The commitment to sociology. A reconstruction of the trajectories of Ricardo Levene y Raúl Orgaz in comparative perspective

Abstract

This article studies a problem that has not yet been explored in the field of the history of Argentine sociology: the centrality acquired by the sociology of Córdoba compared to the sociology of Buenos Aires during the years from the 1918 University Reform to the foundation of the Institute of Sociology of Buenos Aires in 1940. The lack of texts written from Buenos Aires that identify key problems in this period is an indicator of the type of history that has been written about the institutional development of Argentine sociology, that is, the one focus on the capital of the country after the foundations of the department and the career at the University of Buenos Aires in 1957. For this reason, the article will focus on reconstructing the intellectual bets made by the two professors of “Sociology” of the main Argentine universities of that time: Ricardo Levene and Raúl Orgaz. Taking into account the contributions to the sociology of knowledge of Karl Mannheim, Robert Merton and Pierre Bourdieu, an explanation may be given of the reasons why Orgaz leaned towards sociology, performing a work of permanent updating of the sociological novelties at international level and, as a correlate, of production around them, while Levene showed no progress in this regard, performing a poor production in relation to sociology.