Esteban Torres

The main experience of critical theory production in the Western hemisphere took place in Frankfurt and New York, around the Institute for Social Research (IfS), between the 1920s and 1960s. In the beleaguered heart of the IfS, the works of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse throbbed strongly. In the history of Latin America, on the other hand, the most important nucleus of critical theory creation flourished in the fields of sociology and economics in the...

To offer an explanation of the progression of processes of social change, it is necessary to pay attention to the historical evolution of a world appropriation game (WAG), which takes place simultaneously in the national, regional, and global spheres of world society.[1] I could define the WAG – or world power game – as a variable field of interactions that is shaped at the intersection between six historical systems: the...

For the social sciences, the main novelty that the mega-crisis linked to the expansion of COVID-19 has produced is the recognition of the impossibility of ignoring that we live in territorial societies that are increasingly globally interdependent. If, before 2020, social studies were still able to develop acceptable justifications for dispensing with a global framework of observation, this is no longer the case. The pandemic started...

This section of Global Dialogue presents a small sample of theoretical innovations, intellectual itineraries, and future projects from a group of prominent Latin American authors. All of these colleagues work every day to build new theoretical tools for the comprehensive study of Latin America’s social reality and, in several cases, world society as a whole. In conjunction with the affirmation of their respective national...

Major social transformations in world society since the beginning of the twenty-first century are exhausting the two paradigms that governed the development of sociology from its origins until today: the modern paradigm and the anti-modern postmodern paradigm. This issue calls for a paradigm shift. My proposal introduces a new, scientifically minded, postmodern program called the “world paradigm” (WP; paradigma mundialista...

The Argentine Republic is experiencing a remarkable retreat of democracy. The extension and complexity of this retreat is difficult to understand if using the theories of democracy that, with the collapse of the military dictatorships, have become the dominant analytical frameworks for left and progressive forces in the country and in Latin America. Contemporary democratization, understood as a social process of expansion of the forces of public appropriation...