One of the prominent thinkers in the Social Sciences, Aníbal Quijano (1930–2018), has a fundamental work for the compression of contemporary dilemmas since his main theoretical and political concerns have always been linked to the mutations of world capitalism and its reverse paths. This book aims to contribute with analyses of his voluminous and diversified production distributed practically over 60 years of intellectual trajectory.

In the first decades, the Peruvian author produced essential works on peasant movements, the urbanization process, and the class structure in Peru and Latin America by mobilizing sociological categories such as marginality, dependency and structural heterogeneity. He devoted himself to investigating imperialist domination in Peru and its implications for social classes and created the journal Sociedad y Política. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Peruvian sociologist published a set of texts on the coloniality and decoloniality of power, which represents a theoretical construction inseparable from the processes and experiences that were occurring in Peru, Latin America and the world, from the “globalization” of “neoliberalism” to global and local resistances.

Thus, this book is addressed to all those, with or without specialized training in social sciences, interested in knowing not only the history of social sciences in Latin America but mainly in understanding the historical roots and the political dilemmas of peripheral capitalist societies.