Hacia una teoría sociológica abierta y analítica de la transición política

Abstract

This paper aims to examine in depth, in order to avoid them, some of the consequences of the fact that the social sciences began to develop in Western European countries during periods in which the construction of modern, national, representative and democratic states was being sought. If these sciences adopted their theoretical and empirical profile associated with this project of nationalization and democratization of the state, reaching a prophetic dimension that draws the future of the populations of the planet, there is room for other sociologies, more sensitive to the diversity of modernizing projects, which seek to get rid of this prophetic character without losing the conceptual and theoretical richness of our classics. In this sense, this text problematizes the idea of political transition, rethinks the implicit question embedded, as any transition, in it (what is the relationship between power and the individuals subjected to it?) and thus seeks to implement a more open and analytical and less prophetic and evaluative social theory. The work ends by referring to the analysis of the transition in the West African countries of former French colonization, where the advent of a national democratic state does not seem feasible, but where creative processes of relationship between politics, religion and society are taking place.