ABSTRACT
The notion of progress that had spread since the end of the nineteenth century was tied to the notion of biological development, but it was not applied in the same way to the Anglo-Saxon countries and to Latin America. Since the nineteenth century evolutionary sociology had postulated that the natural evolution of society toward higher levels of development would fail due to an imbalance between the character of man and his social state. When "civilized man" achieved a sufficiently virtuous state (that is, adequate moral conditions), the imperfections, which were an obstacle to progress, would disappear. The Anglo-Saxons considered their own success in capitalistic progress as an indicator of their innate capacity for evolution, and they considered the obstacles to be incidental. Yet they believed that the underdeveloped societies did not have the moral, cultural, and racial conditions to undertake the transformation from underdevelopment to modern, technocratic, and democratic societies by themselves. They could not develop infinitely.
