Fernando Henrique Cardoso is from a prominent military family and was raised along Copacabana beach in the affluent zona sul of Rio de Janeiro, during the time that city was Brazil's capital. Cardoso's father and grandfather were both generals.

His father, General Leônidas Fernandes Cardoso, was also a lawyer and is described as a Brazilian nationalist whose thinking on government reflected the French positivism of August Comte.

General Cardoso believed in a modern, scientific and enlightened government for Brazil that would develop the country along the lines of its motto, "order and progress."(1)

Cardoso recalls that his "father was never an authoritarian. Rigorously democratic and a very open man, he was liberal and tolerant, with an absolute sense of public morality."(1)

Fernando Henrique's earliest interests, however, were not political, but literary. Noting his enthusiasm for philosophy and contemporary Brazilian poets such as Domingos Carvalho da Silva, distinguished Portuguese literary figure Fidelino de Figueiredo encouraged Cardoso to study at the University of São Paulo.(1)

Finding a Mentor: Florestan Fernandes

Unlike most politicians, Cardoso considered a conservative career in law but studied sociology instead. Cardoso absorbed a deep understanding of Brazilian history and politics through his father.

Sociology can be seen as a practical way for Cardoso to have combined his knowledge of history with the study of philosophy and politics.

At the University of São Paulo, Cardoso began work with his sociological mentor, Florestan Fernandes.

Sociology as a Way of Life

Fernandes viewed sociology as a way of life and advocated a rigorous empirical approach to social research.(2)

Florestan worked under the umbrella of exiled French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who did fieldwork in the interior of Brazil and published one of the most important books ever written on the history of Brazilian Indians, Tristes Tropiques (1961).

Florestan's collaboration with Lévi-Strauss led to his (1969) dissertation on race relations called The Negro in Brazilian Society, which also became an instant classic.

The French Connection

Structuralism was in vogue and Cardoso learned that many of its key figures like Roland Barthes were Marxists who shared a critical approach to contemporary society and questioned the petit-bourgeois way of life.(3)

Cardoso began studying Marxism and the French language by reading and taking classes from a team of French professors who had arrived and taught in French.

One was a specialist in African religions, Roger Bastide, whose emphasis on ethnography and direct observation Cardoso found very useful.

Another was Alain Touraine, an industrial sociologist who later invited Cardoso to study at the Laboratory of Industrial Sociology at the University of Paris.(4)

Prelude to Revolution

This exposure to structuralism and Cardoso's training in French would prove to be of tremendous value throughout his life. At one point, Cardoso translated a lecture on revolution for Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as they passed through São Paulo on their Brazilian tour. This experience with existentialism, however, would be far from his last.

Before long Fernando Henrique Cardoso would find himself at the epicenter of a revolution which marks the beginning of the postmodern-poststructuralist era, but not until he had firmly established his approach to sociology through research on slavery and industrial entrepreneurs in Brazil, and published a book that would influence the field of dependency studies for decades to come.

References

(1) Goertzel, Ted. 1999. Fernando Henrique Cardoso: Reinventing Democracy in Brazil. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

(2) Fernandes, Florestan. 1977. A Sociologia no Brasil: Contribuição para o estudo de sua formação e desenvolvimento (Sociology in Brazil: A Contributive Study of its Formation and Development). Petrópolis: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

(3) Barthes, Roland. 1982. A Barthes Reader. Edited and with an introduction by Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang.

(4) Kahl, J.A. 1976. Three Latin American Sociologists: Gino Germani, Pablo Gonzales Casanova, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, Inc., p. 131-136.

This is the second part of a multi-part series on former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

Richard F. Kane, from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology
of Illinois State University, can be reached at rfkane@ilstu.edu.

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