ABSTRACT
This chapter critically analyzes Chilean political science (PS) during Pinochet’s dictatorship. It proposes the category of authoritarian political science (APS) as a conceptual tool to account for the interconnections between the regime and the discipline’s trajectory. It examines the way APS frames democracy on the one hand and considers how the discipline has been affected by the parameters set by the politics of authoritarianism on the other. This case study embodies a cold moment of the book, intensely focused on empirical reconstruction. It relies on a systematic and in-depth examination of all of the articles published during the dictatorship by the two main PS journals in Chile, Política and Revista de Ciencia Política, along with 35 interviews and other relevant historical records. Conceived both as a quantitative and a qualitative exercise in critical theory, the chapter has theoretical implications for situating the politics of political science—in particular, it challenges conventional views about the (ironclad) relationship between liberalism, democracy, and the discipline. APS takes us to an ignored episode of PS history that, when theoretically interrogated, denaturalizes the discipline’s dominant self-image and questions the democratic nature of liberalism.
