Why does structuralism return to the forefront?

GABRIEL BRONDINO; VÍCTOR RAMIRO FERNÁNDEZ

Development in Latin America

Palgrave Macmillan

Año: 2018; p. 11 - 45

This chapter discusses Latin American structuralist thought and the transformations it underwent after the neo-structuralist renewal. Contributions in the first decades of the second post-war increasingly introduced the role of power and domination in defining the structure of both domestic and international social relations in peripheral capitalism. The emergence of neo-structuralism after the Latin American crisis of the eighties implied a dilution or simply exclusion of the analysis of power and domination relations. The chapter discusses the consequences of such absence for the analysis and formulation of development strategies and suggest revisiting structuralist thought. Such revisiting demands both to attend the transformations occurred in capitalism in the last forty years and to introduce some other elements that were weakly theorized.