Latin-america, the philosophical-sociological discourse of modernity, the historical-sociological blindness of the theories of modernity: program-matic notes for a latin-american decolonial praxis

Abstract

In this paper, we defend that euronorcentric theories of modernity which pursuit the philosophical-sociological reconstruction of the process of the Western modernization (or European, or the evolutionary-constitutive pattern of development of the contemporary industrialized societies) are characterized for a historical-sociological blindness which is marked by three basic points: (a) the understanding of the Western modernization as a self-referential, self-subsistent, self-sufficient, endogenous and autonomous process of development, so that there would be modernity as rationalization and all the rest as traditionalism, position that, on the other hand, does not prevent the theories of modernity of correlating modernity-modernization, rationalization, universalism and human evolution; (b) the separation between cultural modernity and social-economic modernization, the first as a sphere purely normative, and the second as a sphere basically instrumental, logical-technical, with the purpose of saving a normative concept of epistemological-moral universalism which is the cultural modernity itself; and (c), as condition of that philosophical-sociological reconstruction, the erasing, the deletion and the silencing about the colonialism as a consequence of the development of the Western modernization as a whole. We argue that a Latin-American decolonial praxis has in the denounce, unveiling and deconstruction of this historical-sociological blindness assumed by euronorcentric theories of modernity in their reconstruction of the process of the Western modernization its fundamental epistemological-political starting point to become itself an alternative to the modernity’s normative paradigm, to ground its (Latin-American) philosophical-sociological discourse about Western modernization and its correlation with colonialism.