By LUCAS TRINITY*

Commentary on the book by Diogo Valença de Azevedo Costa & Eliane Veras Soares

1.

The work reviewed here, which is part of the series “Classic and Contemporary Latin American Social Theory”, edited by Adrian Scribano, takes seriously propositions put forward in the 1950s and 1960s by authors such as Florestan Fernandes himself and Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto about the decisive importance of social theory (re)elaborated in the (semi)peripheries of the capitalist world system for international socio-scientific production.

It also follows the agenda outlined by a myriad of authors – such as Brandão (2010), Maia (2011), Lynch (2013), Tavolaro (2014), Botelho (2019), Ribeiro, Dutra and Martins (2022), Rios and Klein (2022), Oliveira and Alves (2023) – of not only questioning the division between social theory (in the North) and social thought (in the South), but of highlighting that Social Theory is also done here, with deliberate capital letters, offering instruments for the global understanding of the modern and contemporary world that are not limited to the understanding of a regional or national formative singularity such as, respectively, Latin America or Brazil.

As suggested at launch event[I] by the book's co-author Eliane Veras Soares, the publication contributes to two important movements: (a) to offer English-speaking readers a synthetic, well-founded approach that, above all, highlights Florestan Fernandes' contribution to social theory taken globally; (b) due to the recognition that the English language has in international academic dynamics, the book draws the attention of the Brazilian scientific community to the supranational relevance of Florestan Fernandes' work and its validity.

In order to highlight the scope of Florestan Fernandes' social theory – his work of theoretical synthesis and his inventiveness in appropriating and dialoguing with different strands of the social sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries – the work is placed in the wake of important works around Fernandes' contributions, such as those of Octavio Ianni, Gabriel Cohn, Miriam Limoeiro Cardoso, Elide Rugai Bastos, Antonio Brasil Jr., among others.

The authors' long research trajectory around Fernandes' work allows for rigorous work that combines the reconstruction of the biographical and intellectual trajectory of the USP sociologist, especially based on an interpretation of his autobiographical narratives, and the simultaneously deep and clear presentation of his central contributions to a critical social theory.

In the book, the body of work by Florestan Fernandes published between the 1940s and 1990s is addressed diachronically, in its continuities and discontinuities, a work that draws on the authors' close relationship with the sociologist's personal archive and library, housed at UFSCar.

The book is structured in three parts, in addition to the introduction, the conclusion and the index. The first part (“From the rags social environment to the University of São Paulo”), strongly inspired by Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, proposes the notion of “style of thought the lump"which works, in the economy of the text, in a double sense: (i) it highlights the complex mediations that link the author's thought to his existence in a particular time-space; (ii) it singles out, in contrast to other social theories, a unique "way" of thinking and, therefore, of conceiving and organizing social and individual experience.

The “style of thought” thesis the lump” runs through not only the first part and the interpretation of Florestan Florestan’s intellectual trajectory, but the entire book. Thus, the second part (“The construction of Florestan Fernandes' critical sociology: From Brazilian 'social dilemmas' to the category of 'dependent capitalism' in Latin America”) addresses his work as a whole and reconstructs its central concepts, always keeping in mind their saturation by that style, which leads, from the 1970s onwards, to the proposition of an original Latin American Marxism and “critical and militant sociology”.

The third part (“Brazil and Latin America in a socialist perspective: racial dilemma, dependent capitalism and bourgeois autocracy”) analyzes the period from his exile in Canada (1969-1972) to his terms as a parliamentarian from 1987 to 1995 and reconstructs the interdependence between Florestan Florestan's reflections on the Brazilian racial dilemma, dependent capitalism and bourgeois autocracy, as well as between the author's theoretical practice and political practice.

In characterizing the “style of thought the lump” by Florestan Fernandes, the authors, based on testimonies and autobiographical sketches, highlight how the sociologist's social origin[ii] subsequently allowed for an understanding that was not only interpretative, but also empathetic or endopathic to the difficulties experienced by individuals and subalternized groups in Brazilian society. They also highlight the active character of a Florestan in training who, when experiencing the contrast between “two worlds”[iii], "will remain faithful to his social provenance” (p. 14).

Loyalty the lump which even allowed a critical and creative reworking of the “typically European pattern of class analysis” (p. 14), always considering, in their elaborations, excluded, exploited and non-integrated population segments that are unintelligible from a restricted and Eurocentric notion of the working class.

Your “indirect political socialization” the lump, or “plebeian socialization” (an expression used by Florestan himself and highlighted by the authors), would be the basis of an ethical formation, in the sense of incorporating concepts of solidarity and collective commitment forged in the experience of camaraderie with those he could count on throughout his difficult trajectory, values ​​antithetical to the antisocial ultra-individualism of the “competitive social order”.

Valley ethos plebeian would condition, again through the flesh of the lived, the perception of the insoluble impasses of capitalism, in general, and of dependent capitalism, in particular, for the consolidation of acceptable civilizing standards of equality (material and symbolic) and political participation of the majority.

The thought style thesis the lump, to think about Florestan Fernandes' social theory, allows us to speak of a perspective of knowledge capable of shedding light not only on the contradictions of the typically capitalist world of work, as does the point of view that underpinned the critique of political economy in the context of the European industrial revolution.

A style of thinking the lump, when it emerges as a fruitful perspective for the production of theoretical-scientific knowledge, allows us to see (explain and understand) the world of non-work, in the sense of the sectors not included in typical patterns of the so-called free salaried workforce, the central vein of his main works, such as The Integration of Black People in Class Society e The Bourgeois Revolution in Brazil.

2.

Within the limits of a review, it is important to highlight the originality of the authors in establishing the mediations between this style of thought the lump and the interdependent formation of the core concepts of the Brazilian racial dilemma, dependent capitalism and bourgeois autocracy, a particular aspect of the book developed in the second part, in which it seeks to highlight: (a) on the one hand, the network that links those concepts, formulated in the 1960s and 1970s, with the works of the previous decades (1940s and 1950s); (b) on the other hand, the networks of Florestan's social theory with other Latin American authors, Marxist or not, and with the appropriations and critiques of the theories of modernization and development.

Regarding this last aspect, which opens up a whole research agenda for those interested in the work of Florestan Fernandes and how the author “became part of a more general movement towards the social sciences' Latin Americanization” (p. 78), the more or less explicit dialogue with the work of institutions such as ECLAC, FLACSO, CLAPCS and authors such as Costa Pinto, Celso Furtado, Fals Borda, Torres Restrepo, Guerreiro Ramos, Stavenhagen, Pablo Casanova, Eliseo Verón, Theotonio dos Santos, Aldo Solari, Sergio Bagú, Prado Jr., Orlando Albornoz, Gino Germani, Mendieta y Nuñez, Isaac Ganón, Louis Swenson, Manuel Diégues Jr., Medina Echavarría, FH Cardoso, Octavio Ianni, José Nun, Roger Vekemans, Domingo Rivarola, Jorge Graciarena, Gérard Pierre-Charles, Julio Le Riverend, Roberto Retamar, Armando Dávolos, among others, is highlighted.

The authors, by following Florestan Fernandes' intellectual networks in Latin America, suggest a periodization of this political-intellectual relationship: (1) from the early 1960s until his compulsory retirement, the period of research at CESIT and dialogue on the possibilities of overcoming underdevelopment and dependence in Latin America; (2) from the period at the University of Toronto (1969-1972) until the end of the 1970s, when he read Latin America "through the prism of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and Marxist critical thinking” (p. 122); (3) the period of participation in the José Martí Cultural Association of São Paulo and in the Solidarity with Cuba movement until the mid-1980s.

With regard to the first aspect, which rigorously brings to light the red thread that connects the works produced between the 1940s and 1970s, I point, from the outset, to the authors' rich suggestion that since his first writings on folklore, Florestan had already expressed an effort to reevaluate a dualistic cognition when thinking about the changing relations between traditional and modern: “one of his conclusions is that folklore in the urban social environment continues to play constructive roles in adjusting family groups and individuals within a highly competitive society” (p. 61).[iv]

From his studies on racial relations in Brazil, Florestan concludes, in a similar way, that “[t]he mere development of class society would not eliminate color prejudice and racial discrimination” (p. 75). In the 1970s, always attentive to the “limits to the realization of an authentic democracy, imposed by Brazilian racial discrimination” (p. 77), Florestan writes about the processes of “modernization of the archaic” and “archaicization of the modern” (Fernandes, 2009, p. 48) that characterize dependent capitalism.

This concept, “based on a dialectical interaction between imperialism, dependency and underdevelopment” (p. 88), represents the culmination of a critique of dualistic reason (Oliveira, 2003) in the work of Florestan Fernandes, “deconstructing the boundaries between social systems in the form of opposing conceptual pairs: advanced and backward, modern and archaic, central and peripheral, autonomous and dependent, developed and underdeveloped” (p. 88).

Such criticism, which is made through a creative synthesis of classical and contemporary social theories by Florestan Fernandes and offers original theoretical contributions “to the sociological study of capitalism and the world capitalist system” (p. 86), is directly related, the authors argue, with “his position of marginality as a politically active sociologist in a peripheral, underdeveloped and dependent society of colonial origin” (p. 85).

Highlighting this also means bringing it into the present, as a challenge “for social scientists located in the multiple peripheries of world system” (p. 90), Florestan’s way of working, which since his theoretical systematizations of the 1950s sought to locate “the epistemological reflection in the concrete backgrounds” (p. 90) of his intellectual production.

3.

Regarding Florestan's theoretical and methodological studies in the 1950s, well before the famous “new theoretical movement” (Alexander, 1987) of the 1970s and 1980s, the authors highlight how Florestan sought to synthesize the contributions of the classics of sociology (Marx, Weber and Durkheim) not from an eclectic stance.

In contrast, his work of synthesis is done through the careful proposition of possible theoretical complementarities based on the clear highlighting of the differences between contexts, traditions, authors and, above all, the different forms of construction of type (ideal type, average type and extreme type) provided, respectively, by the comprehensive method (Weber), by the genetic-comparative or objective method (Durkheim) and by the dialectical method (Marx), highlighting how each of these houses a peculiar conception of historical time and its own margins of abstraction/concretion for the subject of knowledge.

If in the essays written in the 1950s, especially those compiled in Empirical foundations of sociological explanation, the theoretical synthesis occurs at a high level of abstraction, starting from the 1959 essay (in the text “Attitudes and motivations unfavorable to development”), according to the precise dating of the authors, the work is carried out with the aim of shedding light on a specific problem: “the research problems of Third World nations committed to overcoming underdevelopment” (p. 95).

A form of theoretical synthesis that also operates in basic texts for the formulation of the concept of dependent capitalism, such as Class Society and Underdevelopment (1967) and the intervention in Seminar on the problems of conceptualizing social classes in Latin America (1971). There is, therefore, an intricate and mutually enriching relationship between Florestan's theoretical synthesis and sociology of dependency, a relationship that must be deepened in order to consider the validity of his work.

The concept of dependent capitalism not only characterizes an original and productive way – theoretically and politically – of thinking about the integration of some Latin American countries, with Brazil being an extreme type (p. 121), into the world system taken in broad terms (economic, social, political and cultural). It also represents a new way of thinking about the modes of articulation of those spheres or instances within social formations (see Silva, 2022a).

The emergence of this new way of thinking is evident in the passage, highlighted by the authors, from the notion of cultural delay (a concept proposed by William Ogburn and commonly used in modernization theory) to the notion of dilemma. The former is still linked to a stage-based, progressive and unilinear imaginary of modernization processes; the latter decisively points to “to the structural impossibilities of transforming the social order towards realizing its mores or consecrated ideal values” (p. 120).

Thus, in the latter case, the compatibility between archaic and modern in the articulation between and within societal spheres is not seen as a conflict between past and present, as remnants of tradition, but as a mode of structural articulation capable of (re)production and transformation through collective agency, guided by values. Here, modernity and the processes of modernization can be conceived in their fundamental contradictions and ambivalences – at the level of the multiple forms of structural articulation and perpetuation of forms of oppression, domination and exploitation – and as a stock of utopian values ​​capable of triggering and sustaining reformist or revolutionary transformation movements, within or against the order. In Florestan, modernity is not finished nor is it an unfinished project; it is both what it is and what it promises.

By rejecting the thesis of an epistemological rupture that would divide Florestan into an “academic-reformist” phase and a “political-revolutionary” phase, and by seeking to present the politician present in the scientist and the scientist present in the politician in a trajectory marked by continuities and discontinuities, the authors characterize Florestan of the 1970s “as a Brazilian and Latin American Marxist” (p. 132). A characterization that, paradoxically, gained fundamental contours in his exile “in a university from one of the central capitalist and hegemonic countries of the Global North” (p. 136), University of Toronto[v].

4.

I am interested in highlighting, when dealing with the final chapters of the text (which focus on Florestan's political and intellectual activities in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s), the contributions made by the work to the understanding of the concept of bourgeois autocracy.

This concept certainly has a close relationship with the author’s theoretical-political radicalization in the 1970s, when the Marxist socialist and the sociologist interpenetrated without any ambivalence in the search for “interpretation, negation and alteration” (p. 144) of Brazilian and Latin American dilemmas. The authors highlight decisive elements for understanding that concept.

Firstly, it is a conceptual development directly linked to its previous and simultaneous theses “on dependent capitalism and bourgeois counterrevolutions in the peripheries of the world capitalist system” (p. 147). Secondly, as explained in his Notes on the “theory of authoritarianism” (course given at PUC-SP in 1977 and published in 1979), the concept is unfolded in clear contrast with the liberal roots in the notion of authoritarianism, which, for Florestan, “naturalises the institutionalized violence inherent to the bourgeois State without questioning its historical and structural roots in civil society” (p. 147).

Thirdly, it cannot be thought independently of the reconfiguration of the functions of the State in the consolidation of monopoly capitalism, of the uneven and combined development of a new type engendered by it and of the tensions with the socialist camp, which both reinforced the repressive character of the bourgeois State and created profound and new challenges for thinking “the 'transition to socialism'” (p. 148).

Fourthly, the concept of bourgeois autocracy, although strongly linked to a systematic reflection on the implementation and consolidation of the Brazilian corporate-military dictatorship from 1964 onwards (see especially p. 171-172), is not limited to that period, and is fundamental to understanding both the Republic prior to the coup and, from 1985 onwards, “the passage from an open bourgeois autocracy to a restricted democracy” (p. 150), as is evident in Florestan’s interventions from the mid-1980s onwards and his thesis “that the dictatorship prolonged itself by other means and became institutionalized” (p. 150). Thesis that offers important elements for thinking about the strength of the extreme right and fascist groups in contemporary Brazil.

Fifthly, the authors highlight how Florestan clearly indicates the possibility of generalizing the attributes of dependent capitalism and, therefore, of bourgeois autocracy on a global level (p. 151), without taking it as a deviation or peripheral singularity of the classical bourgeois State (see Silva, 2022b).

Sixthly and finally, the reflection on bourgeois autocracy cannot be dissociated from Florestan's systematic study, since the 1950s, on “|the historical forms of combination between capitalist exploitation, racial division of labor and racism” (p. 154). As reinforced several times throughout the text, if Florestan takes “the history of the black as the true history of the emergence of the people in Brazilian society”, this allows us to state that “studying race relations was his gateway to understanding the dilemmas of dependent capitalism” (p. 154).

Rather than being identified with particular government regimes, the concept of bourgeois autocracy sheds light, when considering dependent capitalism, on the forms of power and domination (institutional and extra-institutional) capable of reproducing a modern capitalist society that is structurally closed to the working classes and the broad subaltern segments in economic, political and socio-cultural terms. In a precise formulation entirely based on Florestan's words, the authors write: “bourgeois autocracy constitutes the historical starting point for consolidating distorted forms of democracy in peripheral and dependent capitalism” (p. 172).

When the analytical apparatus presented is mobilized to think about the present time, the authors suggest not only the current relevance of the concept of bourgeois autocracy, but its validity beyond underdeveloped and dependent social formations: “Highlighting the specific class domination of the system's periphery in the era of imperialism and monopoly capitalism, the category of 'bourgeois autocracy' precisely captures a structural characteristic of capitalist societies on an international scale and which today perhaps tends to become generalized. Class domination is exercised autocratically in the face of the hegemony of parasitic fractions of financial capital in the centers and peripheries of the capitalist world system” (p. 174).

The interdependence between dependent capitalism, bourgeois autocracy and racial dilemma in Florestan Fernandes' social theory allows us to return to one of the guiding themes of the entire book: style. the lump of the author's thought. After all, one of the fundamental theses of the classic The Integration of Black People in Class Society It deals precisely with the inability of the so-called competitive social order, in a country with a slave and colonial past like Brazil, to integrate black men and women into the typical attributes of class society and modern wage labor.

This implies recognizing that black men and women formed and form the bulk of the the lump – Lélia Gonzalez (2020), based on José Nun, prefers the notion of marginal mass – from which doña Maria and her son, Florestan, came and fought. With the formulation of the concept of dependent capitalism and bourgeois autocracy, there is a theoretical refinement of the mechanisms that make super-exploitation, exclusion and non-integration (in terms of income, prestige and power) normal and even necessary expedients of the dynamics of a social formation.

Therefore, from the point of view of a sociology of knowledge, there is a triangle of space-time positions that would condition Florestan's contributions to social theory: the dependent periphery in the world system (a privileged place to analyze the ambivalences of modernization and the intertwining between the archaic and the modern); continuum temporal frustration of developmentalist populisms and the multiple autocratic modernizations in Latin America; its social condition the lump.

The style of thinking the lump offers elements not only to think about Florestan's theoretical contributions, but also his positions within political practice, especially from the 1970s onwards, when a conception of democratic socialism, antagonistic to all the attributes of explicit or subtle autocratic forms of domination, emerges from an in-depth analysis of the Cuban experience – in From Guerrilla Warfare to Socialism: The Cuban Revolution, from 1979 (see p. 175-179) – and his political-intellectual interventions in the 1980s and 1990s.

In these writings, the authors highlight, “emerges his first efforts to characterize the 'Brazilian revolution' as a union between the working classes and the dispossessed masses. Florestan Fernandes did not disregard the role of lumpen social strata in democratic transformations” (p. 150). Characterization that guides his militancy in the Workers’ Party and his conception of a revolutionary party, “capable of agglutinating the distinct flags of ecology, women, indigenous peoples, blacks, workers and youth social struggles with the participation of the various dissident groups sidelined by peripheral capitalism” (p. 153).

For the authors, one of the greatest examples of the practical strength of Florestan's ideas is his influence on the MST, whose main training school, the Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (founded in 2005), bears his name: “|a symbol of the return of Florestan Fernandes to his lumpen and peasant origins” (p. 184).

5.

I conclude with two final observations. On the one hand, the reviewed book prompts a systematic and collective reflection on how Florestan Fernandes’ work thinks about and provides answers to questions considered central by an already canonical (and Eurocentric) definition of social theory, namely: “'What is action?'; 'What is social order?'; and 'What determines social change?'” (Joas and Knöbl, 2017, p. 33); as well as the unfolding of these answers in period diagnoses.

The answer to these questions and the period diagnoses present in Fernandes' work are inextricably linked – and this connection only intensifies throughout his political-intellectual trajectory – to a commitment to radically transform forms of social life, therefore, as a “critical social theory” (Collins, 2022).

On the other hand, the work leads us to think about the limitations of the consecrated and Eurocentric definitions of social theory and to grope for a definition of it based on the efforts of authors who, like Florestan, systematically thought about Latin American dilemmas from a totalizing perspective, taking seriously the implications that the study of racial relations, the problems of underdevelopment, dependence and autocratic domination would have in the definition of a social theory that not only reflects, but deliberately yearns to be an instrument of reflexivity and struggle alongside those condemned by a global system.

*Lucas Trindade is a professor at the Humanitas Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN).

Originally published in the magazine Sociologies, v. 27, no. 64, p. e138453, 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/1807-0337/e138453

Reference

Diogo Valença de Azevedo Costa & Eliane Veras Soares. Florestan Fernandes' critical sociology: a social theory of Brazil and Latin America. Oxon and New York, Routledge, 2024, 194 pp. [https://amzn.to/4kdPKjG]

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BRANDAO, Gildo Marçal. Lineages of Brazilian political thought. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

COLLINS, Patricia Hill. Much more than ideas: intersectionality as critical social theory. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2022.

FERNANDES, Florestan. Dependent capitalism and social classes in Latin America. 4th Ed. New York: Routledge, 2009.

GONZALEZ, Lelia. For an Afro-Latin American feminism: essays, interventions and dialogues. Organization: Flavia Rios. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar: 2020.

JOAS, Hans; KNOBL, Wolfgang. Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lessons. Petrópolis, RJ: Voices, 2017.

LYNCH, Christian. Why thought and not theory? The Brazilian political-social imagination and the ghost of the peripheral condition (1880-1970). Data, v. 56, no. 4, p. 727-767, 2013. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1590/S0011-52582013000400001.

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OLIVEIRA, Francisco de. Critique of dualistic reason/The platypus. Sao Paulo, Boitempo, 2003.

OLIVEIRA, Lucas Amaral de; ALVES, Ana Rodrigues Cavalcanti. Rereading Brazilian sociological theory in the light of postcolonial criticism. Society and State, v. 38, no. 01, p. 211–242, 2023.

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RIOS, Flavia; KLEIN, Stefan. Lélia Gonzalez, a social theorist. Society and State, v. 37, no. 03, p. 809–833, 2022. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1590/s0102-6992-202237030003.

SILVA, Lucas Trindade da. Systemic differentiation and integration in Florestan Fernandes. Sociology & Anthropology, v. 12, no. 2, e200108, p. 1-28, 2022a. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1590/2238-38752022v1226.

SILVA, Lucas Trindade da. A Florestan beyond the “thesis of Brazilian singularity”. third millennium, v. 18, n.1, p. 81-111, 2022b.

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YOUTUBE. Book launch: Florestan Fernandes' Critical Sociology. Nov 30, 2023. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/live/sWyvgslXyvA?si=_Q6wnkXqH9BEu4bA.

Notes

[I] The event can be viewed at the link on YouTube (2023).

[ii] Son of Dona Maria, single mother, domestic worker; “a child launched precociously into the world of work” (p. 19), shoeshine boy and waiter in his youth.

[iii] The world the lump of Dona Maria and the world of opulence of Dona Hermínia, the former's boss and Florestan's godmother.

[iv] Still on Florestan's first monographs, when appreciating his studies on the Tupinambá, the authors point out how these cast suspicion on “the ethnocentric views of the 16th-and 17th-century authors” and “comes close to a counter-history of the 'vanquished' original people subjected to a violent process of detribalization” (p. 65).

[v] The book contains a wealth of documents and testimonies that shed light on Florestan's short period in Canada and his return to Brazil (see especially chapter 7, pp. 135-143), as well as reproducing the first pages of the programs of the courses offered in Toronto (see the figures on pp. 139-141).

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