ABSTRACT
This chapter performs a global reframing of the history of political science (PS) in Uruguay, showing how the discipline has participated in broader political and ideological transformations. The main argument is that the discourse of PS on Uruguayan democracy has mostly been acritical with respect to political parties and political elites. The study ponders the role that subjectivity in general, and trauma in particular, has played in the shift from the vocal presence of Marxism in the 1960s to the uncontested hegemony of liberalism in the 1990s in academia and beyond. This is an epistemologically warm moment of the book in which memories and personal experiences become the platform for disciplinary self-reflection. The relevance of the chapter is not confined to the national case: in addition to offering a comparison with Chile, through the Uruguayan experience, regional and even global dynamics engulfing PS will be analytically unraveled. The research is based on a systematic analysis of all of the articles published by the Revista Uruguaya de Ciencia Política (RUCP) from 1987 to 2012 and 22 in-depth interviews with scholars from the Instituto de Ciencia Política (ICP) at the Universidad de la República (UdelaR).
