The institutionalization of Brazilian social thought and the extra-academic institutes: academic defeats and political victories of culturalist conservatism (1934-1954)

Abstract

The paper examines the first competitive selection process for the chair of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters (FFCL) of the University of São Paulo (USP), announced in October 1949, the same month in which Miguel Reale, then rector, founded the Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia (IBF). The process was concluded only in 1954, with the disqualification, for insufficient credentials, of every candidate connected to the institute. This article maintains that the boundaries between the extra-academic institute and the faculty did not precede the contest, since until 1949 both groups published in the same journals, attended the same open lecture courses and trained the same students. Documentary analysis of the FFCL yearbooks, the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia, the São Paulo press and the correspondence between candidates and members of the examining board is combined with a reconstruction of the trajectories of the cadres of the IBF, the FFCL and the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros (ISEB). It is argued that the polemic waged during the 1940s between Reale and João Cruz Costa over the existence of a Brazilian philosophical tradition was a dispute over legitimacy in philosophical production, and that the examination established a criterion that exceeded the claims to legitimacy of both sides: the academic credential. Academic defeat, however, was simultaneous with – and not prior to – the exercise of state functions by the same intellectuals, whose activity would extend from state-government secretariats to the IPES/IBAD complex of business-funded anticommunist institutes.