Profession: Latin Americanist Richard Morse and North-American historiography of Latin America

• Autor(a) principal: Tenório, Maurício
• Data de Publicação: 1989
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.fgv.br/reh/article/view/2279

In the 1960s, U.S. historiography and social sciences experienced an intellectual crisis. While a new unified approach is yet to emerge, today there exist visible tendencies which brake with the 1960s type of approach. This essay deals with one prominent tendency which is to be found in the development of North American theoretical approaches to Latin America. It focuses on the works of U.S. scholar Richard M. Morse. Although Morse by no means represents the typical "Latin Americanist", his works serve to illustrate tha major changes in American historiography and Social Sciences which have occurred in the last twenty years. During the 1960s the American study of Latin America was significantly influenced by both an empiricist tradition in historiography and by the ahistorical approach which characterized the social sciences. These two trends were very much rooted in the structural-functionalist approach in vogue during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The intellectual and political crises of the late 1960s precipitaded, among other things, the reevaluation of the so-called "liberal tradition" of thought. The result was a new approach which tended to be more complexand more open to a post-positivist theoretical influence. Morse, for example, passed from an approach informed by modernization theory - which in turn was based on Parson's interpretation of Weber - to an approach which emphasized Latin America's distinctive cultural and political tradition. While this paper critically analyses Morse's works, it also acknowledges Morse's valuable contributions to the understanding of Latin America.