which defines and fixes our experience of social phenomena, that otherwise is changing constantly? How do we establish our links between inherited intellectual traditions and new experiences to formulate meaningful categories? These and other questions are what allow us to make predecessors like Medina Echavarría a contemporary.

It is in this context that we propose to show how Medina Echavarría has been one of the few who in Ibero-America pointed out crucial dilemmas in theoretical production during the founding stage of the social sciences in countries like Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, providing successive generations a vast intellectual production. To shed light on the previous questions, we only draw from a few argumentative lines by Medina Echavarría. We refer to the foundations of Medina Echavarría’s analytical (theoretical) sociology in the 40s, and the conceptual transition towards economic sociology under the influence of Max Weber during his stay at ECLAC between 1952 and 1977. As we will see, the backdrop for this approach is his conception of sociology as a circumstantial social science and as a concrete social science.

The first section presents Medina Echevarría’s main ideas about sociology as a circumstantial social science, clearly influenced by the philosophy of Ortega and Gasset. This is the starting point to present some elements of his reflection about the problems faced by conceptual elaboration, in a context of accelerating modernization processes in Latin America. In the second part, we show the turns that his theoretical production underwent in the field of economic sociology, between 1952 and 1977. To the extent that Medina Echavarría’s intellectual production stands out for its historicity, the analytical resource that will allow us to point out some distinctive features of his theoretical–conceptual reflection is the experience of historical temporality. In a final balance, we show how Medina Echavarría's ideas led to an understanding of institutional design and development policies, not only as technical problems but of an ethical and cultural nature.

1. Sociology as a circumstantial social science: vertical and horizontal theories

José Medina Echavarría is one of the most recognized sociologists of the Spanish exile in Latin America. His time in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Chile showed various facets as an intellectual, answering to the political, social, economic, and cultural challenges of his time. He was clearly influenced by the crisis of the first modernity, the consequences of the Cold War, and the enormous difficulties of regional modernization projects. As a result of the Spanish Civil War and as a liberal republican, Medina Echavarría experienced a break with the civilizing project that the government headed by Manuel Azaña (1931) established for all of Spain. The ideals of Europeanizing that nation, and looking for solutions to the intellectual, educational, social, and economic lag were cut short by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in 1939. Medina Echavarría was clearly influenced by the legacy of his mentor Adolfo Posada, a precursor of sociology in Spain who undertook editorial projects and translations of seminal works in this discipline. He also laid the foundations for empirical research on the social and economic circumstances of Spain after it’s colonialist past.¹

Medina Echavarría arrived in Mexico in 1939, at a crucial moment for the institutionalization of the social sciences in the region becoming the founder of some of the first schools of field of knowlege in Latin America. He joined La Casa de España en México² where he remained until 1946, collaborating with Alfonso Reyes and Daniel Cosío Villegas in the founding of the Diploma in Social Sciences in 1943. This was a pioneering experiment for other training programs in Mexico and Latin America. In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, national reconstruction, modernization, and the education of an eminently rural population were considered priority issues by intellectual endeavors.

The Spanish sociologist also taught sociology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), published his first works on sociological theory and methodology, and wrote various papers for the Revista Mexicana de Sociología, since its founding in 1939. Perhaps one of the most important contributions was his work as editor of the sociology collection of the editorial and publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica. His goal was to publish in Spanish original works by great thinkers in philosophy, economics, sociology, history, and literature. Founded in 1934 by Cosío Villegas, this cultural project meant access to the ideas of essential authors in Spanish (Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Ferdinand Tönnies, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Thorstein Veblen). Their books nourished the academic programs of degrees in philosophy, law, and economics, in the 40s they nourished the degree in history, and in 1951 the degree in social sciences.³ It took almost 20 years for the academic training in sociology to have its own field at UNAM.⁴ In Mexico and other Latin American countries, the institutionalization of sociology was the consequence of the intertwining between plans and study programs of various social sciences. Likewise, the consolidation of intellectual elites highly critical of the dominant positivist tradition took place and new far-reaching editorial projects were undertaken.⁵ José Medina Echavarría found in this context an ideal ground to give shape to the regenerationist project that had been lost in Spain after the Civil War (1936–1939).

This editorial project gained great impetus from the integration of intellectuals coming from the Spanish exile such as Javier Márquez, Eugenio Imaz, Juan Roura Parella, José Ferrater Mora, Wenceslao Roces, or José Medina Echavarría himself, who led the team of translators for Economy and Society by Max Weber, whose work would be translated for the first time into another language (Spanish) and published in 1943.

Let us remember that Medina Echavarría (1903–1977) was born in Valencia, Spain, trained as a lawyer and specialized in Philosophy of Law. He worked as lecturer at the University of Marburg in 1931. In the following two years, he was awarded a scholarship by the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios in Spain to continue studying at Marburg. Medina Echavarría acquired a deep identification with the historicism and comprehensive sociology of Max Weber.⁶ By 1935, Medina Echavarría showed the reasons for his definitive foray into sociology. He made a strong criticism of the abstract and insufficient character of the philosophy of law to explain the new cultural and sociopolitical coordinates of the European situation. Faced with the crisis of the “philosophical project of modernity,” the organizational forms of social life, and the management of conflict only through the Nation State, Medina Echavarría transmitted in this work what Paul Valery called “an experience of disoriented time.” That is to say, an experience of institutional crisis, of the products of culture and spirit, as well as the dominant anomie in Europe. His book La situación presente de la filosofía jurídica was the starting point for his definition of sociology as a science that dealt with vital reality.⁷

For Medina Echavarría, sociology was faced with an important dilemma: the rationalizing commitment of the first modernity was on crisis after the wars, and the ideals of progress and rationality were deeply broken. Sociology had to identify the effects of the new geopolitical order and the reason why the illustrated values no longer oriented these emerging social relations. After the First World War and the Spanish Civil War, the author raised questions that were central for sociology: Which were the new constellations of forces and social forms of our time? What are the social conditions of our existence? What constitutes the historical foundation of our reality? Medina Echavarría took up Freyer’s definition of sociology as “scientific awareness of a human present.” If life’s radical elements were circumstance and decision, sociology could provide us with rigorous knowledge of our social circumstance, and an understanding of how behind politics there were important decision-making processes and dilemmas around values, such as social justice and liberty. This very Weberian aspect of his thought led to the conception of sociology as a science of vital reality, and also as a concrete social science, that is, historical and circumstantial.

This last statement by Medina Echavarría can be better understood if we think about the experience of temporality itself. He lived through the crisis of western culture for half a century while identifying intellectually with the republican government in Spain (1936–1939). For a sociologist like Medina Echavarría, the values of the past no longer guided modern societies and the post-war present caused stupefaction and acceleration of time; and crises were experienced. The future was, despite everything, a horizon open to action. From there, he derived his concern for spreading the study of the social sciences in Latin America contributing to its institutionalization in Mexico, Puerto Rico and, of course, during his long stay at ECLAC, in Chile. Latin America looked like a new field of opportunities for education, socioeconomic growth, political development and modernization. But the institutionalization of sociology and its consolidation required a deep conceptual and theoretical reflection, as Max Weber suggested when new social phenomena emerged. Medina Echavarría was aware of the social changes that took place after the wars in Europe and some other revolutionary processes in other places like in Mexico, the slow development of Latin American countries and his vital crisis as an emigrated intellectual experiencing emptiness and a certain vital disorientation.

The approach to the crisis as an issue of modernity’s horizon in the mid-twentieth century, and the centrality of Latin America as a region full of unknown social phenomena that required sociological reflection, led Medina Echavarría into social theory as an integrated discourse that concentrates concepts, hypotheses, and statements that enabled the construction of social data from the unknown Latin American population, and their social and economic structures. In his book, Panorama de la sociología contemporánea, Medina Echavarría established an important bond between the sociological tradition from the nineteenth century and the unexplained circumstance of western societies after the wars.

John Dewey, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim were some of the most influential authors in Medina Echavarría’s theoretical analysis. Social theory was defined as a discourse that integrates hypotheses, concepts, and statements about social phenomena.⁸ Following Mannheim, sociology can be classified into systematical or vertical theories that concentrate concepts, that is, the dominant characteristics of phenomena which make social life possible. Vertical theories were characterized by their evolutionary and linear profile, without any consideration of specific circumstances. In other words, these were, in some sense, the weberian sociological ideal types. Then, structural sociology or horizontal theories came from vertical theories and were used to analyze social phenomena in their context, observing their coincidences and limitations. They correspond to what Weber called historical ideal types. Also used for empirical research.

For Medina Echavarría, oriented and significant (rational) social action, like in Weber, was the very heart of sociological analysis. There is a clear influence that comes from Carl Menger’s and Max Weber’s reflections on the necessary consolidation of theory in the social or cultural sciences, as had already happened in other scientific traditions. That is why Weber proposed the ideal types as a special kind of concept that had two types of scope: sociological ideal types and historical ideal types. The former were general and wide categories that were valid in any context, as Medina Echavarría explains in his translation into spanish of fundamental sociological concepts in Economy and Society, Weber’s seminal book. The latter were a heuristic tool that used sociological ideal types considering the specific and circumstantial context. This implied a special use of general sociological concepts in historical contexts.⁹

Medina Echavarría also referred to these theoretical efforts as analytical sociology, following the 1934 The Method of Sociology by Znanieck. The polish sociologist proposed four guiding themes for research: theory of social action, theory of social relations, another on social groups, and the last one about the social constitution of personality. Medina Echavarría added two more issues: social institutions and ecological sociology, that looked at the relation of people and their cultural and natural contexts.¹⁰

The author’s approach to horizontal and vertical theories meant tracing a problem that has not been fully resolved to date: the constant tension between essential theoretical elaboration, in the sense of the Weberian sociological ideal types, and the conformation of other more limited theoretical elaborations, that can be circumstantial but not in the sense of a medium-range theory, the assumptions of which are functionalist.¹¹ This reflection on vertical and horizontal theories was the backdrop for his contribution at ECLAC on the social aspects of development, which took some methodological dimensions of both perspectives.

What underlies Medina Echavarría's discussion about vertical theories (abstract and general) versus horizontal theories is the effort to name, know, understand, and translate ideas and experiences into concepts. For this author, conceptual construction implies a problem that is worth thinking about in our days: conceptualizing allows organizing and guiding the lived experience. Furthermore, conceptualizing also means assuming that these experiences are shaped by the terms in which they are stated.¹² Historical processes such as the crisis of modernity or the novelties of modernization processes in Latin America, were filtered as a type of novel and surprising experience. For this reason, the concepts of nation, sovereignty, political neutrality, nation state, or concepts of movement and acceleration such as modernization and development, were, for Medina Echavarría, categories that kept a wide gap with the reality of the mid-twentieth century. The former had lagged behind the new geopolitical map and the latter still contained a promise for the future.¹³

This author’s diagnosis leads us to understand that conceptual changes are not reduced to a problem of historical semantics. Medina Echavarría clearly understood the gaps between concepts, theories, and situations, hence his inclination for the formulation of new categories and the necessary construction of horizontal, circumstantial theories. Nowadays, this is one of the most important legacies. Medina Echavarría had the opportunity to put his conceptual and theoretical approaches to the test in an unbeatable setting: that of ECLAC at its founding moment, in the mid-twentieth century. The previous approach allows us to address the constant tension between concept and reality, project and results, past experience and horizon.¹⁴

This set of elements allows us to understand why towards the middle of the twentieth century certain categories such as modernization, development, sovereignty, neutrality, state showed significant gaps compared to the post-war reality. The first two concepts contained an expectation of the future that was very open and distant from the Latin American circumstance. The last two concepts no longer enunciated the new geopolitical and socioeconomic framework. For Medina Echavarría, this was not a conflict about the difficulties of enunciating new conditions, but implied thinking about how to order, reflect, and assimilate everything that resulted from an experience of chaos and crisis.

The author’s response was to reconsider the meaning of the social sciences in general and of sociology in particular to propose a renewed conceptualization effort by elaborating, for example, the typology of war, the definition of some fundamental sociological concepts, and the reflection on the cultural conditions in which modernization took place in Latin America. This was the starting point for one of the most interesting contributions of his work: the relevance of an economic sociology as a serious attempt to explain why modernization was not generating the results expected by the ECLAC’s design for this region. Medina Echavarría considered that only a deep comprehension of the rationality of social action, agencies, and contexts could help to understand why socioeconomic development was not what was expected. His economic sociology was a sociological concept, an ideal type and an attempt of a vertical theory that could help understand the structural facts but also agency and significance of social action in Latin American circumstances.

2. The economic sociology of Medina Echavarría: echoes of the legacy of Max Weber

When Medina emigrated from Mexico to Puerto Rico and then to Santiago de Chile, where he arrived in 1952, he already had a solid career in analytical (theoretical) sociology. When he joined ECLAC (founded in 1948) four years later, he faced a complicated context: he was there to provide economists with a sociological perspective understood at first as social aspects of economic development in Latin America. The context was the clear intellectual influence of developmentalist models, permeated by the simplifying classifications of modernization theories, Lazarsfeld’s sociometry, and the analytical universalism of structural functionalism. During his first 10 years at ECLAC, he had to frame his reflections under the functionalist academic predominance. Those were the years in which, when directing the Latin American School of Sociology in the recently founded Flacso, Chile, he resigned due to the uncritical and ahistorical reception of Merton’s functionalism. He didn’t admit quantitative methodology as the exclusive instrument for the construction of indices and data and questioned the abstract and generalizing condition of Parsons’ structural functionalism. Medina Echavarría opposed the emphasis on sociologists’ training only as an expert manipulator of statistical techniques and instruments. He was always in favor of a more critical training in historical and comprehensive terms within sociology. Medina Echavarría thought that sociologists required in the 1960s and 1970s a more plural theoretical formation, to be capable of developing complex interpretations. This required a more balanced training, knowing limitations of sociometry, and also a deeper historical and critical look within the framework of the social sciences. (Medina Echavarría 11972b [1958], and 1986, 35–105)

For Medina Echavarría, the problem that was emerging in Latin American schools of sociology and in multilateral organizations was an understanding of the social based only on quantitative and statistical data. Although necessary in sociological research, the issue was its centrality and predominance, with the consequent exclusion of other modalities of knowledge construction. In this sense, he also affirmed that given the dogmatic predominance of middle-range theories at Flacso, generations of mid-range sociologists were also being formed. This problem was the result of weak and sectarian sociological traditions, as was the case in Latin America. Medina Echavarría defended the necessary elaboration of sociological and historical ideal types under a vitalist and historicist sociological conception. This methodological resource made it possible to understand social action and the context of economic and political actors in Latin America. This motivational structure of action required a long-range training for sociologists open to a plurality of theories and methodologies. However, this feature of his work was latent for a few years, given the modernizing imperatives and reflections on the social aspects of development.¹⁵

The rise of ECLAC’s modernizing approaches assumed a homogeneous, unidirectional development process in Latin American countries, from the most primitive stages to the most advanced states of progress. From this perspective, social change was slow, gradual, cumulative, and would lead to the formation of more or less complex social entities. The counterpart of the modernizing reflection is found in the functionalist structural theory of Parsons and the metaphor of society as an evolving organism. Based on this idea, the research on those years was based on how and what were the processes of social differentiation of Latin American societies. The imbalances in coordination, interdependence, and functional differentiation existing between the social institutions of each subsystem were important facts in the explanation of low development in regional societies.¹⁶

What we observe as a background is not an epistemological debate, but a whole reflection on the scope of sociology in the critical circumstance of the postwar period. In a reflection that is reminiscent of Dewey’s pragmatism, Medina Echavarría pointed out that the responsibility of science lies in solving problems and, to that extent, in moving from an indeterminate, unknown, disturbing or conflictive situation to another in which an analytical order and some solutions were achieved.¹⁷ Because of his historicism, Medina Echavarría questioned the methodological foundations of the Parsonian model that reduced the scientific to theoretical models. The social sciences were not just analytical constructs but concrete social sciences. That is to say, the explanatory scope of the theoretical models depended on the components of the specific historical and social circumstances that filtered their contents.

In this context of predominance of the theories of modernization, developmentalism, and the functionalist paradigm, Medina Echavarría began his work at ECLAC, together with economists who reduced the sociological understanding of economics to demographic and socioeconomic variables in the Latin American region. For him, sociology did not end with sociography, which was certainly essential in a context in which almost nothing was known about underdeveloped economies and societies. Many statistical and empirical investigations were rigorously conducted.¹⁸ But, he recognized that indeed sociology lacked a functional theory (in the sense of managing variables with the operational security of economy), the dominant point of view of functionalism limited any possibility of analysis of specific contexts.

In this scenario, he promoted a border field of knowledge between economics and sociology. With economic sociology he tried to explain why, at the beginning of the sixties, the developmentalist models formulated to promote economic growth had not achieved the expected accelerating results for a modernization on the rise. For Medina Echavarría, it was necessary to understand that between theory and reality there was a considerable gap that could only be bridged with an understanding of the very specific historical and structural conditions that inevitably sifted through theory. This point of view allowed us to penetrate the texture of social reality subject to sociological questioning, to get to know it, value it, and finally act on it. This “landing of the theory” was a reflection and conceptual revision that implied a constant historification. With this, Medina Echavarría was referring to the updating of concepts to integrate new meanings, in such a way that recent vital experience was added.

At ECLAC, Medina Echavarría chose to develop economic sociology as a field of border knowledge between economics and sociology. Its object was to study what the economists had left aside: the substratum of meaning, the intentionality of the various agents involved in the planning strategies, so in vogue in the 60s and 70s. This approach was the starting point to understand the deepest reasons for the existing gaps between social economic structures and the structures of political and cultural representation in Latin America. Furthermore, the centrality of the study of relevant economic phenomena referred to those that in themselves did not have the material struggle for subsistence as their objective. However, its consequences were of interest for this purpose. This was the main reason of Medina Echevarría’s insistence on research of the cultural substrate in the development of capitalism in Latin America, and on the rationalities of social actors.¹⁹

Within the framework of economic sociology, Medina Echavarría formulated complex objects of knowledge such as the elective affinities between economic structures and social structures. This was one of the sociological assumptions necessary to analyze the effects of the developmentalist economic model. However, he went a step further in the sociological understanding of the reasons why the development objectives were not met in the terms proposed by the ECLAC economists. Also well acquainted with Moore’s analysis of development problems, he focused his attention on the study of the first-order requirements such as property, labor, and exchange rates. Medina Echavarría pointed out the need to understand these areas as spaces in which economic action was deployed as social action. The study of the general economic disposition implied knowing the rationality of the actors, and to that extent the guiding ethos of the work habits of various key actors such as the working masses, business groups, and consumers in the Latin American region.²⁰ He proposed the analysis of management, work, and execution capacity as key to the development of capitalism. He rightly pointed out how the lack of this cultural substrate partially explained the precariousness of regional capitalist development. Medina Echavarría also found in the second order of Moore’s requirements another element that could explain the reasons why the development model did not obtain the expected results. Research on the political regime, science, technology, and modalities of social stratification were economically relevant phenomena that should not be left aside if the point was to understand the slowdown in regional development processes (Medina Echavarría 1962a, Vol. II, 14–144).

Medina Echavarría built a reflection on economic sociology in the context of the start of the structuralist economic model headed at ECLAC by Raúl Prebisch, Aníbal Pinto, Celso Furtado, Juan Loyola Pedro Paz, Fernando Fajnzylber, and Osvaldo Sunkel, among others. He reflected on the concept of development that had several characteristics: it was a category of movement and acceleration, with a surplus of meaning, and open to the future horizon. It was raised in a context of a gap that soon became evident, between the Latin American situation and the expectations involved in development strategies. It is interesting to observe the conceptual turns that this category underwent in Medina Echevarría’s work during his first decade at ECLAC, where his definition of development was inevitably marked by the expectations of the structuralist model and the theories of modernization.

Between 1952 and 1965, Medina Echavarría explained development as a process of social change and institutional adaptation. He defined society as a system, subject to strong bottlenecks in some of its structures, gaps in information flows and resources in general, mismatches between the “modern” institutional design and the absence of economic, social, and political agents essential for its implementation. It was the time in which development implied the induction of change with the subsequent acceleration at various social levels. This speed required transformations in the employment structure, adaptation to new functions, the creation of new forms of life, and stratification processes unknown until then. It would necessarily go through important long-range adaptive adjustments. In this sense, he highlighted the absence of actors, institutions and rationalities, status and roles, adequate to the expectation of the acceleration that the structuralist model supposed.

For this reason, in his first years at ECLAC, Medina Echavarría pointed out the urgent need to form a modern business class, a new generation of professionals and technicians, specialized bureaucracies and qualified workers, all of whom were very scarce according to the relevant statistics in Latin America. Likewise, the region suffered from a consolidated urban and rural middle class with a greater capacity for consumption. Another of the important obstacles that limited the performance of strategic economic functions for development, was the existence of differentiated structures of social stratification that coexisted under strong tensions. The statistical evidence, pointed out by Medina Echavarría, showed that in Latin America three modalities of social stratification subsisted: the old residual forms that in Latin America could be traditional, another more intermediate stratum that was about to disappear in the conditions of modern life, and finally, social strata emerging, clearly identified with modernization indicators (Medina Echavarría 1962a, Vol. II, 14–144).

Gradually, Medina Echevarría’s analysis shifted from the study of the difficulties of the adaptive process typical of social economic acceleration processes, towards the centrality of the actors and the understanding of the rationality underlying social action. The systemic and partially functionalist approach was a framework for reflection in which Medina Echavarría found himself uncomfortable and of which he was critical because of its predominance in sociological formation. Little by little he was gaining more strength in his intellectual production, so he developed another concept of development understood as a process of rationalization and planning. From this perspective, development was part of a broader civilizing process in the West, in which the instrumental control of reality and the pragmatic adaptation of the world through the means-end scheme predominated. His idea was that the force that development gradually gained was part of the growing and well-entrenched rationalization, accompanied by instrumental scientific and technical progress. In this sense, the Latin American region also shared phenomena such as accelerated urbanization, widespread technological assimilation, and the unification of life aspirations.

Medina Echavarría did not elaborate concluding sociological and historical ideal types on the development of capitalism in Latin America beyond some isolated studies on the subject. However, he established a comparison between the classical Weberian model and the Ethos of the capitalist mentality against the cultural substrate of economic development in this region. The frame of reference of these studies was the subject of planning, as one of the most important instruments to promote development and growth rates. At the beginning of the 1970s, and as an ILPES official, Medina Echavarría questioned the flaws in the planning designs and analyzed them accurately.²¹

For Medina Echavarría, explaining the failures and errors of developmentalism and planning as instruments of change and a means of accelerating growth rates, implied knowing not only economically relevant phenomena such as the structure of political regimes but also the rationalities of the social and economic actors involved in the design of strategies.²² Hence, research on this topic implied its differentiation into various types: bureaucratic, technocratic, and democratic, and it also implied whose knowledge opened the possibility of understanding the rationality of differentiated social actors. Understanding the different planning modalities implied analyzing the rationality of the action (in a Weberian sense), the social distribution of knowledge, and consequently the existing gaps. In the correlation of these factors, Medina Echavarría found the explanation for the failure of planning. Along with his contemporaries who contributed to the issue of planning, he delved into the democratic modality. He returned to the foundations of Crozier’s indicative planning to point out that instrumental calculation and formal rationality were indispensable inputs for planning, involving also advancing in the knowledge of the socio-psychological limits that gravitated on decision-making processes and decisions; finally, integrating that knowledge into broad, encompassing reasoning.

The foregoing implied effective feedback between the various representative bodies: parliaments, political parties, and the Executive with economic interest groups, such as trade unions, business organizations, and other social, cultural and scientific groups. Citizen participation was essential, not only in an electoral sense but also in the aspirations, needs, and interests of those groups. What was intended was to achieve an invaluable flow of information that came from the world of citizens’ life, from the common man, and the instrumental scientific rationality of technocrats and that of the bureaucracy. Medina Echavarría exhaustively explained the existing tensions, gaps, and interdependencies between these modalities of orientation of social behaviors, and the problems derived from the social distribution of knowledge in each one of the social spheres. What was desirable was that in the field of politics, and under liberal democracy, the negotiation of interests and rationalities of several agencies could be possible. It was necessary to understand the plans, not only in their economic dimension but also as means of political negotiation to the extent that they manage to articulate values, establish priorities, and allocate resources within clearly delimited regulatory frameworks.

3. The legacy of José Medina Echavarría facing the dilemmas of politics and democracy: final notes

We have shown that an element of Medina Echevarría’s legacy, such as the reflection on the production and explanatory scope of theory, was an important problem in the Latin American sociological debate in the 70s. It gained even more strength facing the great dilemmas and difficulties of modernizing processes and planning and development strategies. In the decades of Medina Echavarría at ECLAC, new interpretations, concepts, and theoretical approaches were sought trying to break the existing gap between Latin American underdevelopment and the expectations and assumptions of the structuralist paradigms. There was an implicit recognition of the enormous gap between the lived experience of economic and social actors and a theoretical model with very open expectations for the future. In other words, there was a notable gap between concepts, intentions, and results. For Medina Echavarría, the foregoing implied a broader horizon in the interdisciplinary study of the social sciences when addressing specific problems, and the possibility of formulating something that Medina Echavarría had pointed out: the value of vertical and horizontal theories, as different levels of sociological analysis which made emphasis in the Weberian rationality of agents in their context. Theoretical analysis made the conceptualization of social experience possible, to understand social action’s significance, its context, circumstances, and possible tendencies.

Let’s point out something that Medina Echavarría said clearly in his last years of life in the 70s, and that still resonates strongly in the present, in the design of public policy the discussion about development strategies, their achievements, and failures was not an exclusively technical problem, or of sociological understanding, or general orientation of the social sciences. The backdrop in the discussion was in the decision-making arena, since we lived immersed in a contradictory state of desires and objectives: what did societies of the post-war period wish for, Medina Echavarría asked, freedom or security, tolerance or imposition, the direction of a minority, or the active presence of the citizen and his interests? At the end of the 1970s, Medina Echavarría pointed out to anyone willing to listen, that it was not at stake whether or not modernization strategies should be undertaken considering the pressing socioeconomic problems facing the region, but rather what type of industrial and now postindustrial society we wanted, who wanted, how we wanted to live in it, and best of all, for what. They were clear political and ethical dilemmas, and not only problems of institutional and technical design. This also reminds us of, and hopefully we will not forget, our commitment to historicize the vital experience in the contours of the societies in which we live, not only in institutional spaces and disciplinary developments, but in the field of democratic public life that he thought as possible. It was then a matter of processing social experiences, which was nothing more than acquiring awareness of our transitory condition, and to that extent designing our future in the present.

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Laura Angélica Moya López

Laura Angélica Moya López is a mexican sociologíst and PH.D historian, lecturer at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Azcapotzalco), since 1990. Her academic research includes social memory studies, intellectual history, and the Republican Spanish Exile in Mexico. She has published several studies, among them: José Medina Echavarría y la sociología como ciencia social, 1939–1980, México, EL Colegio de México, 2013.

Notes

1 Adolfo Posada founded the Revista de Derecho Privado where he started the translation of seminal authors such as Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim. This editorial project was continued by Medina Echavarría in Mexico in Fondo de Cultura Económica.

2 During the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, the refuge of more than 25,000 Republican Spaniards was possible, and included scientists, intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, philosophers, workers, farm workers, and the middle class. They had a great impact on the cultural life and scientific development of the country. The Casa de España en México gave way in 1940 to El Colegio de México, created to accommodate a part of this elite and thus enriched various fields of knowledge such as philosophy, sociology, law, medicine, poetry, and literature, among many others (Lida, Matesanz, and Vázquez 2000).

3 The Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) contributed to the institutionalization of economic science in Mexico. There was a great urgency to train specialists who would solve problems after the Mexican Revolution, such as land distribution, population growth or its distribution in the territory. This urgency was added to other factors that laid the foundations for the institutionalization of the social sciences, among them: the founding of early publications in economics and other social sciences such as the Revista Mexicana de Economía (1928), El Trimestre Económico (1936) Cuadernos Americanos (1942), the creation of the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (1930), and the legacy of anthropological research and positive law. The FCE published not only seminal works but also fundamental manuals, current affairs, monographs, brochures, and documentary collections (Moya López 2007, 765–803).

4 It is important to point out that in Mexico, sociology had as precursor fields law, anthropology, and ethnographic research. The need to have a first overview of Mexican society after the revolution (1910–1917) led to the creation of the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales at UNAM in 1930. Among its founders are Lucio Mendieta y Núñez, Alfonso Caso, Miguel Othón de Mendizábal, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, and Narciso Bassols. In 1939, Mendieta founded the Revista mexicana de sociología, one of the oldest in Latin America (Olvera Serrano 2004).

5 The integration of sociology as part of higher secondary education, took place from the last third of the nineteenth century when the liberal intelligentsia formed its educational plan based on the positivist tradition of Comte, the organicism of Herbert Spencer, and the social evolutionist traditions, also dominant in Europe. Among the most representative authors of this tradition were Justo Sierra, Agustín Aragón, Porfirio Parra, and Ezequiel Chávez, among many others (Moya López 2003).

6 The legacy of José Medina Echavarría has been analyzed by different points of view. Juan Jesús Morales wrote José Medina Echavarría. Vida y Sociología, an important biography on the spaniard sociologist; Alberto Ribes published in 2007 some interesting texts about sociology in Spain, and the role of Medina Echavarría, among other intellectuals including Luis Recaséns and Francisco Ayala. Finally, Laura Angélica Moya López studied Medina Echevarría’s legacy drawing from the point of view of the intellectual and conceptual history of Reinhart Koselleck.

7 In 1923, the ratiovitalism of José Ortega y Gasset consisted in rejecting the philosophical extremes of rationalism and relativism, to focus true knowledge on analyzing the spontaneity of life, and at the same time on the importance of reason and our beliefs as vital functions of the human condition. Beliefs were not just ideas, but a way of being in the world to integrate circumstances and lived experiences. This was the starting point for a “theory of reasoned life and vitalized reason.” This perspective was based on a diagnosis of Europe as a tired continent, lacking vital energy, sunk in obsolete forms and social norms in the face of new phenomena, drives, and spontaneous efforts for change (Ortega and Gasset 1980).

8 Vertical theories referred to very general, abstract, and temporally oriented reflections on the future. They were great models of sociological reflection, validation of which was not necessarily found in empirical contrast. This was the case, for example, of structural functionalism (Mannheim 1940 and The relations in theory and in teaching, first published in 1936).

9 For example, a sociological ideal type was a concept like capitalism and a historical ideal type was capitalism developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, as an effect of protestant ethics.

10 Medina Echavarría developed this agenda when he wrote several essays published posthumously in his book, La sociología como ciencia social concreta (1980).

11 It should be remembered that Robert Merton considered middle range theories as intermediate theoretical elaborations between the great abstract paradigms (such as the Parsonian one) and the generalizations derived from the analysis of a limited set of particular cases. It is important to note that the purpose of middle range theories would contribute in the long term to the consolidation of the general systemic theory.

12 Without losing sight of the fact that any concept is part of broad theoretical networks in which they are stated and in which they acquire a certain semantic load (Koselleck and Richter 2011).

13 Jorge Graciarena compiled some of the reflections of Medina Echavarría in La sociología como ciencia social concreta, in which the Spaniard sociologist matured concepts and reflections on social theory. His writing had as its starting point the sociology lessons given in Puerto Rico between 1946 and 1952. During his long stay at ECLAC (1952–1977) and until his death in 1977, he worked on social theory. The reason for his efforts was to question the predominance of middle-range and functionalist theories in the Schools of Social Sciences and Sociology, and the exclusion of other social theories. This was the case in FLACSO (Brazil, Argentina, and Chile). The criticism of this approach has a clear Weberian lineage, if we remember the methodological differences established between historical ideal types and sociological ideal types.

14 Within the framework of Koselleck’s conceptual history, there are various gaps in the relationship between a concept and the social phenomenon. This means that there are relationships of correspondence and simultaneous transformation between both; another is where the concepts do not change the historical reality, so that it is conceptualized in a new form. Finally, it is also possible that reality changes while the concepts remain stable. For the German thinker, the last two cases are representative of a lack of synchronicity between language and reality, between concepts and history. If concepts and reality change at different speeds, sometimes it is the conceptualization of reality that is ahead of time and at, other times, reality is ahead of conceptualization (Koselleck 2012).

15 Medina Echavarría had clear differences with the analytical universalism of Parsons and Merton and with Learfield’s empirical research because of his intellectual trajectory in historicism, ratiovitalism, pragmatism, and Weberian sociology. He recognized how useful these perspectives were. But most important was the exclusion of more plural and complex theoretical and methodological perspectives at Flacso. The problem was also to reduce sociological research to functionalism as the main and dominant perspective at ECLAC and in social scientist formation in Latin America. One of the effects of this predominant academic formation was the exclusion of theories of rational social action (Moya López 2013, 159–218).

16 It is widely known that various currents of modernization theory coincided in taking up some very specific aspects of Parsonian structural functionalism. We refer, for example, to the pattern variables as criteria for classifying societies into traditional and modern, and the systemic imperatives: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency, with which Parsons explained the feedback process of energy and information between subsystems and the functional balance between them (Almond and Coleman 1960).

17 Medina Echavarría advanced important ideas in texts such as Sociología: Teoría y Técnica (1946), and “Reconstrucción de la Ciencia Social,” (1941, 35–56).

18 See the two volumes entitled Aspectos Sociales del Desarrollo Económico en América Latina, coordinated by Medina Echavarría and de Vries. Volume I was published in 1962 and the second in 1963. The latter was edited with Benjamin Higgins. Among the first texts by Medina Echavarría related to development were: “Las condiciones sociales del desarrollo económico” and “Tres aspectos sociológicos del desarrollo económico,” both published in the first volume. In 1958, he published “El papel del sociólogo en las tareas del desarrollo económico.”

19 The influence of Max Weber’s economic sociology was notable in the thought of Medina Echavarría, who grouped it under four fundamental themes: the different types of economic action, the role of rationality in economic life, the social structure of the organizations of economic institutions such as property, organizations, the market, and money. Finally, he studied the social macrostructures linked to the different types of capitalism: rational, political, and traditional commerce (Swedberg 2003). He also recognized Rostow’s contributions on the stages of economic development and Moore’s reflections on social change, modernization processes, and development (Medina Echavarría 1962b, 23–53).

20 The concept of an economically relevant phenomenon was defined by Weber as one that did not have the material struggle for existence as an end in itself, but the consequences of which were of interest to this end. For their part, economic phenomena corresponded to those situations in which the actor’s primary interest referred to the material struggle for existence. Finally, economically conditioned phenomena were those that in themselves were not of interest in terms of the material struggle for survival but were partially caused by economic factors (Weber 2014, 5–45 and 46–165).

21 Medina Echavarría noted three problems in planning strategies: first, the internal tension between the possible purposes of planning as an instrument of change and as a means of accelerating the growth rate. The second referred to the scarce parallelism between the decisions of the political powers and the guidelines and advice of the planner. Finally, he pointed out the difficulties encountered with the existing administrators at the time they introduced new techniques and instruments that, in the bureaucratic environment, altered the routines of their performance (Medina Echavarría 1972a).

22 Medina Echavarría’s most outstanding texts on these topics were: “La planeación en las formas de racionalidad (1969)” and “Desengaño sobre el desarrollo (1970),” both integrated in the book Discurso sobre política y planeación (1972a). Another text was: “Las relaciones entre instituciones sociales y las económicas: un modelo para América Latina” (1961, pp. 311–344).