Crise da ciência política behavioralista e as origens os think tanks nos Estados Unidos

Abstract

The formation of the institutional space of think tanks, currently the main liaison between political power and intellectual production in the United States, was a crucial element in the rise and consolidation of the modern conservative movement in that country in recent decades. Rather than simply opposing the specific ideological content of the so-called post-war liberal consensus , contributing decisively to the sharp right-wing turn in American politics, the prevailing conservative think tanks forged a new matrix of discur-sive production and exercise of political power, conventionally characterized by what has been called the market of ideas . The main hypothesis of this work is that this new dis-cursive matrix, founded in the notion of equilibrium in the supply of conflicting ideolog-ical opinions, emerged as an attack on the old liberal matrix of discursive production, anchored in the idea of scientific objectivity and nonpartisan neutrality, which, in its turn, was established by the American academic apparatus, particularly in the field of social sciences, with the advent of the behaviorist revolution in the context of the Cold War. The purpose of this dissertation is to unveil the genesis of this new type of collective intellectual and, more appropriately, its discursive matrix, capable today not only of in-fluencing and shaping the adoption of specific public policies, as it is usually argued, but, much more importantly, also capable of setting the ideological horizon within which such policies are legitimately conceived, debated and made feasible. It is argued, therefore, that the emergence of that phenomenon was only made possible due to the deed crisis inside Cold War academy, symbolized by the students rebellion on university campuses and, which is less reminded, by the insurgency of professionals in the social sciences disciplines, particularly, what I propose to analyze here, in the political science.