Dependency Debates at the Center for Studies of National Reality of the Catholic University of Chile, 1968-1973

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to investigate the reception and debates generated within the Center for Studies of the National Reality of the Catholic University of Chile (1968-1973) by the dependency ideas and the work of its most prominent exponents intellectuals. The above, due to the condition of relative heterodoxy existing within its academic faculty, its profuse scientific production and the capacity displayed by this organization when collaborating with the Popular Unity government, both by providing political-technical cadres and by providing advice to public entities in charge of executing key areas within the socialist transition process in Chile. For their part, the ideas of dependency, which had become hegemonic within Latin American social sciences, constituted a fundamental tool for examining peripheral capitalist societies, whose relevance we aspire to establish as part of the unprecedented process of transition inaugurated with the rise to power of the President Salvador Allende, who made indispensable the need to develop a new process of accumulation of empirical-theoretical knowledge that would allow him to guide the changes committed to his government program through new analytical tools and responses based on contingency.