Functional differentiation and the sociology of Brazilian modernity

Abstract

Sociological interpretations of Brazil, guided by the concepts of “personalism and “patrimonialism”, develop a diagnosis that we have a “modernity deficit “and infer this deficit largely of an alleged missing or imperfect process of differentiation of social spheres and subsystems among us. Currently, this type of interpretation has been updated with the theory of functional differentiation of Niklas Luhmann. In this paper we will try to show that this type of sociological interpretation is based on an idealization of differentiation of spheres in the North Atlantic countries, building an empirically unfounded counterpoint to diagnose the lack of functional differentiation in Brazil.

Keywords

• modernidade
• diferenciação funcional
• modernidade periférica
• sociologia brasileira