ALAIN TOURAINE AND BRAZIL: SOCIAL ACTORS AND DEPENDENCY IN DIALOGUES OF THE 1970S

Abstract This article shows part of the dialogues of Alain Touraine with Brazilian authors. I focus on the 1970s, when the French sociologist supervised nine theses on Brazil in universities in the Paris region, all dedicated to the study of social actors in the context of dependent societies. Before analyzing the content of these researches, I briefly present some fundaments of Touraine’s social theory, the context of his early contacts with Brazilian sociology, and the elements that compose the “model of dependent development” that he elaborated to think of Latin America. Next, I discuss the presence of this model in the theses of its students and some limits of this approach.