Caio da Silva Prado Júnior (February 11, 1907November 23, 1990) was a
Brazilian historian, geographer, writer, philosopher and politician.
His works inaugurated a new historiographic tradition in Brazil, identified with
Marxism
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
, which led to new interpretations of the Brazilian colonial society.
Biography
Caio Prado graduated with a degree in
law
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been vario ...
from Faculdade do Largo de São Francisco,
São Paulo
São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for 'Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the GaWC a ...
in 1928, where he would later become a
Professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...
of Political Economy. He was politically active during the 1930s and 1940s, including during the
1930 Revolution. In 1933, he published his first work - ''Evolução Política do Brasil'' (Political Evolution of Brazil) - an attempt to understand the country's political and social history. In 1934 he took part in the foundation of Brazilian Geographers Association.
After a trip to the Soviet Union, at the time under Stalin's dictatorship, he published ''URSS - um novo mundo'' (Soviet Union - a New World), which was banned by
Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas (; 19 April 1882 – 24 August 1954) was a Brazilian lawyer and politician who served as the 14th and 17th president of Brazil, from 1930 to 1945 and from 1951 to 1954. Due to his long and controversial tenure as Brazi ...
' government's censorship. He then joined the
Aliança Nacional Libertadora which he chaired in São Paulo.
In 1942 he published the classic ''Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo - Colônia'' (Formation of Contemporary Brazil - Colony)
, which should have been the first part of a work on Brazilian historic evolution. However, the following volumes were never written. In 1945 he was elected ''deputado estadual'' for the ''Brazilian Communist Party''. He published the newspaper ''A Platéia'' and, in 1943, with Arthur Neves and
Monteiro Lobato
José Bento Renato Monteiro Lobato (18 April 1882 – 4 July 1948) was one of Brazil's most influential writers, mostly for his children's books set in the fictional Sítio do Picapau Amarelo (Yellow Woodpecker Farm) but he had been previously ...
, he founded Editora Brasiliense (Brasiliense Publishing House), for which, later, he published ''Revista Brasiliense'', between 1956 and 1964. After 1964, he was persecuted by the military dictatorship.
In 1966 he was elected Intellectual of the Year by the União Brasileira de Escritores, following the publication of ''A revolução brasileira'' (Brazilian Revolution).
Works
The most important works of Caio Prado Junior are:
* 1933: ''Evolução política do Brasil''
* 1934: ''URSS - um novo mundo''
* 1942: ''
Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo'' (translated as ''The colonial background of modern Brazil'' Berkeley : University of California Press, 1967)
* 1945: ''História Econômica do Brasil'
Access here
* 1952: ''Dialética do Conhecimento''
* 1953: ''Evolução Política do Brasil e Outros Estudos''
* 1954: ''Diretrizes para uma Política Econômica Brasileira''
* 1957: ''Esboço de Fundamentos da Teoria Econômica''
* 1959: ''Introdução à Lógica Dialética (Notas Introdutórias)''
* 1962: ''O Mundo do Socialismo''
* 1966: ''A Revolução Brasileira''
* 1971: ''Estruturalismo de Lévi-Strauss - O Marxismo de Louis Althusser
* 1972: ''História e Desenvolvimento''
* 1979: ''A Questão Agrária no Brasil''
* 1980: ''O que é Liberdade''
* 1981: ''O que é Filosofia''
* 1983: ''A Cidade de São Paulo''
External links
Economic history of Brazil, author Caio Prado Junior, in Portuguese
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Prado, Caio Junior
1907 births
1990 deaths
People from São Paulo
20th-century Brazilian historians
Brazilian Marxists
University of São Paulo alumni
University of São Paulo faculty
Brazilian geographers
Marxist historians
20th-century geographers
20th-century Brazilian philosophers