Nacionalismo e pragmatismo tecnogrático em Roberto Campos: um estudo sobre a sua trajetória intelectual e institucional no período 1951-1959

Abstract

This research analyzes the intellectual and institutional trajectory of Roberto Campos (1917–2001), with particular emphasis on his role as economic advisor to the Brazil– United States Joint Commission (1951–1953), as an executive of the National Bank for Economic Development (1952–1953), managing director (1956–1958), and president of the institution (1958–1959). The period under examination is decisive for understanding both the formulation and the crisis of the “non-nationalist” strand of developmentalism present in his work. It allows us to situate Campos as one of the leading architects of the technical and institutional conditions that enabled the integration of Brazilian capitalism into international capital. The research is grounded in the thesis that Campos should be understood not as a bourgeois figure, but as a managerial actor within the dominant classes of Brazilian capitalism. His objective was to organize and control the technological integration of the national economy through a technocratic and productive management of the general conditions of production—within which the State played a central role. In this process, Campos elaborated significant categorical structures that endowed his intellectual output with coherence and expressed the technocratic worldview of the dominant capitalist class of managers. This perspective diverges from the prevailing literature, which generally portrays Campos as a subordinate technician or functional intellectual aligned with the interests of monopoly capital, without recognizing him as part of the dominant capitalist class. The analysis combines an examination of his institutional roles with the internal logic of his writings, drawing on Lucien Goldmann’s genetic structuralist method. The dissertation is divided into two main parts, dedicated to Campos’s experiences in the Joint Commission and the BNDE, and it sheds light on how he contributed to the consolidation of a technocratic and “nonnationalist” developmental rationality in 1950s Brazil.