Preface: Questions

In a national culture of notable variety and depth, the sociologist Chico de Oliveira has been one of Brazil s most original thinkers. A North-Easterner, he was born in 1933, in Recife, and educated there. At the age of 24 he joined sudene, the regional state development agency, working as deputy to Celso Furtado, the country s most famous economist. Both were driven into exile by the military dictatorship which came to power in the coup of 1964. Abroad, de Oliveira worked for the un in Guatemala and Mexico, before returning to Brazil in 1970, where he found employment with the social-science foundation cebrap in Sao Paulo. He later held chairs in sociology at both State and Catholic universities. In 1972 he published an iconoclastic reassessment of accepted theories of Brazilian economic development, under the title Critique of Dualist Reason. In this he took his distance from Furtado s legacy, as well as more generally the intellectual tradition of cepal, the un s Economic Commission on Latin America, whose presiding spirit was Raul Prebisch.