“Social History” should be readily definable as the study of historical phenomena which transcend the individual and manifest themselves in human groups. But such a definition includes almost all meaningful history; it seems to fit precisely those political and institutional studies to which social history is ordinarily contrasted. Since our main concern here is with practical historiography rather than with questions of genre, I will simply indicate through description and elimination the kind of history I mean.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1968 as a “living memorial” to the twenty-eighth president of the United States. Its aims are to support advanced research and writing on national and international issues by scholars and practitioners from all over the world, and to bring together the realms of scholarship and of public affairs, which Wilson himself combined.

During the last decade, there has been a great debate on the social role and political function of the social sciences. This debate has brought into focus certain types of research that had not been considered valid before, each with its respective theoretical framework. As I see them, the most interesting and productive of these new perspectives for the social sciences in Latin America today are (1) modesty in research, (2) primacy of the qualitative, (3) autonomous development of theoretical models, (4) interdisciplinary research, and (5) broader acceptance of individual action and commitment as validating elements for research. None of these is strictly new: on the contrary, some of them (e.g., 5) are cyclical and have quite respectable ancestors; some have been presented by other colleagues, and myself, in many places and at many times. Nevertheless, they are worthy of repetition in view of their considerable implications for research policy and social action.

The population “explosion” in latin america during the past 25 years has been followed by a veritable explosion of research into its origins, characteristics, and effects as seen from the points of view of many disciplines. Research on the economic determinants, concomitants, and consequences of population growth in Latin America has not been absent; but it has been notably less abundant than that pertaining, for example, to sociological dimensions of the phenomenon.

While dependency analysis has a long tradition within Latin America, only recently has it emerged from the relative obscurity of certain Latin American writers to be included among the approaches used by scholars in the United States. The dependency approach was first adopted by a group of “radicals” in the United States, partially as a reaction to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but also as part of a general attack on the capitalist system, the military-industrial complex, and U.S. imperialism. It is now evident that dependency analysis has emerged as a legitimate field of inquiry for Latin Americanists, even if some scholars refuse to acknowledge its existence. In spite of generating considerable analysis of Latin America and the inter-American system, the dependen tistas have not been subjected to the critical scrutiny they deserve, primarily because of the lack of academic respectability of the radicals and the different channels through which their publications appear. Aside from the critiques of Raul Prebisch (Flanders, 1964; Hodgson, 1966; Salera, 1971), an article by David Ray (1973), and the internal bickerings among the dependentistas themselves, systematic criticism of the dependency approach has been lacking. For this reason we felt the need to delineate the broad outlines of the dependency theory of underdevelopment; present a selective critique of the methodologies, content, and conclusions of the major writers; and identify some of the more potentially rewarding areas for subsequent research.