By ARID PERSIO*
Article from the recently released collection, organized by Luis Felipe Lebert Cozac
1.
A wealth of ideas among economists of the most diverse backgrounds. Friendliness, sense of humor, enthusiasm for knowledge – it is impossible not to be captivated by the figure of Zé Marcio.
A friend at all hours, a painter in the early hours of the morning, a singer of tango, samba and romantic Italian songs, a jokester, lavish in his praise, always with new projects, José Marcio Rego moves with ease in the most diverse environments.
One of the hallmarks of José Marcio Rego's personality is his presence of mind. In response to a question from Jô Soares, who at the time hosted the most popular talk show in Brazil, he said that when he had doubts about his intelligence, he remembered that he had married Dona Marisa. She was in the audience, the cameras focused on her and the audience erupted in applause. José Marcio Rego caused envy and sighs among 100% of the show's female audience: what woman doesn't like to receive a public declaration of love like that?
Later, José Marcio told me that he was immediately inspired by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, who had publicly declared how much he owed his wife, Chico's mother. And there are other similarities between them. Like Sérgio Buarque, Zé Marcio has a passion for books. Some have a passion for love, others have a passion for alcohol, others have a passion for gambling, Antonio Candido tells us, and there are those who have a passion for books. Sérgio Buarque would get around his wife, who was worried about the excess of books, by sneaking into the house through the kitchen to leave the books with the nanny. Only then, empty-handed, would he officially ring the doorbell of his own house.
José Marcio Rego, in turn, transformed an old car into an appendix to his library. With his house overflowing with books, he decided to create an automobile escape valve. The car would sit in the garage, with a dead battery and who knows if it had any gasoline. A potentially mobile library.
2.
But my favorite story with José Marcio Rego was when, while still at BTG Pactual, I thought about opening a branch in Paraguay. With historically low credit risk, fertile land for soybean cultivation and easy access to the Río de la Plata, the country seemed to offer many opportunities for an investment bank. Didn't José Marcio Rego have Paraguayan connections? He quickly arranged a lunch with Don Antonio Vierci, one of the main local businessmen.
After lunch, we headed to talk to President Horacio Cartes, recently elected but not yet sworn in. Cartes received us at his residence with pomp and circumstance. The conversation was lively, it went on for a while, and at one point, worried about the traffic to the airport, I made a move to leave. But Horacio Cartes continued talking about the economic policy he intended to implement in Paraguay – “I am very friendly with President Dilma Rousseff’s Brazil, but we are going to follow Chile’s path, not hers,” he explained to me in a mischievous way. At the end of the conversation, he tried to reassure me: “Don't worry, friend, you won't miss the flight".
It was the most embarrassing thing I have ever experienced. Horacio Cartes provided us with a comfortable and powerful sedan to take us to the airport. I don't know if it was his car or the President's. The fact is that the car sped off. Cops in front of us slowed down traffic and blocked streets so that we could get there as quickly as possible. It looked more like a president fleeing a terrorist attack than two Brazilians who just wanted to catch their flight home. Thank goodness the car had tinted windows. We were met by immigration officers right at the airport entrance and miraculously managed to board. Takeoff was providentially delayed a little... What better way to pay tribute to your 65th birthday?
If José Marcio Rego were a traditional, serious academic, one of those who only communicate with his peers through his writings, the tribute would have to be an unpublished article for his work. festschrift. But José Marcio Rego is first and foremost a conversationalist. No one better than him to conduct and edit the two volumes of Conversations with Brazilian economists and Conversations with Brazilian philosophers. And always with a kind eye for the work of those who gave their best to advance knowledge. It was thinking about Zé Marcio the talker that I decided to tell a story to the readers of this book. The story of Pensão Aridaregala.
3.
José Marcio Rego had wanted to organize a study group with me since the publication of “Larida”, the text written jointly with André Lara Resende in 1984, which ten years later would become the conceptual basis of the Plano Real. He published “Larida” in a collection of Paz e Terra edited by him in 1986. But the idea of the study group only gained traction after a debate held in the auditorium of the Folha de S. Paul in December 1997.
The debate had been scheduled for the launch of another collection, also organized by José Marcio, called Rhetoric in economics. A tireless editor, this was actually his second collection on the subject. My article “The History of Thought as Theory and Rhetoric,” originally published in 1983 as a discussion paper for the Department of Economics at PUC-RJ, was already included in the first, but José Marcio Rego decided to publish it again in the second collection, as he liked it so much.
Well, the second collection on rhetoric also contained a text by Bento Prado Jr. José Marcio Rego, his long-time friend – I remember that every now and then I would get in the car and drive to São Carlos to talk to him – convinced him to participate in the debate in the auditorium of Folha de S. Paul. The auditorium was surprisingly full, and Bento Prado Jr. and I were talking about the topic, with the mediation of Fernando de Barros e Silva, a journalist at the time. Sheet. It was a fun conversation, with him unearthing the neo-Kantian roots of my thinking, and me commenting on his reticence regarding the recognition of the rhetorical dimension of the human sciences. The debate flowed freely and ended with dinner at a pizzeria, enjoying a red Miolo, the best wine produced in Brazil at the time. As we were leaving, José Marcio Rego asked: “Persio, how about we republish the Pensão Humaitá?”
It was there that the Aridaregala Pension was founded. The names were similar, and there was a charm, typical of José Marcio. The Humaitá Pension became famous for its practice of the art of conversation and its ability to live well. Yan de Almeida Prado, one of the richest men of his time, would open his mansion on the corner of Brigadeiro and Humaitá streets to his friends on Saturdays. Lunches would last the entire afternoon, accompanied by Bordeaux wines and top-quality champagnes, mixing serious matters with mundanities. The Humaitá Pension, a chapter in the effervescent cultural scene of São Paulo at the beginning of the last century, began in the 1930s and continued for decades.
The Aridaregala Pension, on the other hand, was anything but a pension. Instead of the sumptuous mansion of one of the city’s wealthiest families, the Aridaregala Pension was held in my apartment. The meetings were held on Saturday mornings. They started at 11:10, a civilized time, and never invaded lunchtime. The food at the Aridaregala was, in fact, very frugal: peanuts, nuts, water and orange juice, coffee, lots of coffee, cheese bread and a few other snacks. The number of participants, 12 or XNUMX at most, was limited by the size of the table in the room where we met. And, as if so many differences were not enough, there was always a previously announced agenda, a text or a book, to keep the conversation from rambling too much.
Needless to say, it was José Marcio Rego who named our study and debate group Pensão Aridaregala. In addition to the irony, the name did justice to the participants. When we started, at the end of 2001, José Marcio was always hanging out with Paulo Gala, his student and also a student of Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira. Two and two make four, Rego and Gala are regala, he explained to me.
The Pension was an unlikely combination. José Marcio Rego and I have different backgrounds and views on how the economy works. I am too orthodox for him; he is too developmentalist for me. Our opinions also often differ in national politics. He, by affinity, moves in another universe of dialogue, but his ability to move in the most diverse environments is unique. In a video humorously called “Regonomics”, José Marcio Rego tells us about the intellectuals who influenced him. I am there, described as a force of nature despite being conservative, in his words, but there are also many other forces of nature, progressives, Of course, which have little or nothing to do with me. José Marcio is a master of the art of conversation!
The Aridaregala Pension celebrated its 2021th anniversary at the end of 20. The extraordinary thing, in a country where discussion groups formed outside institutions rarely survive for long, is that the Aridaregala Pension still meets today. The sessions have become less frequent over time, but, with the exception of the period when I lived in London, we have never let a year go by without a meeting. We didn’t even stop in 2020. There was an in-person session, back in February, in which Fernando Haddad discussed with us his “Brazil: a hypothesis under construction”. After that, the epidemic came and everything changed, but even so, we held a virtual session of the Pension in August, with Bolívar Lamounier discussing the “Theodicy Brazilian".
Over the years, life has led us to different topics, and the participants have also changed. The only constants since the beginning have been José Marcio and I. In the beginning, everything revolved around the philosophy of science, a topic that fascinated us. We had a long discussion about a book by Gilles-Gaston Granger, Economic Methodology, which I had discovered, while still a student, on one of the shelves of the FEA-USP library. Published in 1955, it still impresses me today; the fact that it was written in French and by a philosopher unfortunately meant that it never made it onto economics reading lists. Quine, Hempel, Friedman in their Essays in Positive Economics, all were the subject of some group session. I usually started it with a brief presentation and comments, to break the ice and open the conversation. Even Niklas Luhmann deserved a session, partly motivated by an article on social differentiation that I had written for a collection of articles published by him in Germany.
We had inspired meetings, but every now and then we would get into conversations about things we didn’t understand. I remember a time when we ended up going into phenomenology and we scheduled a meeting to discuss a text by Husserl. I was supposed to give the presentation myself, but, already too influenced by the analytical philosophy of the Anglo-Saxon world, and in the midst of reading Bernard Williams, I ended up getting confused. Husserl exasperated me. I read and reread the text, looking for a common thread that would allow me to grasp the ideas. I woke up early on the Saturday scheduled for the discussion to do one last reading, who knows, maybe some insight would emerge in the freshness of the morning. The fact is that I got a kick out of the “transcendental reduction”. There was no embarrassment because no one in the group was much better than I was.
Little by little, we changed our focus. We moved from philosophy to literature, discussing a text by Benedito Nunes about Clarice Lispector. The most interesting part, however, came later. Our generation was starting to publish books, and the sessions began to be about their books, always with the author present. With the exception of Eduardo Giannetti, we never discussed more than one book per author.
Only two of our meetings were recorded, both from the phase in which we focused on the Frankfurt School. One with Marcos Nobre discussing his book Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Philosophical discourse of modernity, by Jürgen Habermas; another with Jorge Grespan on the subject of his recently released The negative of capital.
Today, rereading the transcript of these two meetings, their lively and spontaneous nature, the richness and diversity of points of view, are striking. In retrospect, I regret not having recorded or at least taken notes on the many other meetings we had. In the United States, a person can do something remarkable, such as chair a company, participate in the government, found an NGO, and, upon leaving office, immediately write down his memoirs and reflections. Here, due to the excessive reliance on oral tradition and, why not say it, a certain laziness, few people record their experiences. May the diaries of Fernando Henrique's presidency serve as an example for us all.
Over the course of its 20 years, Pensão Aridaregala has changed. It was a group of economists, but it has evolved into an eclectic group of thinkers from diverse backgrounds. It began focused on the philosophy of science, but it has become more Brazilian, focusing more and more on thinkers and/or themes from our country. It was not something planned – it just happened. If there is one thing that has characterized it, over so many years and so many themes, it is its genuine tolerance and respect for divergent thinking, always seeking a space for collective reflection that allows us to understand the complex world in which we live.
2021 will be another year for Pensão. At the end of February, we had a virtual conversation with Roberto Schwarz about the Whatever: interviews, portraits and documentsWe have great candidates for the following meetings: Corruption, justice and public morality by José Eduardo Faria; Ring of Gyges, by Eduardo Giannetti; In search of the nation, by Antonio Risério; Benjamin Moser and his biographies of Clarice Lispector and Susan Sontag.
Two decades of conversations are no small feat. From the outset, it was up to me to choose and invite who would participate, as well as the text or book to be discussed, but the one who kept the candle of continuity burning was José Marcio Rego. When it took too long to schedule a session, José Marcio Rego would ask me. He would suggest topics and names, one after the other. Sooner or later, one of two things would happen: either one of his ideas would end up taking off or I would come up with an author/topic that I found interesting. And a new session of the Pensão would take shape.
Congratulations, Zé Marcio! Long live!
*Persio Arida is an economist. He presided over BNDES and the Central Bank of Brazil.
Article originally published in the newspaper Economic valueIn 2021.
Reference
Luis Felipe Lebert Cozac (org.). Seams of thought: Festschrift – José Marcio Rego: texts in homage to his 70th birthday. São Paulo. Biennial Publishing House, 2025.
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