São Paulo (Brasil), 1920 – 1995
By Carlos Eduardo Martins
Considered by many the most important Brazilian sociologist, Florestan Fernandes was the son of a poor and illiterate Portuguese immigrant who worked as a washerwoman and never met his father, who died shortly after his birth. He began working at six years old as a barber’s assistant and was forced to interrupt his studies in the third grade of primary school to continue working. At seventeen, he was encouraged to resume his studies by teachers at Ginásio Riachuelo, who secured him a daytime job. He then enrolled in a supplementary course and, in 1941, entered the Social Sciences program at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters, and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo (USP).
To follow the classes, largely taught by foreign professors, especially French, in their original language, he needed to develop great intellectual discipline. In 1942, he was invited by Roger Bastide to publish a paper on folklore in São Paulo in the journal Sociologia. From 1943 onward, he regularly contributed to the newspapers Folha de S.Paulo and O Estado de S.Paulo. In 1944, Fernando Azevedo invited him to be his second assistant in the Sociology II chair. In 1945, he enrolled in the postgraduate program in Sociology and Anthropology at the Free School of Sociology and Politics of São Paulo. He then linked the theoretical foundations of sociology to classical thinkers and a rigorous concern with empirical research to interpret Brazilian reality. This concern was evident not only in his work on folklore but also in his study of the social organization of the Tupinambás, with which he earned his master’s degree in 1947 and the Fábio Prado Prize in 1948, publishing the work the same year. He further developed his reflections on the Tupinambás in an analysis of the social function of war in that society, which earned him a doctorate from USP in 1951.
Rigour in Research
Transferred to the Sociology I chair, replacing Roger Bastide, he assembled a research team—including Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Octavio Ianni, Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco, Luiz Pereira, Leôncio Martins Rodrigues, Sedi Hirano, Gabriel Cohn, and Lourdes Sola, among others—to create a Brazilian sociology based on rigorous empirical research. Motivated by this purpose, he published Notes on Problems of Induction in Sociology (1952), Empirical Foundations of Sociological Explanation (1958), and Essays on General and Applied Sociology (1959).
More than creating a school of sociological thought, Florestan formed a group capable of combining systematic empirical research on Brazil’s social conditions with the classical theoretical frameworks of sociological thought (from Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber to Mannheim). For him, sociologists from underdeveloped regions should not compete with those from major centers but rather assimilate their results and focus efforts on empirical investigation of the fundamental problems of their regions, generating specializations in sociological theory related to underdeveloped capitalism and Brazil. This concern was the foundation of his militant sociology, dedicated to theoretical development and solving the country’s social problems and theoretical dilemmas. One condition he set for the research group he led was refusal of international funding, important to guarantee autonomy and creativity of thought.
The research he conducted or coordinated on Black people in Brazil or the mentality of the industrial bourgeoisie led him to gradually abandon illusions that the Brazilian industrial bourgeoisie could carry out a national-democratic revolution similar to those in central countries. Part of this transitional period includes works such as Sociology in an Era of Social Transformation (1963), The Integration of Blacks into Class Society (1964) — his thesis for full professor in Sociology I — and Class Society and Underdevelopment (1968).
In 1969, Florestan had his political rights revoked by Institutional Act Number 5 (AI-5) and was forcibly removed from USP. He managed to leave the country thanks to solidarity from abroad, especially the University of Toronto, the Canadian government, and activists. He became a full professor at the University of Toronto but returned to Brazil in 1972.
During this period, he wrote a fundamental work, The Bourgeois Revolution in Brazil (1974), in which he adopted a dependency theory approach blending concepts of classes and estates. For him, Latin American estate origins, rooted in colonial legacies, had merged with class society and prevented Latin American bourgeoisies from leading the establishment of a competitive social order capable of granting them internal legitimacy or sovereignty and international power.
Analyzing the Brazilian case, Florestan stated that the bourgeois revolution limited competition to the economic field and combined with the recycling of patrimonialism and local bossism. This process produced a composite bourgeoisie that ceded internal technological dynamism to foreign capital and accepted a subordinate role in capital accumulation, compensating economic restrictions derived from subordination with the overexploitation of labor. The 1964 coup was a key moment in this process.
In 1978, he was hired by the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) of São Paulo after a brief stint as a visiting professor at Yale. In 1979, he gave a free course on the Cuban Revolution at the invitation of students and student organizations, symbolically returning to USP, where in 1985 he became professor emeritus. He never requested reinstatement to USP, from which he had never formally resigned.
Analyses of Brazilian Authoritarianism
From the mid-1970s onward, he deepened his writings on the Brazilian and Latin American political model in light of the military power crisis and redemocratization. He identified various political forms acquired by conservative modernization: counterrevolution, détente, relative democracy, and conservative conciliation. Significant works from this period include Closed Circuit: Four Essays on Institutional Power (1976), Notes on the Theory of Authoritarianism (1979), Power and Counterpower in Latin America (1981), Dictatorship in Question (1982), New Republic (1985), and What Kind of Republic? (1986).
In 1986, he joined the Workers’ Party (PT), being elected constituent deputy. He was re-elected to the Federal Chamber in 1990. From June 1989 to August 1995, he maintained a weekly column in the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. He also wrote works such as Thought and Action: The PT and the Paths of Socialism (1989) and In Search of Socialism (1995).
With deteriorating health—after a 1975 surgery, he received a transfusion of contaminated blood and contracted hepatitis C, which progressed to liver cirrhosis—he refused privileges offered by the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government for treatment in the United States. In February 1995, after feeling ill with internal bleeding, he was found by his son waiting for care in the line at a public hospital. Asked about this, Florestan argued he went to the public hospital because he was a public servant and did not prefer queues but there were others ahead of him. Hospitalized at the Hospital das Clínicas in São Paulo for a liver transplant, he died on August 10, 1995, from multiple organ failure due to surgery complications.
