Abstract
This chapter studies the activity of the Ford Foundation in the academic area of Brazilian social sciences during the Cold War. It analyses the complex arena of academic competition with which the Foundation interacted as it sought to influence the conception and organization of the academic discipline of political science in a direction coherent with its international ambition: to substitute traditional political studies for comparative studies of forms of government and political behavior. The chapter engages in a sociological analysis of the agents involved in this process. It first investigates the encounter of specific Brazilian intellectual groups with two Ford Foundation program officers at a time when Brazilian political space was undergoing a restructuring (1964–1982). It then analyzes (a) the dominant recruitment practices of Foundation agents and (b) the scholarship recipients they selected; studying their family situation, college degrees, scholarships, careers and investment in their professional development. It also takes account of the position of Brazilian political scientists in the competition for national hegemony among political elites from different States in the Federation.
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Notes
- 1.
In the Brazilian Federation, the State of Minas Gerais (MG) is known as a training ground for politicians who go on to prominence on the national political scene The State of São Paulo is recognized as a significant economic and financial center in the country. The reputation of MG derives from the political power exercised by its bureaucratic elites in a familial network which has controlled the State’s politics since the days of the Empire (1822–1889) and, subsequently, since the establishment of the Republic in 1889. São Paulo has gained a dominance position in national political affairs since 1994.
- 2.
In the 1960s, there were in Brazil four distinct degrees in political studies: FACE, in Minas Gerais; The College of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo (developed from the French mission in 1934, which molded the early generations of graduates); The Free School of Sociology and Politics, created in 1933 by the business elite of São Paulo. Donald Pearson is credited with introducting empirical research as the scientific model in the 1940s; The Higher Institute for Brazilian Studies (ISEB), created in Rio de Janeiro in 1955, attached to the Ministry of Education and Culture, which was an influential center for developmental ideology. It was closed by the military government in 1964 (Miceli 1989; Massi 1989).
- 3.
The political instability generated by President Jânio Quadros’s resignation and Vice-President João Goulart’s rise to power was intensified by the civilian-military coup in 1964, which deposed Goulart, initiating a twenty-two-year military government.
- 4.
Yvon de Magalhães Pinto was a descendant of representatives of the General Assembly of the Empire and of Federal Republican congressmen, a cousin and nephew of signatories of the Minas Gerais manifesto against the dictatorship of 1942, who were, like himself, founders of the Democratic National Union Liberal Party. His uncle was one of the creators of the Free Law College at the end of the 19th century.
- 5.
This program of scholarships was later used by Mauck as a basis for the creation of the Departments of Public Administration in Nigeria, Taiwan, Korea, and Turkey.
- 6.
That is, the tradition of Columbia University in the USA, not Columbia the South American state.
- 7.
The titles of the doctoral theses developed by Ford scholarship recipients are very instructive: Carvalho , J.M. “Elite and State-Building in Imperial Brazil”; Farias , V. “Occupational Marginality, Employment, and Poverty in Urban Brazil”; Reis, E. “The agrarian roots of conservative modernization in Brazil 1880–1930”; Reis, F.W. “Political development and social class: Brazilian authoritarianism in perspective”; Schwartzman, S. “Regional cleavages and political patrimonialism in Brazil.”
- 8.
Cândido Mendes de Almeida was a founding member of ISEB and the General Secretary of the Justice and Peace Commission in Brazil, 1972–1997. He was also one of the people responsible for denouncing cases of torture in Brazil during the military regime. He held numerous positions and appointments including Visiting Professor at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Columbia (1965–1981) and the president of the International Political Science Association (1979–1982).
- 9.
Cf. Lattes Platform, CNPq. For CEBRAP , see statistical tables in Sorj (2001: 52–54).
- 10.
The Brazilian Peasantry, Columbia University Press, 1975; The Raft Fisherman: Tradition and Change in the Brazilian Peasant Economy, Indiana University Press, 1970.
- 11.
In 1983, the ANPOCS newsletter gave a complete list of the 38 fellowship grants approved by the Foundation, the diversity of the projects themes, and brought together research from UFRJ, PUC/Rio, USP, and UFRGS.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Afranio Garcia and Joana Canedo for discussing various aspects of this paper. The research on which this paper is based has been supported by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo, FAPESP.
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Canêdo, L. (2018). The Ford Foundation and the Institutionalization of Political Science in Brazil. In: Heilbron, J., Sorá, G., Boncourt, T. (eds) The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73299-2_9
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