Session Organizers

Nadya GUIMARÁES
University of São Paulo, Brazil

Aaron PITLUCK
Illinois State University, USA

When ISA decided to hold its Forum in a Latin American country, we realized as RC-02 Program Co-Organizers that it would be perfect if we started exploring the theoretical contribution of ECLAC (the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean/CEPAL – Comisión Económica para América Latina y Caribe). Since its creation in 1948, ECLAC has developed a rich and seminal discourse encompassing the economic, social and political dimensions of development in this region. As a leading think tank, ECLAC has nourished generations of Latin American economists, social planners, and social scientists by not only hosting them in Santiago but also with collaborative intensive training programs throughout Latin America. 

Our motivation in creating this invited session was an early excavation to better understand the influence of ECLAC and Latin American Structuralism on the origins of contemporary Latin American Economic Sociology. In addition, we hoped the session might examine ECLAC’s relevance for contemporary Economic Sociology by considering theoretical repertoires associated with ECLAC such as Latin American Structuralism, Dependency Theory, and Neo-structuralism.  

The vivid debate in our session came from three different sources: the interplay of disciplines—economics, political sociology, public policy; the confluence of theoretical discussions and memoirs; and the cross-fertilization of insights coming from various generations of Latin American intellectuals. 

We are grateful that three experts were able to join us in this exploratory session. Miguel Torres, the Editor in Chief of Revista de CEPAL, is a leading economist at ECLAC/CEPAL, who has been researching and extensively publishing on the contributions of its main intellectuals. Maria Herminia Tavares de Almeida, a leading political scientist in Brazilian academia, is a senior researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) and a former Professor at the Institute of International Relations, University of São Paulo. Elisa Kluger is an associated researcher at the International Postdoctoral Program at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP). 

Miguel Torres, Estructuralismo, Dependencia y Neoestructuralismo En El Siglo XXI 

Torres stated that ECLAC's intellectuals provided a foundation for Latin American and Caribbean "socioeconomics" for more than 70 years, based on the center-periphery theory of Raul Prebisch and the structural historical method. He suggests that Prebisch inaugurated a tradition that recovers the thought of José Carlos Mariátegui, who interpreted society through an original and autonomous thought; this was the path that ECLAC tried to follow. 

In his presentation, he revisited three key theoretical formulations from ECLAC intellectuals. Firstly, the structuralist theses of the first phase of ECLAC thought. Secondly, the so-called “dependency theory”, a derivation of the structuralist approach, especially from the center-periphery approach, associated with the structural historical method. Thirdly, and more extensively, the recent ideas of ECLAC, from the last 10 years. Those ideas departed from the structuralist approach of the 1990s, but expressed some changes from 2010 on, exploring more deeply the interplay between the regional context and the different dynamics that have characterized the global economy and society. The notion of “inclusive development” became a central axis in the proposals and recent documents, with significant advances on the issues of environmentally sustainable economy, and the inefficiency of inequality. More recently, the post-COVID context oriented the intellectuals toward exploring the changes in the regional productive matrix and the possibility of its move towards a more inclusive development. 

Maria Herminia Tavares de Almeida, ECLAC and the Latin American Political Sociology in the 1960-70: Memoirs 

Almeida reflected on the intellectual contributions of CEPAL, based on her own memories as a young researcher in Santiago de Chile in the 1970’s. The city was indisputably the Latin American capital for the social sciences, and ECLAC was the core of an important group of institutions. In fact, Santiago hosted a large set of institutions representing the United Nations system, including CELADE (Latin American Center for Demography, 1957), ILPES (Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning, 1960), PREALC (Latin American and Caribbean Regional Program for Employment), FLACSO (Latin American School of Social Sciences, 1967) supported by UNESCO, and also Escolatina (School of Economics, at University of Chile 1967). That coexistence produced a very lively intellectual milieu, an important circulation of students and researchers, and legitimated the relevance of Latin American Studies.  

Almeida also remembered that at this time, two macro theories dominated the intellectual environment: functionalist theories of modernization competing with Marxist theories of bourgeois democratic revolution and imperialist domination. Despite their theoretical differences, they shared the belief that there was no other development path for Latin American than the model of capitalist or socialist societies. In contrast to those universal explanations, ECLAC stated the originality and specificity of the economic change in Latin America, departing from its foundational manifesto (1949), the Prebisch Report.  ECLAC’s thought provided intellectuals with a theory of international trade and a theory of Latin American industrialization, side by side with an original, controversial and unorthodox theory of inflation.

This thought grounded the Latin American Sociology produced in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, and its search of specificities on social stratification, urbanization, labor markets, among other subjects. In the same vein, ECLAC inspired the emergence of a Latin American political sociology, focusing on the specificities of power structure, on populism and mass mobilization, on peasant resistance, and on authoritarianism. ECLAC’s thought also developed a center-periphery theory of international relations that anticipated Immanuel Wallerstein’s ideas.

In sum, the theoretical and methodological contributions of ECLAC developed some of the key theoretical tools of the contemporary era. 

Elisa Kluger, The ECLAC-NBDES Center and the Building of a Generation of Intellectuals Engaged in Planning the Brazilian Development

Kluger continued the conversation on the history and intellectual production of ECLAC focusing on a different period and a diverse angle. Her paper, co-authored with Sergio Wanderley and Alexandre Barbosa,  explores how the Economic Commission for Latin America (at this time, ECLA) created comparative national frameworks for analyses. Kruger’s presentation highlighted the process of diffusion of ECLA’s ideas and showed how the organization contributed largely to the training of economic experts in Latin America with its “Course on Problems of Economic Development”. 

She discussed how the specificities of the Brazilian context influenced the form of absorption of ECLA’s ideas, leading to changes in the visions about the development problem of the experts that worked at the ECLA-BNDE Center, a short-lived partnership (1960-1967) with the Brazilian National Bank for Economic Development/BNDES. Kluger emphasized how the circulation of ECLA’s experts between the offices fostered the adoption of comparative frameworks for the studies of the development, stressing the need to understand the effects on the development patterns of the political and social diversity within the region.  

Based on documents, newspaper stories and testimonies offered by ex-members of the Center, Kluger described its activities and retraced the processes of genesis, expansion, and closure of that partnership aimed to impact both the governmental spheres and the academic world, offering alternative training to the hegemony of neoclassical economics. Following the closing of the Center, her paper examines the effects of disbanding the Center’s staff and the dissolution of international cooperation. The now dispersed community sought to build fortifications to defend ECLA’s influence while at the same time critically engaging with and improving ECLA’s earlier scholarship.