Ronald Chilcote's approach to the history of intellectuals is refreshing in several ways. Rather than concentrating on a few famous big names, he introduces the reader to a far wider range of ‘scholars, teachers, journalists’ (p. 8), mainly on the political Left, who contributed to debates about Brazil's national economic development. He delineates their various roles in the eco-system of knowledge, but also outlines their work and traces their intellectual trajectories, in an ambitious attempt to keep ideas, ideologies, institutions and significant individuals all together within the frame. Instead of the usual focus on the capital city, with an occasional nod to the provinces, he maps out the competing orientations of two major intellectual centres: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The book's main argument is that in the mid-twentieth-century debates about national development, São Paulo intellectuals focused on civil society, while those in Rio concentrated more on the state. The evidence for that case is substantially drawn from interviews and conversations the author has had with more than 60 social scientists and policy-makers in Brazil over the last half century. There is probably no other scholar from outside Brazil who has achieved such a sustained level of access to Brazilian intellectuals reflecting on their own history. Digitised tapes, with transcripts and/or summaries of the interviews, are now available in the library of the University of California, Riverside, for the benefit of future researchers, but fortunately a good deal of the content of these interviews can also be found in this volume.
The two chapters on intellectual life in Rio and São Paulo are the heart of the book and where its main interest lies. The work of Rio intellectuals was carried out mainly under the aegis of the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros (ISEB), a graduate education and research centre opened by the Ministry of Education in 1955 to conduct social science research into Brazil's economy, society and politics. Chilcote vividly conveys the fertility of intellectual life at ISEB, while remaining clear-sighted about the constraints and difficulties experienced by its participants. In São Paulo, by contrast, there was no single institutional focus, although the Escola de Sociologia e Política and its journal Sociologia (1938–64) was one major site of exchange, as was the Revista Brasiliense (1955–64). Chilcote is rarely explicit about how he sees the relationships between intellectual environments and intellectual production, but in posing the question and in the substance of his account he provides the basis of some possible answers. These two chapters are followed by a thoughtful survey of contributions by Brazilian intellectuals to the understanding of comparative economic development, both empirical and theoretical, in which Chilcote shows dependency theory to be more diverse than is usually acknowledged in the Anglophone academy. There are also two synoptic chapters, one of which offers an overview of Brazilian political thought from 1930 to the 1980s, including a useful survey of how the debates have been analysed by Brazilian historians of ideas. The other, final chapter is a (rather frustratingly) brief account of the Brazilian Left's thinking about democracy, which makes reference to the educational ideas of Paulo Freire, to the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) and to Brazil's diverse social movements, taking the story up to Dilma Rousseff's election victory of 2010. The book is admirably wide-ranging in scope, although sometimes at the expense of leaving this reader wishing for more elucidation and interpretation from the author.
Overall, the focus on political economy, especially national development policy, sits awkwardly within an organising framework shaped by the cultural concept of national identity. This idea is taken as a given, with little reference to the extensive literature debating its meaning and connotations, even that from Brazil itself (Roberto Schwarz is in the bibliography, but not Silviano Santiago). As is amply demonstrated by the work of the intellectuals he discusses, there are many aspects, both economic and political, to viable nation-statehood: an independent foreign policy; control of natural resources; overcoming inequalities; protecting and promoting industry; establishing the primacy of public over private interests; challenging the intellectual and cultural impositions of hegemonic external powers. The complexity of the work by Brazilians to address these questions is in tension with this book's uncritically adopted opposition between ‘colonial mentality’ and ‘national identity’.
The framework remains firmly national throughout, to the extent of omitting someone as influential as the radical geographer Milton Santos (1926–2001), who spent much of his life teaching and researching abroad after the coup of 1964. More significant than any specific omissions, however, is the wider truth that so many of the individuals discussed in this book were themselves transnational, both in outlook and experience. A well-known example is Celso Furtado, who together with Raúl Prebisch led the extensive work on national economic development carried out in the 1950s at the Comisión Económica para América Latina of the United Nations (the Economic Commission for Latin America, CEPAL), in Santiago. As a young man, he had fought in Italy and studied in Paris. Like other Brazilian social scientists of the time, his main sources of comparisons and connections were Spanish American countries, especially the larger economies where similar problems were confronted. As Chilcote shows, Brazilian intellectuals also looked further afield: for example, Cândido Mendes de Almeida, who worked at the Instituto de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos in Rio and in 1963 published an extensive comparison of national development in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In these respects, I could not help thinking that the analytical framework did not always do full justice to the richness of the material. Overall, however, there is much to learn about intellectual life in twentieth-century Brazil from this volume, which no other scholar could have written. As a US economist and political scientist of many years’ standing, Chilcote has drawn upon his deep knowledge of Brazil's economic and political history to analyse the work of his counterparts in Brazil with judicious sympathy.
