The paper examines several current characteristics of social sciences in Latin America, in parallel to the development of the subcontinent in recent years. The starting point is the sign that the contradictory combination in Latin America of an intellectuality that has a high cultural level and the existence of social and political movements in an explosive social situation creates wide possibilities for the development of sociology. The crisis of social sciences follows those significant changes, seeking new analytical perspectives able to demonstrate the pace of contemporary changes. Strictly speaking, the article tries to demonstrate that what Latin American sociology sees as novelty is a regression to the critical thinking that characterized it in the past. One of the most important legacies of Latin American sociological history is the study and classification, from a perspective of totality, of social structures and sociopolitical processes as a basis to examine actors' stances and the dynamics of social institutions. Therefore, there is room for a healthy trend in social sciences: overcoming empiricism, regaining theory. A founding need for Latin America today is to update its search for development: how is it possible to be up to the world, to universalize in order to live a historical moment with all its social potential, overcoming backwards and age-worn ways of production and life. And more: how to co-participate in the criticism of new modern and postmodern ways, envisaging new models of civilization, criticizing liberal democracy and Latin Americans' national States of competition, and encouraging the recovery of the democratic public in face of the tendency to state authoritarianism. The contributions that Latin America can give to the criticism and the renewal of democratic politics, to the reform of production and life, and to humanism and renewed radical communitarianism have to meet the old aims of national and social liberation of today's world, adjusted to the new conditions.
Latin America; Latin American sociology; empiricism; social theory; civilization; political crisis; democracy; exclusion; neoliberal State; civil society; State public