Problems of political theory from Latin America* Gildo Marçal Brandão** * This text takes up and expands arguments contained in Galvão Quirin, Célia 1998 Political Theory and Academic Institutionalization. ** Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of São Paulo, scientific coordinator of the Support Center for Research on Democratization and Development. In any case, it is symptomatic of the resurgence, in Latin America and in Brazil, of interest in theory - social and political - at a time when the battle for the academic institutionalization of the social sciences seems to have been definitively victorious. It is also significant that the appearance of interventions, which reveal a certain discomfort with some results of that task, comes to light when the pressures of research funding agencies and internal methodological disputes within the disciplines seem to force a new step towards the one-dimensional classification of scientific activity and a readjustment of the training of the social scientist. It is stimulating that this resurgence of interest occurs when the depth of the intellectual crisis and the speed of contemporary economic, social, technological, and political transformations are causing the putrefied frameworks of our thought to explode, both in their apocalyptic and integrated version. In the Brazilian experience, the professionalization of the social sciences and investments in theory construction went in opposite directions. As Gabriel Cohn alluded to in his intervention at the Encontro da Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais, the most ambitious attempts to produce theory that is simultaneously stimulating for empirical research, updated in relation to developments in philosophy and international methodological reflection, and solidly anchored in the defense of the relevance of intellectual projects for public life, were exhausted in the early '60s with the controversy between Guerreiro Ramos and Florestan Fernandes on the nature and role of social theory. After that, throughout the process of institutionalizing academic science during the military period, theory will be transformed into an instrument to be used punctually, while an exacerbated politicization of social science occurs. At this point, the gap between the ambitions with which we started, marked by the will to respond to the Marx-Weberian challenge of producing knowledge capable of confronting the demons of our time, and some of the results we reach, when trying to impose the hegemony of an 'academic party' that sections knowledge into autarkic latifundia, reifies the method independently of the object to be investigated, and reduces scientific training to the learning and refinement of technical procedures while externally professing an excessive faith in institutional engineering, which in the meantime does not exempt the mediation of professional politicians in public life. Unlike the sociology of intellectual life that constructs itself in sociology of knowledge, it is not possible to explain this difference by internal political disputes within academic activity or to suppose that it is essentially the result of the rational choices of the academic elite or the micro-political strategies of coteries. This gap between ambitions and results is also linked to the perverse effects of our recent political history and to changes in the structure and ways of being of society, which on the other hand ensures its non-gratuitousness. Obviously, no one is thinking of leaving aside what was conquered during those twenty or thirty years, but it is necessary not to minimize the perception that something was lost in this process. For this reason, the results we commemorate today, as the poet Luis Vaz de Camões would say, 'different in everything from hope', relativize the self-congratulatory discourse at the moment of its triumph. When it comes to political science, this discomfort has a name and manifests itself as a return of the debate on the question of theory, hitherto repressed by the aforementioned exacerbated politicization of social science, and also, who knows, primarily by the less recognized uncritical absorption of the results of the old 'conductivist revolution' and the modern 'institutionalist', which together contributed to making forget the methodological reflection on the conceptual presuppositions of research activity that was being done to foster generalized illiteracy regarding the formal problems of exposition and to confine vocation within the narrow limits of the profession. From this point of view, the terms used by Sheldon S. Wolin to combat methodolatry, and also those of Isaiah Berlin to criticize a political science that is not intended to educate political discernment, remain fully current. In any case, anyone in the human sciences who speaks of theory is doomed to face the problem of the relationship between science and philosophy on the one hand, and the relationship between theory and empirical and historiographical research on the other, since both constitute the neuralgic field of discussion. There is no radical separation between them. In fact, the question of method constitutes the intersection between the two, especially if we understand it more in the Kantian sense of criticism of knowledge than as something limited to the use and school learning of research techniques and procedures. On the other hand, unlike the natural sciences, which need to forget their founders, the social sciences do not advance without remaking their own path, and for that reason the question of the classics is constitutive for them: it is inscribed in their own structure and in their way of being. In the case of political science, this broad theme is exacerbated by the inescapable relationship of the discipline with its own tradition - with the fact that it cannot help but relate to it.