Científicos e intelectuales, una nueva cultura política: José Cuatrecasas y las colecciones de flora tropical

Abstract

This work aims to show a piece of the important role that collecting and scientific collections played in the training to become naturalist during the Silver Age of Spanish science (1900-1936). It attempts to show that the Junta para Ampliacion de Estudios (JAE), the main institution that promoted such a modern scientific project, aspired to create an intellectual elite with the capacity to participate in the governance of the State (a new political culture). The JAE incarnated a rationalist scientific model that opposed the ultraconservative positions, which were defenders of a Catholic science. Both of them were involved in a struggle that was not only restricted to science, but it reached all social, political and cultural aspects of national living. This article takes the biography of the botanic Jose Cuatrecasas as starting point and its analysis will be processed from the sociocultural History of Science and the History of Ideas.