Cultura política, política exterior y caducidad del modelo del Estado como actor racional: el caso argentino

The social sciences are afflicted by a notable lack of cumulative development. A recent illustration of this phenomenon is a paper first published in September 2003 simultaneously by Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA) and the United States Institute of Peace, under the signature of Jorge I. Domínguez, David Mares, Manuel Orozco, David Scott Palmer, Francisco Rojas Aravena, and Andrés Serbin, titled "Boundary Disputes in Latin America". In the section titled "Why did territorial disputes linger?" there is not one mention of the contents of the educational curriculum as a major cause for the permanence of territorial disputes in Latin America. This is so despite the fact that relevant research was undertaken in the field in the 1980s, and that partly as a consequence of this work, the leading author of the WCFIA piece invited the present author to Harvard as Visiting Professor of Government in 1994. The old research, published in Spanish, English and Italian, was simply forgotten, despite its having received positive comment by the U.S. Library of Congress’ Handbook of Latin American Studies and other prestigious sources. This is interesting inasmuch as it reveals a hard datum relevant to the sociology of socialscientific knowledge. Under the circumstances, it has seemed wise to recast a part of the results of the old research into a new paper. Other parts will be republished shortly.