Intellectuals, Social Theory, and Political Practice in Brazil Introduction

Jawdat Abu-El-Haj and Ronald H. Chilcote describe the life of major intellectuals and their influence on cultural life in Brazil. Between the mid-1920s and 1937, Brazilians of all classes admitted that the First Republic between 1891-1930 was unsustainable, but no class had the power or the will to impose its ideology on the whole of society. Fernando de Azevedo led a new faction of the urban middle classes composed of professionals in alliance with a new urban bourgeoisie made up of merchants and importers. The intellectual camp of the industrial bourgeoisie can be traced to January 1928, when the industrialists George Street, Francisco Matarazzo, and Roberto Simonsen split from the commercial association and organized the Center of Sa~o Paulo Industries. The political support of the Paulista urban elite for the 1930 Revolution was decisive to the demise of the First Republic.