Prácticas académicas, supuestos teóricos y nuevas formas de dar cuenta del estudio de lo social: las relaciones entre la historia y ciencia política.

Abstract

This article, based on the distinction between History and Political Science as disciplines, constructs a series of problems and explores in them some of the assumptions that relate these disciplines to one another. The text is divided into five sections. The first presents a brief characterization of Political Science, stressing that it is a discipline where different types of study converge, only some of which can make scientific claims. The second part questions the uses of History in mainstream political science, based on the review of an article that discusses the subject in one of the journals most widely consulted by political scientists. The third section schematically explores the way History uses some of the main categories of Political Science and also deals with the problem of the formation of modern states to review some discussions of the «statalist» nature of the social sciences. The fourth section raises questions about the understanding of politics that underlies so-called «Political History» by locating some of the discussions promoted by historians of the Annals School, and comments on a historiographic approach to Colombian political history. The final section gathers arguments used by certain sociologists and historians to stress the fact that both History and Political Science have in common the need to develop methods that will allow them to accede to social processes that appear to be the products of random, contingency, or simply the «non-rational».

Keywords

• political science
• history
• disciplines
• academic practices
• theoretical assumptions.