ABSTRACT
The collapse of the industrialization process through import substitution, and the social and economic crisis that followed led to a profound questioning of the developmentalist project, the theoretical principles upon which the model has established and the scientific sociology's competence to interpret social change. According to critics, scientificism had reached its maximum cohesion as a profession and an ideology between 1957 and 1962. The dramati course of events that followed Gino Germani's resignation from the UNESCO position was the result of a number of factors: the political climate that characterized Argentina in the 1960s; stagnation of the theoretical paradigms upon which scientific sociology was built; and Germani's own difficult temperament. The disputes about functionalism; the relationships among science, ideology and neutrality; the whole question of the use of foreign funds and—last but not least—the problem of dependency were all themes that gradually delineated a new panorama for Argentine social sciences.
