Looking for an Identity. Brief History of Political Science in Latin America

Abstract

In Latin America the scientific study of politics is a relatively recent enterprise. For decades, its cultivation was markedly dominated by law, in particular by constitutional law, political philosophy, political theory, sociology, history and economics, from which theories, concepts, hypotheses and methodologies were imported, a plurality of approaches and paradigms emerged that made it prosper and, in turn, hampered an operational definition of the discipline as proof of its autonomy. Consequently, there are few intellectual efforts to track its development, both internally and externally, and there are few systematic analyzes that hold an empirical portrait of the intellectual and structural development of the discipline and, at the same time, of the current state of its practice in the region. Hence, what the profession of a political scientist is, what it does and what it can do is frequently confused as that activity carried out by some fan of politics in the mass media, the profession of those who make a living from politics, or simply in the opinion of the coffee tables, distorting its justification that by itself science demonstrates, first, as basic science and, later, applicable knowledge.