If Latin America's public universities are considered part of the state, then it seems plausible to characterise them as similar to the state, i.e. as clientelistic. However, this plausible hypothesis has never been examined by the literature on twentieth-century Mexican social sciences. Just like clientelism, science patrons such as US philanthropic foundations have similarly been neglected. In this article I argue that, as an alternative to what the Rockefeller Foundation perceived as clientelism and amateurism at Latin American universities, it claimed to patronise liberal scholarship, practised according to formal rational criteria. While foundations have been frequently considered part of a US imperialistic drive towards cultural hegemony in Latin America, they were not unitary actors and frequently failed to predict the actual impact of their grants. In Mexico in the 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation boosted the humanities, but missed the opportunity to support a local take on social science teaching and research.
This article questions and partially refutes three arguments about the history of international relations (IR) as a discipline. The first argument has been raised in the literature about global IR, which argues that the discipline mirrors the power gap that characterizes international politics. The second argument is that classical realist IR theory reached the zenith of its influence in the 1950s thanks to the support that Hans J. Morgenthau and his likes received from the Rockefeller Foundation. The third is that the history of the social sciences in Latin America can be told without considering foreign donors. This article shows that the patronage granted by the Rockefeller Foundation as the International Studies Center at the Colegio de México opened its doors in 1960 explains the division between IR and political science and its emphasis on realist IR theory and area studies. Two explanations account for the donor’s impact: the dexter use of conditionality and the legitimacy that those conditions had from in the recipient’s point of view. The donor changed Mexican and possibly Latin American IR.
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