Discussing The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences

A review is an interpretation and, at the same time, an invitation to read. Paulo Ravecca’s book is challenging, dynamic, and thought-provoking, sparking questions and reflections within many areas of research and politics. This makes it a book with unlimited potential to stimulate and nourish research in a diverse array of matters beyond those specifically approached by it. It engages the reader – front and centre – with a stark political message: anyone can be oppressive, and oppression can happen in the name of anything. The author interrogates ‘us’, the readers, as he explores the link between knowledge and power. The work combines critical theory, epistemology, and comparative politics. This unusual blend implies in itself a contribution to questions about the type of knowledge we produce, and how we teach it. It makes us query and reflect on why we teach social sciences – specifically, political science. This book is unique in its capacity to spotlight, and interrogate, the political dimension of academic practice, disentangling ever present power relations.

The book's first chapter is an intellectual exercise of critique that targets positivism and the illusion of scholarly neutrality. Drawing from the Marxist tradition and post-structuralist, postcolonial, and queer studies, the piece argues that knowledge is a battlefield. The author keeps a critical distance and tension visà-vis his own theoretical tools. This critique of positivism that, at the same time, refuses to idealize its own gaze embraces a scholarly praxis of resistance against potential temptations to simplify the complex (and sometimes contradictory) landscape of knowledge and power. Ravecca (2019) thus interrogates the persistent lack of problematization of the link between reflection and emancipation.
The critical unpacking of positivism, scientific objectivity and its implications is developed through a wide array of methodological approaches and is empirically grounded on the recent political and academic developments in Chile and Uruguay, though the book constantly keeps a more hemispheric and multiscale perspective. Ravecca (2019) structures the book as a journey through different epistemological 'temperatures' (cold, warm, and hot) that translate "intensity levels in the engagement with the interplay between subject (i.e. subjectivity), knowledge, and power" (RAVECCA, 2019, p. 211). In other words, they refer to the distance, or lack thereof, between knowing subject and known object.
The chapter on Chile is 'cold'. The way in which the methods and techniques are mobilized expresses this epistemological temperature (for example, the different role that interviews play in this and the following chapter is revealing). The relationship between authoritarianism and political science is at the centre of this analysis. I, however, found the way the relationship between authoritarianism and neoliberalism is explored particularly interesting. It makes visible the role of the Pinochet-era Chilean political science in this relationship. The chapter is organized around the quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis of all the articles published by two leading political science journals in Chile: Revista de Ciencia Política (1979Política ( -2012 and Política (1982Política ( -2012. This examination is paired with 35 interviews and further document analysis. Ravecca (2019) builds evidence that links analysis and theoretical reflection, showing the main components of a political science moulded by -and a contributor to -the project of 'Pinochetismo'.
The chapter introduces a conceptual construct of invaluable interpretative power: 'authoritarian political science'. This concept stands as a main contribution of the book which invites us to reconsider these processes not only through their 'historical nature' -considering the context of Latin American dictatorships of the 20 th century -but also in terms of our present-day reality, with democracy finding itself in trouble -or weakened -in some parts of the continent.
The conceptualisation of 'authoritarian political science' is of key importance given that it shows how an institutional discourse can be built to justify governments and projects that damage democracy and give way to authoritarianism, sometimes even in the name of democracy itself. The concept elucidates how economic neoliberalism was 'and is' justified as the pathway to 'the most important freedom' (the freedom of markets), and how -as Wendy Brown (2006)  On the other hand, the chapter on Uruguay and its political science approximate a warmer epistemological temperature, illustrating the leading role that the subjectivity of members of the academic community plays in the analysis (through the interviews). In both the Chilean and Uruguayan cases, Ravecca (2019) critically analyses political science processes from multiple approaches. In the Uruguayan case, he shows how the discipline was institutionalised after the civic-military dictatorship (1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985), during the return to democracy. Uruguay thus did not host its own version of 'authoritarian political science' but rather developed a space in which, according to Ravecca (2019), academics became complacent vis-à-vis the vernacular liberal democracy and specifically its political parties and elites. This complacency, Ravecca (2019)  To conclude, Ravecca (2019) invites us to revisit the main reflections and findings of his intellectual tour de force, drawing theoretical dialogues, questioning the discipline and informing such reflections through t he systematic comparison of the cases examined. Finally, the possibility of a different narrative within the discipline emerges from the search for freedom through self-reflection.
Perhaps, the best description of this text has already been captured by Leo Masliah, in a song that Ravecca quotes in a different passage when speaking of writers and their words: "They do not want laurels or glory (…) They only pass onto paper (…) experiences, totally personal, zonal, (…) partial elements that when gathered are not such" 2 (Biromes y Servilletas, 1994).