BRESSER-PEREIRA: The Symbolic Power and Scientific Legitimacy in the trajectory of an intellectual.

• Autor(a) principal: Brito, Leonardo
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Encontros
• Texto Completo: https://portalespiral.cp2.g12.br/index.php/encontros/article/view/655
• topic: Intellectuals; Power; Science.; Intelectuais; Poder; Ciência.

This article is a brief overview of my doctoral thesis as part of the Graduate Program in Social History at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). Its main purpose is to analyse the role played by social scientist Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira in the elaboration of the action plan regarding the State Reform initiated in Brazil in the second half of the 1990s, during the first term of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Bresser is par excellence an intellectual (re)producer of a given vision of the developmentalist State of crisis in Brazil, which was established from 1930s onwards. His performance in academic ranks in economics and business administration departments from the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo (nowadays EESP and EAESP / FGV-SP) and even in other prestigious universities, both inside and abroad, was crucial to legitimise him as an interlocutor and executor of a specific view of the crisis that has marked the Brazilian State since the mid-1980s. Bresser has partaken an economistic and excessively cyclical interpretation of the crisis, which had been foreseen as a fiscal one. From categories of analysis elaborated by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this study has sought to highlight some aspects of the former minister’s successful and influential career in academic life. Bourdieusian categories such as "scientific field", “scientific and symbolic capital” and "symbolic violence" have come to play a central role within the scope of my research.