Loughborough University

Faculty Member, Social Sciences

Senior Lecturer

About

I studied sociology at the University of Chile as an undergraduate and first came to the UK to do my PhD in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, where I studied with Robert Fine. At Warwick I also had my first academic job in Britain, which I then gave up in order to go back to Chile. I spent five years in the Department of Sociology at the University Alberto Hurtado in Santiago where I was privileged enough to help set up the first doctoral programme in Sociology in Chile in 2006. While in Chile, I remained a Fellow of the Warwick Social Theory Centre. I joined the Department of Social Science at Loughborough University in January 2010.

I am the author of three books and a number of articles in both English and Spanish. I have been invited to give more than forty seminars and lectures to more than twenty universities in Aregntina, Brazil, Chile, the Czech Republic, Germany, Singapore and the UK. I am also a member of the international advisory boards of the British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory and Revista de Sociología.

My main research area is classical and contemporary social theory broadly understood. I am interested in the rise and main features of modern social theory as an intellectual endeavour that has sought to grasp, over the past two hundred years or so, what is it that makes modern social life both ‘modern’ and ‘social’. On the one hand, there is always the question in social theory as to whether, and how, are modern forms of organization different from previous forms of human life. On the other hand, there is also the attempt to grasp why is it exactly that makes social relations patterned yet unpredictable, individualized yet collective, liberating and simultaneously repressive. In so doing, I have engaged with the historical roots of modern social theory (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Parsons) as well as with contemporary writers such as Margaret Archer, Ulrich Beck, Jürgen Habermas or Niklas Luhmann.

More specifically, I have done work on three main subject areas: (1) nationalism and cosmopolitanism; (2) universalism and the natural law-tradition; (3) what makes social relations ‘social’.

1.  Nationalism and cosmopolitanism. This is the subject of my first two books, A Social Theory of the Nation-State (Routledge 2007) and Nacionalismo y Cosmopolitismo (UDP 2010). The works seek to provide a novel account of the nation-state’s historical development and recent transformations on the basis of a number of different general sociological theories of modernity from classical social theory to the present. I sought to challenge the view that social theory has understood the nation-state as the necessary representation of society in modernity. This argument, which in current debates has been referred to as methodological nationalism, is rejected because it is unable to capture the richness of social theory’s intellectual tradition and the nation-state’s own problematic trajectory in modernity. In opposition to methodological nationalism, it is advanced the thesis of the ‘opacity of the nation-state in modernity’ – that is, the nation-state as unfinished project that seeks to present itself with a sense of closure that it has never actually achieved. In so doing, moreover, I attempted to develop a robust defence of society as both concept and reality. Rather than referring to the nation-state, the idea of society is social theory’s key tool to grasp the ultimate conditions of modern social life.

In relation to cosmopolitanism, I am of the idea that rather than looking at it from its political or institutional dimension, we assess whether, and to what extent, many key sociological concepts (rationalisation, bureaucratisation, the state, functional differentiation, class, power, discipline or emancipation) all point to certain cosmopolitan human traits that constitute humanity as a single species. I have been tried to think through the connections between cosmopolitanism and universalism, which then led me to open up another field of theoretical enquiry.

2. Universalism and the natural-law tradition. Early in 2011, I  published, La Pretension Universalista de la Teoria Social (Social Theory's Claim to Universalism) .The book I am currently completing is entitled The Natural Law Foundations of Modern Social Theory: A quest for universalism and will be published by CUP in 2012. Its main argument is that the comprehension of social theory’s key features of needs to be traced back to the corpus of natural law. As an enquiry into the normative foundations of social theory, this means that all the ethnic, religious and cultural variations to be found in modernity pushed social theory to make use of natural law presuppositions to establish its fundamental normative standpoint; namely, the universalistic claim of the ultimate unity of the human species. The book’s aim is neither to restore natural law nor to argue that social theory is simply natural law writ large. Rather, its ultimate goal is to reconstruct and re-evaluate the relationship between natural law and social theory as one of Aufhebung: social theory is always trying to overcome, but in so doing is also constantly reintroducing, those themes and concerns that are the dearest to natural law. In addition to this, I have just finalised another collection of my essays in Spanish on universalism and social theory (La Pretension Universalista de la Teoria Social, 2011).

I have thus been fascinated over the past couple of years not only by the works of the well-known sociologists mentioned above but also by such writers as Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, Reinhart Koselleck, Eric Vogelin, Hans Blumenberg or Ernst Bloch all of whom, from their radically different theoretical and normative perspectives, developed beautifully subtle understandings of the connections between the natural law tradition, the question of universalism and modern social life.

3. What makes social relations ‘social’. This is the project for a new book that will be published by SAGE. The key idea behind this project is that, if in historical terms modernity is conventionally regarded as sociology’s almost natural object of study, in more analytical terms the challenge is rather about achieving a viable conceptualisation of ‘social relations’, ‘society’ or ‘the social’. Social relations can then be defined as the emergent outcome of human interaction in the sense that what takes place during these interactions never fully coincides with the actors’ intentions nor can their results be fully predicted by the social scientific observer. Writers and schools of thought will of course have completely different substantive definitions of what these social relations are actually made of. Yet looking at the intellectual task of social theory from the question of what makes social relations social can offer social theory a sense of identity that at times is regarded as lacking.

Does it make a difference if we speak about actions or interactions? What is power and does it have primacy over other types of interaction? Does human language lead towards understanding? Do societies have an organising centre or are they best seen as differentiated? Does the material priority of the reproduction of social life imply its primacy over other social spheres? Is nationalism necessarily opposed to cosmopolitanism? The relevance of particular answers is twofold. On the one hand, these ways of addressing the problem of social relations imply a certain vision of who we are as human beings. What we say about social life reflects, and is reflected upon, what we consider as the main features that make up our common humanity. On the other hand, their relevance lies in their actual use for the scientific advancement of sociology as an empirical discipline. Social structures, communication and nations are among the key aspects of social life to which empirical sociology devotes its attention, while they implicitly carry notions of how we are and what we do as human beings.

In other words, these are not mere concepts whose relevance is taken for granted for paradigmatic reasons or intellectual modes. Rather, it is my contention that if and when these concepts stick, they do so because they have proved able to touch upon a particular feature of how people understand their own life in society and, accordingly, how they decide to act upon it.

Finally, as a result of a recent invitation to the Graduate School at the University of Jena in Germany, I have started a new project on the different possibilities and meanings of doing ‘theory research’. My starting point for this project is simply the factual recognition that the kind of guidance that is readily available when pursuing empirical research is simply not available in ‘theory research’. While this may have to do with the very nature of theory research itself, it should not prevent us from distinguishing between different styles of theorising. At the very least, we can surely inquiry into what makes ‘sociological theorising’ both sociological and theoretical. At the very least, we should be able to distinguish different strategies and forms of theorising in sociology; for instance, ‘sociological theory’, ‘theory of society’, ‘metatheory’ and ‘social theory’. Furthermore, these need to be differentiated not only among themselves but also in relation to other such fields as ‘normative political philosophy’, ‘history of ideas’, ‘conceptual history’ or even ‘historical sociology’.

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