Keywords

Introduction

One of the goals of the Interco-SSH project was to study the emergence of a European research area. For the Argentine team, this inspired reflection on the experience of regionalization of SSH in Latin America. In the “Old Continent”, European associations and journals began to appear in the 1960s as transnational collaboration increased. These were the first of several indicators that a regional space for SSH was being configured, a process that accelerated during the 1980s, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall (see Heilbron, Boncourt and Timans in this volume). In Latin America, regionalization was an integration experience that began in the 1950s and was interrupted by the repression that SSH suffered in the last cycle of military dictatorships. In this chapter we analyse the regionalization cycle of SSH in Latin America to contribute to an understanding of the effects and meanings of this type of transnational structure in the development and autonomy of SSH in different regions across the globe. Where and when does science regionalization emerge? Under what conditions is regionalization possible? Beyond the policies that seek to foster such transnational integration, we will see that regionalization depends on specific cultural processes and socio-political constraints.

The movement of science institutionalization observed in this chapter resulted from the support and initiative of the supranational entities created during the second half of the twentieth century (UNESCO , Organization of American States, UN), of certain national governments, especially those of developmental orientation, of the leading Latin American state universities, and of American philanthropic foundations, mainly Ford and Rockefeller. During this same period, other academic disciplines were being modernized and international funding was also on the rise in other continents, especially Europe . Regionalization , however, was most prominently manifested in Latin America, as evidenced by professional organizations, regional teaching centres, and by research projects, journals and book series on Latin America.

This significant and long-lasting development was contingent on a deep-rooted belief that Latin America constituted a unit and that understanding this unit was necessary to then make sense of each nation or sub-region. International conditions after 1945 encouraged integration among university and scientific communities, furthering ideals that date back to turn-of-the-century modernism. This was inspired by the writings among othersFootnote 1 of Uruguayan José E. Rodó (1871–1917) and of Cuban José Martí (1853–1895) against the Monroe Doctrine.Footnote 2 As these ideas gained currency, the notion of Latin American unity was no longer based on the shared and lasting aftereffects of colonization and on Spanish and Portuguese as common languages, but instead on the search for independence in the face of the political and cultural domination of the United States and Western Europe. During the first half of the twentieth century, such ideals formed the basis for political movements of different sorts across the region, many of which had anti-imperialist tendencies. Americanism promoted a common framework for the alliance of Latin American intellectuals, to stand up to imperialism and cultural domination . This cultural position was especially triumphant during and after World War II, a period when Europe was perceived as decadent. It was time to show Latin America as a “civilization”, a singular cultural experience, a space with its own unique social integration, not merely a product of European colonization. As this chapter will show, (Latin) Americanism was already paving the way for regional scientific collaboration . After 1945, the institutionalization of SSH made social scientists into a new kind of cultural specialists, replacing modern essayists as the authorities on the social, cultural and political issues of nation and region. During the period examined here, it is no coincidence that the Latin Americanist trend within the social sciences centred on politics after the Cuban Revolution and throughout the Cold War . For this very reason, the social sciences were the target of attacks and repression during the cycle of Latin American dictatorships, a cycle which resulted in the fragmentation of these projects and ideals. By imposing openness to the “global market”, the neoliberal policies of the 1990s and 2010s also contributed (and still contribute) to the disarticulation of Latin Americanism. In this study we interpret the process of regionalization in the social sciences in Latin America, noting the characteristics of this unification and tracing its timeline between 1950 and 1980. Although there are mentions of the fragmentation and current state of the transnational frameworks in different SSH disciplines, a complete interpretation of this topic is outside the scope of this work.Footnote 3

This chapter starts by examining a series of selected indicators of regional institutionalisation: professional organisations, education and research institutions, journals, intellectual production and scientific conferences. Our analysis then expands to the field of publishing, which provides different insights into the relationship between the social sciences, politics and the broader market of symbolic goods. Academia and publishing represent two separate fields of symbolic production, with their own timelines, experts and structures. Trends in publishing are not merely reflections of what happens at universities and similarly, universities do not respond to the needs of publishing. As we shall see, ambitious SSH book series were produced before the institutionalization of disciplines like sociology, psychology or anthropology, laying the groundwork for the development of scientific cultures.

Regionalization of the Social Sciences and Emergence of Latin America as a Research Topic

A specific cycle and environment are associated with the regionalization of the social sciences in Latin America. Certain countries in the region—and especially major cities like Buenos Aires, Mexico City and São Paulo—were poles of attraction for the new “Latin American social sciences.” By the mid-1950s these three cities boasted the region’s largest and most dynamic universities with renowned research and degree programs, intellectual leaders and influential institutions. The two most important social sciences publishers in the region, Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) and Siglo XXI , also had their main offices in Mexico City. Farther south, the first regional centre for research in the social sciences opened in Rio de Janeiro and, later, two innovative graduate-level programs were instituted there, one in anthropology at the National Museum (Museu Nacional/1968) and the other in political science at the Rio de Janeiro University Research Institute (Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro, or IUPERJ /1969). Yet the regionalization or “Latin Americanization” of the social sciences was most patent in Santiago, Chile, the headquarter of many international organizations associated with the social sciences, such as the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) and the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES). Unexpectedly, the Chilean capital thus became the most transnational and intellectually intense city in the region, a vital destination for any aspiring social scientist in Latin America (Garcia Jr. 2010).

To characterise the process of regionalisation of the SSH in Latin America, the following sections present: the most influential agents and the social capital they brought to bear in this process; the main regional institutions; the first “Latin American” SSH journals ; certain research projects that established Latin America as a topic of study.

Agents

Although all starting dates are arbitrary to some degree, we could say that the founding in 1948 of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) , a U.N. institution headquartered in Santiago, was decisive for this regional development of the social sciences. Under the intellectual guidance and leadership of the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, who took charge of the institution in 1950, CEPAL soon boasted theoretical and doctrinal sway in terms of both the question of development and the very conception of the social sciences. In “El desarrollo económico de América Latina y algunos de sus principales problemas” (“The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems,” 1949), an essay that Albert Hirschman (1980) called a “Latin American manifesto” and which would be used as an outline for CEPAL’s program, Raúl Prebisch encouraged Latin American countries to abandon the “points of view of the great centres of world economy.” Latin America, in Prebisch’s view, needed to adopt a solid industrialization policy in order to overcome the stagnation that countries of the region were experiencing as a result of “a long-term decline in terms of trade.” Prebisch’s message was welcomed by both intellectual elites across the continent as well as the political groups in power in different countries in the region that made developmentalism state policy during this period.

Soon after joining CEPAL, Prebisch brought in a small group of young researchers from different countries. The majority were economists but there were a few sociologists as well (Hodara 1987; Garcia 1998). Most were under 30 years old and almost all had studied at US and European universities. Raúl Prebisch, who was nearing 50, was the only renowned Latin American among them. CEPAL’s unique emphasis on the importance of social and institutional factors in the process of economic and social development contributed to an intellectual alliance between economists and sociologists. Such an alliance, indeed, would more broadly characterize academic production during this period.Footnote 4 In this regard, the issue of economic development fostered common themes and programs of study in the social sciences across the continent. This, in turn, created political and intellectual expectations for a plan to modernize society and invest in science.

The aim of regional integration was unquestionably present at the beginning of the period, when in 1950 the first generation of sociology academics in the region—those who later became known as “chair sociologists”—founded the Latin American Association of Sociology (Asociación Latinoamericana de Sociología, or ALAS), the world’s first regional association of sociology (Blanco 2005).Footnote 5 However, the development of ALAS stalled due to the “amateur” nature of this generation of sociologists, mostly lawyers by profession, accustomed to channelling their intellectual concerns in the traditional genres of political essays and the history of ideas. In addition, the universities where they worked did not yet provide opportunities for a more effective professionalization of intellectual endeavours. In this regard, it was the next generation of social scientists to undertake the construction of a regional perspective in the social sciences when, in the mid-1950s, its members began to occupy important posts at the preeminent institutions in the social sciences. Trained in the “scientific” methods of social research (fieldwork, extended use of statistics, case studies, comparative method, etc.) and guided by social reform ideals (state modernization, cultural integration, etc.), this was the generation that built the leading regional institutions both for education and for research and for its dissemination. In addition, it promoted an agenda for debate on Latin America’s situation—social stratification and mobility, authoritarianism, economic development and modernization—that would draw attention to the social sciences and make them a source of hope for the public.Footnote 6

Europeans as Agents

Latin Americans were not the only agents involved in this process: Europeans like Gino Germani, José Medina Echavarría, Peter Heintz, Johan Galtung, Rodolfo Stavenhagen and Juan Marsal all played fundamental roles the in building institutions and implementing research programs guided by the aim for “discovering Latin America” as a research theme and topic.

Born in Italy, Gino Germani (1911–1979) came to Argentina in 1934 after serving a four-year jail term for antifascist activities during the rule of Benito Mussolini. In Rome, Germani had studied economics and in Argentina , he graduated from the School of Philosophy and Literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. In 1955 Germani founded the Department of Sociology and the Sociology Institute at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and oversaw both entities until 1965. The Spaniard José Medina Echavarría (1903–1977), who had studied law and philosophy, served as an advisor to the Spanish Congress under the Republic and as a governmental business advisor in Warsaw. After the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Medina moved first to Mexico and later to Santiago, Chile. In addition to promoting intellectual renewal in the social sciences, Germani and Medina Echavarría were true institution builders. They were highly influential where the social sciences became a discipline and were later consolidated across Latin America, including publishing houses and journals, undergraduate and graduate programs, and regional centres for education and research. The Swiss sociologist Peter Heintz (1920–1983) and the Norwegian Johan Galtung (1930-) came to Santiago as UNESCO experts (Abarzúa Cutroni 2016). They played a decisive role in starting the first regional study centre, the Latin American School of the Social Sciences (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, or FLACSO ). Heintz, who studied sociology in Köln with René König, ran the Latin American School of Sociology (Escuela Latinoamericana de Sociología, or ELAS) at FLACSO from 1960 to 1965. Before teaching at FLACSO, Galtung, a sociologist as well as a mathematician and a student of Paul Lazarsfeld, had taught social research methodology at Columbia University. The Catalonian Juan Marsal (1928–1979) came to Argentina in 1954. From 1959 to 1964, Marsal studied sociology with Germani and then received a grant from the National Scientific Research Council (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas, or CONICET) to study at Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1965. Upon returning to Argentina , he headed the Social Research Institute (Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales) at Torcuato Di Tella Institute and edited the Revista Latinoamericana de Sociología. Soon after the persecution of Jews began in Germany, the young Rodolfo Stavenhagen (1932–2016) fled Germany with his family. After seeking refuge in several countries (Italy, Switzerland, Holland, USA), the Stavenhagens finally settled in Mexico in 1940. Stavenhagen graduated from high school there before attending the University of Chicago (1951). In 1958, Stavenhagen received a master’s degree in social anthropology from Mexico’s National School of Anthropology and History (Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia) and in 1965 he earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the Université de Paris. Between 1956 and 1976, he taught at UNAM’s National School of Political and Social Sciences (Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, or ENCPyS), and from 1962 to 1964, he was the secretary general at the Latin American Centre for Research in the Social Sciences (Centro Latinoamericano de Pesquisas en Ciências Sociais, or CLAPCS) in Rio de Janeiro and director of the journal América Latina.

Latin-Americans as Agents

A changed social and political context favoured the rise of a new class of cultural producers. Between 1930 and 1960, most of the countries of Latin America experienced profound changes in both their social structures and economic and political systems. Industrialization policy, the main aim of which was import substitution in response to the 1929 crisis, altered the distribution and social morphology of the Latin American population. The process of urbanization led to an imbalance between rural and urban life and the rise of new political movements that channelled the demands of these emerging groups (Peronism, Varguism, etc.). These changes can also be seen in universities, where the student population rose considerably. Between 1950 and 1960, university enrolment in Argentina rose from 82,500 to 180,000; Brazil experienced a similar increase (from 51,000 to 95,700) as did Mexico, from 35,200 to 77,000. In some countries, this altered the balance, hierarchy and power relations between the different schools and disciplines on individual university campuses. Yet, in addition to size, the social composition of the university population was also altered as a growing number of women, Jews and children of immigrants enrolled, especially in the emerging disciplines of the social sciences. The social and ethnic origins (working-class, first- or second-generation immigrants) of certain leaders of this new generation of Latin American social scientists, were indicative of this demographic shift in the university population (Blanco and Jackson 2015).

Some of the Latin-Americans who played decisive roles in the regional institutionalization of the SSH, were Florestán Fernandes , Pablo González Casanova, Orlando Fals Borda and Eduardo Hamuy. Their disposition to innovate was partly the result of their social origins together with close contact with foreign agents and institutions. For example, Florestán Fernandes (São Paulo 1920–1995) was the son of a housemaid and he studied at the Escola Libre de Sociologia e Ciência Política and at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) with the German anthropologist Herbert Baldus. His institutional professionalization began in 1954, when he succeeded Roger Bastide in the Sociology I chair at the USP. The Mexican sociologist Pablo González Casanova (Toluca 1922) received his Ph.D. at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, under the guidance of Fernand Braudel. From 1957 to 1965, he directed the School of Political and Social Sciences, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (Barranquilla 1925–2008), who founded Colombia’s first degree program in sociology in Bogota in 1959, earned his master’s degree in sociology at the University of Minnesota and his Ph.D. in Latin American sociology at the University of Florida. Although he did not complete his Ph.D. studies, the Chilean sociologist Eduardo Hamuy, who introduced empirical sociology in his country, studied in the United States, taking classes on social research methodology at Columbia University, teaching and conducting research as a visiting professor at the City College of New York and working as a research assistant at the University of Wisconsin.

Institutions

The initiatives, the alliances and the efforts of this new generation of social scientists culminated in 1957 with an intergovernmental congress that brought together government officials and science policy experts from 19 Latin American countries. The congress representatives voted to found two centres, one for teaching and the other for research: the Latin American School of the Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Santiago and the Latin American Centre for Research in the Social Sciences (CLAPCS) in Rio de Janeiro. The Chilean economist and Christian democratic politician Gustavo Lagos Matus (Santiago de Chile, 1924–2003) was the first FLACSO director and Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto (Salvador de Bahia, 1920–2002) was the first head of CLAPCS.

FLACSO’s mission was to train experts in the social sciences at the graduate level, a mission that national universities were not prepared to undertake due to lack of qualified staff. In this regard, the new institution was conceived of as interdisciplinary (sociology, economics, public administration and political science) and during the period analysed here, two regional instruction programs were launched, the Latin American School of Sociology (ELAS) and the Latin American School of Political Science and Public Administration (Escuela Latinoamericana de Ciencia Política y Administración Pública, or ELACP) (Franco 2007; Beigel 2009).

ELAS, which opened its doors in 1958, became a powerful international centre. It became practically mandatory for ambitious graduate students in the social sciences to go there. Providing grants to around twenty students each year, the new school played an important role in shaping the intellectual capital of the social sciences in Latin America. From 1957 until 1973, when Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship sent a great number of academics and researchers into exile, ten cohorts of Latin American social scientists (174 men and 73 women) graduated from Latin American School of Sociology. The Latin American School of Political Science and Public Administration opened its doors in 1966 and four cohorts (46 men and 10 women) had graduated by 1973 (Franco 2007) (Table 5.1).

Table 5.1 FLACSO as a training center for a Latin-American SSH elite
Full size table

Finally, the Latin American Centre for Research in the Social Sciences (CLAPCS) opened the same year as FLACSO, as part of the Brazilian Institute of Education, Science and Culture (Instituto Brasileiro de Educação, Ciência e Cultura, or IBECC) in Rio de Janeiro, headed by Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto until 1965. Since that year, it has been directed by Stavenhagen and subsequently by Manuel Diégues Jr. From the beginning, CLAPCS promoted comparative research and, between 1957 and 1970, it hosted 37 research projects, including the Centre’s own projects as well as others initiated at the request of, or in collaboration with, other institutions.

Journals

Regional development can also be seen in the periodicals published during this period. Although the first national journals in the social sciences, such as the Brazilian Sociologia (USP-1939), the Mexican Revista Mexicana de Sociología (UNAM-1930) and the Argentine Boletín del Instituto de Sociología (UBA-1942), made their own attempt at regional integration by appointing social scientists from different Latin American countries to their editorial boards, it was not until the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s when two major journals hinted at the need for regional integration in their very names: América Latina and Revista Latinoamericana de Sociología. First published by CLAPCS in Rio de Janeiro in 1958, América Latina was a quarterly publication. By 1976 it had published 251 articles (113 in Spanish , 76 in Portuguese , 45 in English and 13 in French ) by some of the most renowned and up-and-coming figures in sociology both in Latin America and internationally. Although most of the articles focus exclusively on country-specific issues, a good number (45 of 251 articles) address Latin America as a whole with an additional 11 offering comparative studies of two or more countries (Lippi de Oliveira 1995). Published by the Centro de Sociología Comparada (Centre of Comparative Sociology, or CSC) at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute, the Revista Latinoamericana de Sociología was launched in 1965 (it was published from 1965 to 1971 and then again from 1974 to 1975). A total of 95 articles were published in its 22 issues, in addition to 37 research notes, 81 reviews and 38 informational pieces. Almost a third of the articles published were about Latin America.

At the Torcuato di Tella institute, the Centre of Comparative Sociology (CSC) merits special mention. Founded in Buenos Aires by Gino Germani in 1964 with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, its research agenda mainly focused on demographic and social changes in Latin America. CSC researchers conducted numerous investigations on the social and political milieu in the region. The focus included the migration, urbanization and mobilization of new urban groups, the guidelines for change in social stratification, education and economic development. Working with a large network of institutions abroad, the centre was international right from the start. The seminar that the CSC organized in 1964 is indicative of the broad regional and international cooperation it fostered. Sponsored by the Social Sciences Research Council (USA) and UNESCO , the seminar on the discrepancies in the process of economic and social development in different countries of Latin America brought together 50 scientists from 18 countries (28 from Latin America, 11 from Europe and 10 from the United States).

Research Projects

The regional development of the social sciences made Latin America a topic of study in the social sciences, but it also fostered a new standard for intellectual production and collective scientific research between different institutions in the regions and works co-authored by European and US social researchers and a new work style, i.e., comparative research. The collective study on the union structure of two Chilean industries located in the cities of Lota and Huachipato is a cogent example of this international collaboration . The research was conducted between 1956 and 1958 by the Institute of Sociological Research at the Universidad de Chile in collaboration with the Centre d’Études Sociologiques in Paris, directed at the time by Georges Friedmann. The study, published in French in 1966Footnote 7 and in Spanish the following year, was a collaborative effort involving French, Chilean and Argentine researchers (Alain Touraine, Jean Daniel Reynaud, Lucien Brams, Hernán Godoy, Torcuato Di Tella and Enzo Faletto). A similar study, the first of its kind, was conducted in 1958 and entitled “Estratificación y movilidad social en cuatro ciudades latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Montevideo y Rio de Janeiro)” [“Stratification and Social Mobility in Four Latin American Cities”]. With funding from UNESCO , this research was conducted by the Latin American Centre for Research in the Social Sciences (CLAPCS), FLACSO and the Institute of Sociology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and supervised by Gino Germani (Argentina ), Issac Ganón (Uruguay), Eduardo Hamuy (Chile) and T.P. Accioly Borges (Brazil).Footnote 8

Comparative research as the epitome of this new work style can be seen in “El desarrollo social de América Latina en la posguerra” (“Social Development of Latin America During the Post-War Period” 1963), a CEPAL report written by José Medina Echavarría and co-authored by Enzo Faletto and Luis Ratinoff; in Consideraciones sociológicas sobre el desarrollo económico en América latina (Sociological Consideration on Economic Development in Latin America 1964), also by José Medina Echavarría, as well as the most important works by Gino Germani, including Política y sociedad en una época de transición (Politics and Society in Times of Transition 1962); Sociología de la modernización. Estudios teóricos, metodológicos y aplicados a América Latina (The Sociology of Modernization: Theoretical and Methodological Studies Applied to the Latin American Case 1969), and Urbanización, desarrollo y modernización. Un enfoque histórico y comparativo (Urbanization, Development and Modernization: A Historical and Comparative Approach 1976). Another example of this genre includes the pioneering studies in the field of the sociology of culture and intellectuals in Latin America compiled by the Catalonian sociologist Juan Marsal in Cambio social en América Latina. Crítica de algunas interpretaciones dominantes en las ciencias sociales (Social Change in Latin America: A Critique of Some Predominant Interpretations in the Social Sciences, 1967), in El intelectual latinoamericano (The Latin American Intellectual 1970) and in J. Marsal (ed.) Los intelectuales políticos (Political Intellectuals 1971). Others that deserve mention include Elites y desarrollo en América Latina (Elites in Latin America 1967), edited by Seymour Martin Lipset (USA) and Aldo Solari (Uruguay) and Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina (Dependency and Development in Latin America 1969), by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto.

A brief overview of the last work cited provides insight into the regional aspect of intellectual production in the social sciences during this period. First, the book was co-authored by the Brazilian Henrique Cardoso and the Chilean Faletto. Both had been students at two of the most innovative institutions in the social sciences in the region, Cardoso at the unofficial “School of Sociology” at the Universidade de São Paulo headed by Florestan Fernandes and Faletto at the Latin American School of Sociology at FLACSO, headed by José Medina Echavarría . Their work was a best seller in Latin American and one of the main exports of the region’s social sciences (with translations into Italian in 1971, German in 1976, French in 1978 and English in 1979). Its main arguments took shape during the “Thursday meetings” of a group of researchers at ILPES, in Santiago, Chile, which trained experts in planning and development and whose Social Planning Division was directed by José Medina Echavarría (Franco 2007). The first draft of the book began circulating as a work in progress in 1967 and two years later, the publishing house Siglo XXI released it across Latin America.

The Strategic Role of Book Publishing

In previous studies, we have shown the strategic role of book publishers in the configuration of transnational intellectual communities in Latin America (Sorá 2017). Books are, indeed, a posteriori evidence of the vitality of intellectual communities. Yet publishing houses are also workplaces, sites for socializing and putting together academic projects, especially in times in which agents of modernization are excluded from their “natural” workplaces (universities) for political reasons. Among the publishing houses that participated in the construction of a “common market” for the social and human sciences, two Mexican publishers, Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) and Siglo XXI , were undoubtedly the most important.

Until the 1930s, most books read in Latin America were predominantly published by Spanish (i.e. Labor), French (i.e. Hachette) and US (i.e. Jackson Inc.) publishers. In those years, and in response to the international financial crisis, the Universidad de México opened the first School of Economics in the country but was unable to put together a degree program because of the lack of relevant bibliography in Spanish . Daniel Cosío Villegas (1898–1976), a mentor of modern economics, approached the prestigious Spanish publishing house Espasa & Calpe to discuss a book series of the most important works in the discipline for the new school in Mexico. The philosopher Ortega y Gasset, the leading authority at the Madrid-based publisher at the time, minced no words in his response to the proposal: “The day Latin Americans decide what Spain publishes, the culture in all Spanish speaking countries will be reduced to a banquette for Negroes” (Cosío Villegas 1986, 146). Cosío Villegas was absolutely furious at the Spaniard’s response, and Mexican economists realized their only option was to start their own publishing house. Banks and state institutions contributed to a trust whose capital was used to found FCE in September 1934.

By 1938, publishing in Spain had all but ceased due to the Civil War, creating a fertile terrain for Spanish publishers to “pursue the [Latin] American dream” in the dynamic capitals of the New World. Spaniards already settled in Buenos Aires joined recent exiles to start Losada, Emecé and Sudamericana, which published most of the literature Ibero-Americans would read in the following decades. President Lázaro Cárdenas implemented a government policy to bring Republican exiles to Mexico—a policy put into action by Cosío Villegas and the renowned essay writer and diplomat Alfonso Reyes.Footnote 9 Upon arriving to Mexico, prestigious Spanish poets, philosophers, editors and social scientists like Enrique Díez Canedo, José Ímaz, José Gaos and José Medina Echavarría were hired as FCE collaborators and welcomed at La Casa de España, a cultural centre later renamed El Colegio de México (1940) which eventually became the most renowned academic institution in the country. While the Spaniards at FCE were in favour of expanding the catalogue to encompass all the social sciences and humanities , Cosío Villegas and Alfonso Reyes “Latin Americanized” the selection of titles, launching the books series Biblioteca Americana (American Library) and Tierra Firme (Mainland). While Biblioteca Americana gathered works by the authors of the emancipation of Latin American countries, Tierra Firme hired the most renowned intellectuals in the region to write essays for a comprehensive encyclopaedia of Latin America. The goal was to present a sort of inventory of the continent’s common problems and the challenges to face (Sorá 2010).

The books series published in Mexico included excellent translations of both historic writings in the social sciences across the globe as well as some of the latest contemporary works. During José Medina Echavarría’s time directing the FCE sociology book series, he introduced Latin American readers to Spanish translations of influential works by authors such as Max Weber, Karl Manheinn, Ferdinand Tönnies, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto (Blanco 2009; Moya López 2013).Footnote 10 Medina Echavarría’s knowledge of Germany’s tradition in sociology was the result of long stays there during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Gino Germani did similar work from Buenos Aires, where he edited the Ciencia y Sociedad (Science and Society) book series at the publishing house Abril and the Biblioteca de Psicología Social y Sociología (Social Psychology and Sociology Library) book series at Paidós. With Spanish language editions of works by Erich Fromm, George Mead, Karen Horney, Bronislaw Malinowski, Karl Popper, Talcott Parsons and Charles Wright Mills, Germani provided a new frame of reference for the social sciences in the region (Blanco 2006).

Although book publishing contributed to the institutionalization of the social sciences and humanities, it was its own differentiation process. This section will show how the development and expansion of the Latin American book market predated the social disciplines and also fostered their integration within a regional cultural arena. For this reason, it is important to clarify certain aspects of the symbolic unification that the field of publishing supported through its experts and its actions, especially those associated with regional unity. The ideals associated with a common understanding and a symbolic connection across the continent took shape in Latin American publishing space; in the case of FCE, the First International Student Conference held in Mexico in 1921 as part of the centennial celebration of Mexico’s independence was critical to the new publishing house’s main objectives. As we will see, the (Latin ) Americanism fostered during the conference was the result of the friendships and alliances formed by the student leaders in attendance. Representatives from 25 countries, mainly from the Americas and Europe, attended the event. The Argentine delegation attracted plenty of attention due to the international coverage of student protests for university reform in 1918. The Argentines had fought for student participation in university administration, abolition of the existing chair system, support for new competitive-based university positions, freedom from imperialism, etc. At the conference in Mexico, participants forged many long-term alliances. The event was coordinated by Cosío Villegas, president of Mexico’s Student Federation at that time. One of the Argentine delegates was Arnaldo Orfila Reynal (1897–1998), who promoted Mexican culture among Argentina’s avant-garde intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s after his return to Argentina . When FCE began its international expansion by opening its first branch abroad in Buenos Aires in 1945, Cosío Villegas chose Orfila Reynal as its director.

Although Cosío Villegas’s career had much in common with those of the so-called “chair sociologists” (studies in law, political/diplomatic positions, cultural commissions, etc.), his ever-precarious position within the governing elite of Mexico forced him to reinvent himself on several occasions, illustrating the transformations underway in the social sciences in Latin America. In the mid-1920s, Cosío Villegas studied economics at the University of Wisconsin and in 1929 he joined Gonzalo Robles, Emigdio González Adame, Jesús Silva Herzog and other “missionaries” of state modernization and culture in Mexico in lobbying for a degree program in economics. In 1948, he reoriented his scholarly interests towards history. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Cosío Villegas moved to New York and spent three years working on a history of Modern Mexico. Upon his departure, a “natural” candidate for the post—Orfila Reynal—took his place as the FCE director. With a doctorate in chemistry from Universidad de La Plata, Orfila was an Argentine militant socialist and founder of the Universidad Popular Alejandro Korn.

By the end of the 1940s, FCE’s catalogue in the humanities and social sciences had brought the publisher enormous prestige. Orfila brought to Mexico the Argentine tradition of “cheap editions”, creating two books series, Breviarios (Epitomes) and “Popular.” The foreigner Orfila “Mexicanized” the catalogue, creating Letras de México (Mexican Literature ), a book series that released the contemporary canon of national authors like Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes. Towards the end of the 1950s, as part of his growing commitment to the cause of the Cuban Revolution, Orfila began editing political works on the Third World.

Under Orfila Reynal, FCE continued to expand across the continent and beyond, opening a branch in Santiago (1954), Lima (1961) and Madrid (1963). This was part of Cosío Villegas’s strategy to join the “American extremes,” and slowly gain a foothold in Spanish publishing from the Americas. However, in 1964, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) administration lurched to the right when Gustavo Díaz Ordaz—an undercover CIA agent—was sworn in as Mexico’s president. A conservative intellectual group now had the backing it needed to remove the “communist foreigner” (Orfila Reynal) from his post at the head of one of the most important publishers in Latin America. The dismissal was justified by the publication of two books: Spanish language versions of Listen Yankee by C. Wright Mills and The Children of Sánchez by Oscar Lewis.

This battle, fought on the front of the Cultural Cold War , produced a schism in the history of Mexican culture (Sorá 2011). When he was relieved of his post in October 1965, Orfila Reynal received the support of “an army of 500 intellectuals,” according to testimonials from the time. After a series of fundraising events, the allied intellectuals raised around three hundred thousand dollars and proposed that Orfila start a new publishing house that would continue the intellectual and scholarly renovation and political emancipation that he had begun as the head of FCE. After all, Orfila was the most renowned publisher among important colleagues across the globe like Alfred Knopf, François Maspero, Gaston Gallimard and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The publishing house that was born as a result of these efforts was Siglo XXI . From the start, illustrious Latin American writers like Julio Cortázar, Carlos Pellicer, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Mario Vargas Llosa expressed their support for the initiative, even offering to cede the rights to their works to Orfila’s new publishing house. However, Orfila decided that instead of reediting works of literature , Siglo XXI would focus on contemporary social and political issues. Thus the Siglo XXI catalogue moved away from literature and history, the two genres that had been considered critical in essays about specific countries within Latin America and the continent as a whole. The words of Carlos Monsiváis summarize the main focus of the Siglo XXI catalogue:

Initially, Siglo XXI was the publishing house that presented some of the most overarching trends in the period known for the Cuban Revolution, new Latin American thought, the “Boom,” the awe inspired by dependence theory, the downfall of guerrilla warfare across the continent, the emergence of liberation theory, the new methods for community education, Marxist revisionism. Siglo XXI published Pablo González Casanova, Paulo Freire, Poulantzas, Lacan, Marta Harnecker, the Central American revolutionaries, the Marxist classics, Argentine sociology (…) For a decade, leftist groups and parties, Christian base communities, students of the social sciences, revolutionary nationalists and all those dismayed by poverty and exploitation sought out Siglo XXI to become informed, to create a horizon of revolutionary expectations, to define and redefine the meaning of their actions. (Monsiváis 1993: 35)

In all of the cultural enclaves where Spanish is spoken, Siglo XXI was the top publisher of cutting-edge works in the social sciences, politics and literature, at least from 1965 to 1975. Due to both its unique start-up capital and the triangular division of work between Mexico City, Madrid and Buenos Aires, the publishing house held sway across Ibero-America. Siglo XXI waged what was perhaps the last battle to establish a common continental culture among readers from Latin America. Argentina’s military dictatorship led the first attack against such a project. A week after the coup d’état on March 24, 1976, a group of marines raided the branch of Siglo XXI in Buenos Aires and caused damage that would prove irreparable to the publisher’s project.

Fragmentation

Starting in the second half of the 1960s, the growing political instability that would eventually culminate in military coups in almost every country in the region had stalled the regional development of the social sciences in Latin America—albeit to varying degrees in each country—and the accumulation of intellectual capital that had accompanied it. After dictators seized power in Uruguay and Chile in 1973, and in Argentina in 1976, many departments and degree programs in sociology, anthropology and psychology closed. Professors were forced into exile and social research gradually shifted to the private sphere (Trindade 2007).

Brazil, where a dictatorship came to power in 1964, was a very different story. Since the SSH were seen as useful for development policies, the institutionalisation of the social sciences was not inhibited in any way under military rule in that country: on the contrary, those disciplines expanded at both undergraduate and graduate levels (Garcia 2009). In this regard, and despite political persecution—mainly targeted at the group headed by Florestan Fernandes at the USP—the social sciences were consolidated at university level through the creation of new programs of studies like those in anthropology at Museu Nacional (1968) and at UNICAMP (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1971); the political science program at IUPERJ (1969); and the sociology programs at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (1967) and Universidade de Brasilia, among others (Ortiz 1990). Something similar occurred in Mexico, where new undergraduate and graduate programs helped the social sciences to expand at different universities and research institutes.

In any case, the broader consequence of this fragmentation process, which was exacerbated in the countries with the most violent and destructive dictatorships, was a clear alteration of the institutional development of the social sciences, where research and production of social knowledge passed from public universities to independent private institutions. In this new context, the Latin American Social Sciences Council (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, or CLACSO ), founded in 1967, played a major role in maintaining the “Latin American agenda” for social sciences in the region. By 1989, 113 public and private research centres (some university-affiliated) from 21 countries had joined CLACSO.

As a transnational institution that served as a mediator and channel for funding from different US and European foundations, CLACSO had the resources needed for education and research in the social sciences to continue, even in the face of adverse conditions within specific countries, through different grants and degree programs at the graduate level. This institution was also responsible for keeping Latin America at the top of the agenda of the social sciences in Latin America, as attested by numerous works published over the years by Siglo XXI . Most of these works detailed the results of symposiums organized by CLACSO.

However, during the years of dictatorship in the Southern Cone,Footnote 11 the debate gradually shifted from economic development to the question of the transition to democracy and the possibilities for constructing a democratic political culture. A milestone on this new agenda was the regional conference on “Social Conditions for Democracy” organized by CLACSO in San Jose, Costa Rica, in 1978. In the mid-1980s, as part of the transitions to democracies, stability gradually came to characterize national universities and more full-time teaching positions became available as well. This brought social research back to universities to the detriment of private research centers, many of which were forced to close. Since then, although a certain regional focus has remained on the social sciences at both the institutional and intellectual level over the past two decades; its intensity has decreased considerably.

Conclusions

Our analysis of the extent of regionalization in the social sciences in Latin America reveals how cities like Santiago, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City were well positioned at a certain point in time to become international poles of excellence. It was a period marked by the Spanish Civil War, a World War and the Cold War , economic dependence, the ebb and flow of funding for research and university education, and dictatorships . The cycle of regionalization in the social sciences examined here reveals that scientific autonomy depends on both accumulating certain resources and on overcoming obstacles of all sorts.

The continental integration of SSH is not a natural fact or a necessary historical development. It could not have been achieved through state policies alone. In Latin America it was instead a long-term cultural development that required a transnational framework of social relations and shared beliefs between the producers of ideas that made regional integration a priority. Our study shows that the regionalization of any sphere of cultural production emerges as a strategy for practices and models of thought in critical contexts of symbolic and political domination . In other words, regionalization occurs when countries in a cultural area lack conditions (as in the case of Latin American countries) or lose strength (as in the case of the main science producing countries of Western Europe) to compete with the hegemonic centres for the production of universal knowledge, like the United States in the Global Age.

At the end of the nineteenth century, (Latin ) Americanism emerged as an intellectual movement to combat the Monroe Doctrine. It transformed over the course of the twentieth century to combat other forms of cultural domination like the Spanish monopoly on book publishing. Cultural producers in the different countries of Latin America had joined forced prior to the national-regional institutionalisation of the social sciences. The CEPAL “manifesto” made the argument for a research program that would explain the global causes of economic backwardness, social inequality and barriers to development as part of a world systems theory. In the late 1960s, dependence theory expanded this program of knowledge globally. These and other theories developed in the Global South made politics a primary issue. The social sciences and the humanities established models of thought that in many cases laid the groundwork for the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For this reason, SSH agents were subject to persecution by those who violently defended the Western order in the context of the Cold War . Once democracy was restored in the 1980s, regional integration in Latin America promoted political institutions such as Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR). Yet on the cultural level, no similar integration occurred in the period here examined. As an ideological framework, globalization seems to depend on the dismantling of previously valid transnational identification principles, like Americanism. Today, social sciences professionals are likely to communicate with each other and travel to neighbouring countries more often than in the past. But Latin America is no longer a global issue or a significant object of knowledge. This may be a sign that the world is becoming more hierarchical and asymmetrical or that the struggles for the definition of science and its meaning have shifted to other regions like East Asia. This shift indicates that social scientists in Latin America will need to think critically about their possibilities to become dynamically involved in the challenges posed by contemporary structures for the production of universal knowledge. Perhaps it is the right moment to stimulate new forms of regional collaboration, as our European colleagues are trying.