The social sciences without planning or revolution?

From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, Latin American social scientists saw themselves as important agents in the processes of change and modernization unfolding in the region’s societies. Inspired by the exuberance of the sweeping changes occurring in the modern-day world, many social scientists felt they were the best equipped not only to interpret the major political and socioeconomic processes taking place in the region, but also to deduce from those interpretations the policy directions in which Latin America’s national societies should plot their future course. The link between the generation of knowledge and active intervention in the real world -the link of organicity- was, for many, the chief element that legitimized the practice of the social sciences in the region. Based on extreme, highly illuminist self-images, such as those associated with the central-government planner or the revolutionary intellectual, many social scientists saw themselves as true links, or bridges, between science and power, or between the development of knowledge and the rationalization of the social order.