Notes for a History of the Science of Political Psychology

Abstract

This paper presents the general lines and the first results of an “archeological” research program about the genesis of political psychology in the nineteenth century. Although it only began to be recognized as a disciplinary field in the 1960s, we demonstrate how political psychology was an important contender, later to be invisibilized, in the great debates leading to the shaping of the social sciences amid the convulsions that agitated the previous century. The article also suggests that political psychology should be considered more of a dynamic interdisciplinary field than a discipline in the traditional sense.