This volume brings together the most important works of the Bolivian sociologist René Zavaleta Mercado. In constant creative development from his first texts, his thought is born from the current of Latin American revolutionary nationalism, which in his native Bolivia permeated the Revolution of 1952. It later evolved towards Marxism, although this quickly came torn apart by an increasingly heterodox view. . The originality of Zavaleta's writings rests, in fact, on the appropriation and reinvention of Marxist categories applied to a reality that poses substantive questions: societies straddling different social forms (capitalist and pre-capitalist), in which there is no hint of the social homogeneity that is recognized in Europe and in which the States also appear as unfinished or incomplete entities. Based on these particularities, which he described with a new set of concepts (“variegated society”, “lordly paradox”, “mass”), Zavaleta wonders about the eventuality of social transformation on the continent, as well as about the role in this process of the local working class, peasants and indigenous communities. The possibility of this social knowledge, historically situated and politically involved, is what he called horizons of visibility.

This book includes what is surely his best-known work, Dual Power in Latin America, and also the introduction and plan of what promised to be his greatest work, unfinished due to his early death, Lo nacional popular en Bolivia. In addition, a selection of his most significant essays has been included, covering the political situation in Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s.