Celso Furtado and development: an outline

Abstract

This review essay focuses on the most crucial points in the evolution of Celso Furtado's contribution to economic and political thought in relation to development, in the hope that a wider readership will appreciate the importance of his ideas to Latin America's ‘development’ during the 1960s and 1970s, and perhaps even see value in reviving them. It opens with a description of the background to the rise of development economics, highlighting aspects of the discipline that this remarkable Brazilian economist confronted and transformed. This is followed by a description of his period as a development theorist or ‘reform monger’ (Hirschman 1963) and his subsequent exile (1964–1975). The article concludes with a discussion of some of the work produced on his return to Brazil.

Keywords:

• Governance and Public Policy
• Labour and Livelihoods
• Latin America and the Caribbean

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Andrew Balanda for translation assistance.

Notes

1. Furtado (1961: 8), referring to his history of economic thought (1954), said that he had not included the ‘North-American institutionalists … for the simple reason that they did not offer a systematic interpretation of the process of growth’.

2. It is ironic that the book is dedicated to Prebisch, who did not acknowledge it, since it caused him many problems at ECLAC, and Furtado's views were used to put pressure both on Prebisch and on the institution. It should also be said that the book was largely at odds with prevailing economic views, including those of Prebisch himself.

3. There he published An Economic Development Policy for the Northeast (1959b), perhaps one of the first books to use the thesis of the deterioration of terms of trade within different regions (Northeast and Centre-South) of a single country. For details see Mallorquín 1996 and Love 1996.

4. The government's three-year plan – Plano Trienal de desenvolvimento economico e social (1963–1965), written by Furtado (1962b) – came under attack from all sides of the social spectrum.

5. Mallorquín (2005) analyses the conceptual changes in the theoretical vocabulary between A economia brasileira (1954) and Formação econômica do Brasil (1959a). The translation of the latter work into English as The Economic Growth of Brazil: a survey from colonial to modern times (published in 1963 by the University of California Press) loses much of the ‘structuralist’ flavour of its vocabulary, and in Furtado the distinction between ‘development’ and ‘growth’ is crucial.

6. Diagnosis of the Brazilian Crisis, the English translation of Dialética do desenvolvimento (1964) (literally ‘the dialectics of development’), can also be put in this group, making a very well developed case for the unification of political forces against regressive right-wing social forces, foreseeing the military takeover – which unfortunately turned out to be true.

7. It is interesting to note that during these years Prebisch was also rethinking the periphery through the notion of the surplus: his articles appearing in the Review of the ECLAC from 1975 onwards were included in his book Peripheral Capitalism (1981), just plain coincidence. See Furtado 1998 in Mallorquin 1998.

8. Prebisch (1981) had similar problems in trying to differentiate between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ investments.

9. These concepts first appeared in Furtado 1954 and become the basis for the ‘structuralist theory of inflation’, which subsequently appeared in the classic texts of Noyola (1956, republished 1987) and Sunkel (1958); see also Danby (2005) and Sánchez Torres and Mallorquín (2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carlos Mallorquín

Carlos Mallorquín holds degrees in social and political sciences from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the University of London. He currently lectures in sociology at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Having completed an intellectual portrait of Celso Furtado, he is working on an intellectual biography of Raúl Prebisch. Some advances in this work can be read in his chapter ‘Raúl Prebisch before the Ice Age’, in Edgar J. Dosman (ed.), Raúl Prebisch. Power, Principles and the Ethics of Development (Inter-American Development Bank, New York, NY, 2006); and ‘The unfamiliar Raúl Prebisch (1943–1949)’ in Esteban P. Caldentey and Matías Vernengo (eds.) Ideas, Policies and Economic Development in the Americas (Routledge, New York, NY, 2007). Contact details: Facultad de Sociología, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 4 Sur 104, Col. Centro, 72000 Puebla, [email protected]

Editor's Note: This article has been shortened for reasons of space. The full text is available from the author on request. For the benefit of readers who do not read Portuguese, we have included a literal translation of the title of each of the works by Celso Furtado listed. Most have been published in English and Spanish, and many in other languages, often under titles that are not a literal translation of the Portuguese original. Readers are referred to the International CELSO FURTADO Center for Development Policies at www.centrocelsofurtado.org.br for a comprehensive listing.