Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira

Trabalho apresentado ao IX Encontro Nacional de Economia Política, Uberlândia, 8 a 11 de junho de 2004. Dados, vol.47(1): 49-84.

Abstract. The ISEB was a group of nationalist intellectuals who, in the 1950s, thought Brazil also in global sociological and political terms. They defined broadly development as capitalist and national revolution; more specifically, as an industrialization process through which the growth of per capita income would become self-sustained. In the process of national formation and institutionalization of a national market, a national bourgeoisie would associated itself the state bureaucracy to the workers, having as common objective or criterion the national interest. Their ideas were criticized by the school of sociology of São Paulo, which emerges ten years later rejecting nationalism, and insisting in class conflict. ISEB's mistakes, however, are not relate to this criticism. They overestimated the capacity of the modern sector to absorb the labor surplus existing in the traditional sector, and they underestimated the possibility that a crisis originated in excessive foreign indebtedness could put a halt to the national revolution.