This paper discusses from what role a dialectical understanding can play for analyzing the case of “scientific developments in the cold war”, following Gabrielle Hecht’s book on the “technologies of empire” and how that narrative appealed to different situations in Latin America during the cold war (with the aeronautical development in Brasilia, for example). I will focus on the mechanisms that the text has to recognize the historical processes that accompany the production of that scientific knowledge, framed in a historical process that has the characteristics of a more complex historical event, such as the cold war. Afterwards, I Will focous on the philosophical implications of this matter. Specifically, I will first summarize some of the proposals for the relationship between the collective and the individual that exist in the different thinkers that we have reviewed. With this, I hope to generate a small framework of analysis to review how the case study I have selected is positioned in the historical explanation. The theoretical problem that underlies this reflection is in the diagnosis made by Emilia Viotti in her negative dialectic, and we take elements mainly from the historiographical proposal of E. P. Thompson and from the considerations on the method of Jean-Paul Sartre who marks history as the discipline in the best conditions to face the problem of totalization.