THE LATIN AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT SCHOOL: EPISTEMOLOGICAL TENSIONS OF A FOUNDER MOVEMENT

The economic and social thinking of Latin America was enriched by the Latin American Development School (LDS). That is the name given in this essay to the contributions from distinguished social scientists who, during fifty years (1950-2000), articulated their ideas around the, so called, Center-Periphery Vision, originally formulated by ECLAC in its widely known Economic Report of Latin America 1949. The notion of development, used by the members of the LDS experienced, during this long period of time, a transformation from an economic theoretical vision to a multidimensional societal approach. This essay suggests that the LDS was capable of reformulating, in a constructively critical way, the main analytical categories of social sciences built by the western academic world, modifying them in order to reach their own interpretation, historically rooted into the Latin American social realities. The LDS ideas "accompanied" in a dynamic fashion the profound structural transformations experienced by Latin American Societies in the second half of 20th century. This essay attempts to summarize some essential features of that long term intellectual process including not only the contributions of the so called Latin American structuralism, but also those of other social scientists that rooted on the same interpretative foundations.