XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Read or not to read Marx during the Cold War? The case of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1962-1988)

• In Event: Intelectuais e anti-intelectuais brasileiros na Guerra Fria / Brazilian intellectuals and anti-intellectuals in the Cold War

Abstract

In the 1960s, reading Karl Marx's Capital in groups and in German became a common practice in universities around the world. In Brazil, in particular, mastery of reading this book had become a kind of prerequisite for participation in the most avant-garde intellectual debate in the social sciences. The origins of this phenomenon can be traced back to the circle of USPians, around the philosopher José Arthur Giannotti, who, in 1958, proposed "reading Capital à la française", that is, following Martial Guéroult's structural reading method.

With the establishment of the authoritarian regime in 1964, the Brazilian intellectual space underwent transformations, due to a contradictory stimulus to culture and science, which were censored in their contents, but not banned at all. This framework made possible the presence of American philanthropy, embodied in the Ford Foundation (FF) and its project to develop a "new" left - that is, inspired by the American model of doing social sciences, more empirical, less theoretical, and, above all, less European.

This broad rotation of the Brazilian intellectual space can be observed in the trajectory and work of Fernando Henrique Cardoso - and particularly in his stances towards the US intellectual space and towards Latin American Marxism. This paper reconstructs them, avoiding political judgments and anachronisms, in the light of the morphological and institutional transformations that go from the "first Marxist doctoral thesis", defended by him at USP in 1962, to his consecration as a "dependentista", crystallized in his election to the presidency of the International Sociological Association (ISA) in 1983. Drawing on rarely used documentation (first editions of his works, personal correspondence, etc.), and from an objectifying perspective on Brazilian intellectuals, this work distances itself from both "condemnatory" views (which see him as a traitor to socialist principles) and hagiographic views (which explain his success as a function of the wisdom of his ideas).

Author

• Lidiane Rodrigues, UFABC