“I enrolled in the Faculty of Law because, during the dictatorship, sociology studies were not authorized, and law was always a window into the social realm”.
With this reflection, Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos summarizes one of the decisive moments of his early formation—an experience that would shape the direction of his critical thinking and his later trajectory in the Sociology of Law.
His ability to articulate personal experiences with the evolution of his ideas offers insight into the gradual construction of an approach that spans decades, political contexts and intellectual traditions.
His early years in Coimbra, within a working-class family, placed him from a young age in contact with the social tensions that would accompany him throughout his academic life.
At twelve he was already offering tutoring to support the household economy, an activity he would later identify as part of the environment that nurtured his sensitivity to social issues.
This background explains the surprise generated by his admission to the Faculty of Law, where he became one of the first students from a working-class background—and soon stood out for his academic performance.
International training and the making of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s thought
During his stay in West Berlin, he was exposed more directly to contemporary debates. As a scholarship holder, he studied philosophy and became interested in Marxism through the contradictions he observed between capitalist Germany and communist Germany.
Crossing the Berlin Wall frequently—an everyday part of visiting his partner—placed him before two parallel realities that pushed him to question simplified explanations and seek broader tools to understand the social world.
His move to Yale University consolidated this shift. There, between 1969 and 1973, he pursued a PhD in the Sociology of Law, strengthening his engagement with debates on inequality, social struggles and legal systems.
It was also during this period that Boaventura de Sousa Santos assumed Marxism more consciously as a theoretical framework, though he would later integrate it into a wider set of critical perspectives.
Brazil, Portugal and the emergence of new epistemologies
Before returning to Portugal, he conducted fieldwork in a Brazilian favela—an experience that played a decisive role in shaping his relationship with epistemology.
Direct contact with contexts marked by exclusion reinforced his interest in forms of knowledge produced in historically subordinated environments.
Years later, these concerns matured into the formulation of the Epistemologies of the South, an approach advocating recognition of knowledge marginalized by Western hegemonic thought.
Back in Portugal, Sousa Santos became involved in the April 25 Revolution and participated in founding the Faculty of Economics at the University of Coimbra.
Together with other researchers, he created the Centre for Social Studies, where he developed ideas such as the theory of the semiperiphery and the concept of the welfare society.
These contributions consolidated his place within a critical tradition seeking to expand theoretical tools for interpreting complex social phenomena.
His participation in the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2001 marked another intellectual shift. Engaging with social movements from various regions led him to revisit his Marxism and incorporate insights from anticolonial thought and multiple strands of feminism.
For Boaventura de Sousa Santos, this process did not mean abandoning the Marxist matrix but placing it alongside other reflective frameworks that broadened his understanding of the world.
A constant challenge in his career has been communicating these ideas beyond academic spaces.
He recalls that explaining the Epistemologies of the South without naming them required an effort of conceptual translation oriented toward activists and grassroots collectives—groups with whom he sought to share debates usually confined to university circuits.
This exercise, according to his own account, demanded many hours of conversation and reformulation.
Recent contributions and current perspectives of Boaventura de Sousa Santos
In his most recent work, Sousa Santos analyzes the historical instrumentalization of law since the seventeenth century, the appropriation of legal language by social movements, and the geopolitical transformations reshaping Europe after the war in Ukraine.
Changes in social-protection systems and rising military expenditure are, in his view, part of a broader process forcing a rethinking of the political and economic foundations of the continent.
With more than five decades of intellectual work, Boaventura de Sousa Santos maintains that understanding the world requires avoiding uncritical theoretical loyalties and recognizing the plurality of existing forms of knowledge.
For those entering sociology, his advice is to value the scope of scientific inquiry without losing sight of other knowledge systems capable of addressing questions Western thought does not always know how to formulate.
This perspective encapsulates the evolution of an author who has built his work in ongoing dialogue with diverse critical traditions and social experiences.
