SOCIAL SCIENCES BETWEEN “SOCIETY” AND “POLITICS”: FORD FOUNDATION AND INTERPRETATIVE DISPUTES AROUND THE MEANING OF THE 1964 COUP

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze the tensions of the Brazilian sociological field in the 1960s, verifying the existence of an antagonism between models of science for the country in the period. As a way of accessing such tensions, I defined as an object the interpretative disputes of two groups around the meaning of the 1964 coup: a first, by authors who took sociology as their axis to explain the coup and the dictatorship (Florestan Fernandes as a representative of this paradigm), and a second, who saw in political science the discipline best adjusted for the understanding of these phenomena (Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos as a central figure). The hypothesis, therefore, is that, more than a simple theoretical divergence, these points of view express the very quarrel of the field of social sciences of that period, erected between poles of society and/or politics. More broadly, I intend to investigate the way in which the process of decline and hegemony of these paradigms was influenced by institutions that promote science, especially through the private funding of the Ford Foundation. With this, there was a reordering of the field of Social Sciences in the country.