Hostos, Eugenio MaríA De (1839–1903)

Eugenio María de Hostos was one of the founders of sociology and legal sociology in Latin America. Born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, he died in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He studied law at the Central University of Madrid, although he quit his studies short of graduation in 1868. He was critical of the shortcomings of Spanish republicanism and liberalism, with which he had been actively involved.

Hostos then embarked on what would be a lifelong intellectual and political pilgrimage through Latin America. He was a strong advocate of ending the lingering conditions of colonialism in America, which he referred to as a “sociological condition” that served as a major obstacle to the effective realization of republican political ideals. His Tratado de Sociología(Treatise on Sociology) was the first systematic treatise on sociology written in Latin America. The treatise constitutes the culmination of a series of lectures and articles on what Hostos called “the laws of society,” on which he began speaking and writing (and which were published) as early as 1877. A group of his former students published the complete treatise after his death in 1904.

In his Lecciones de Derecho Constitucional (1880) (Lessons on Constitutional Law), Hostos produced his most important work on legal sociology. He proposed that society, and not the state or government, was the main subject matter of constitutional law. According to Hostos, constitutional law had as its concrete objective the legal organization of society and, therefore, must conform to its organic nature, that is, be viewed as an integral part of the whole of society. On the other hand, he also proposed an expansion of Charles-Louis de Montesquieu's (1689–1755) theory on the division of governmental power and functions, adding a fourth, electoral, branch to the traditional three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial.

In his other major sociological work,Moral Social(1888) (Social Morality), Hostos made important contributions to legal education reform in Latin America. He insisted on the study of the law from a sociological and ethical perspective, what he called “total law,” in comparison with the traditional focus limited to the study of the positive law, described as “partial law.” Some of his major philosophical influences were the positivism of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and the idealism of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832), a follower of Johann Fichte and Frederick Schelling. Krause exercised a great deal of influence over Spanish and Latin American liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century.

Yet, strictly speaking, Hostos's legal and sociological thought was to project a broader worldview of his own, greatly influenced by his commitment to the political struggles of his times, particularly to ending colonialism in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Hostos was a prolific writer and distinguished himself throughout Latin America as an educator, philosopher, novelist, and journalist.