The Fundação Getúlio Vargas from a historical perspective: organic intellectuals and political action (1940s-1960s)

Abstract

The article analyzes the historical conditions that led, in 1944, to the organization of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), a public interest entity regulated by a legal regime of private law, thanks to the mobilization of intellectuals, state agents and segments of the national business community. The FGV and its intellectuals were part of a broad network of social forces engaged in the tasks of conservative modernization of Brazilian capitalism throughout the 1940s and 1960s, forging proposals of political economic intervention and constituting the social articulations necessary for its realization. Therefore, the research ex- amined the official documentation produced by the FGV itself and the materials produced by intellectuals connected to the institution and deposited at the Arquivo Nacional and at the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC). The long political-professional formation of this group and the comprehensive network of relationships established in governmental agencies, private hegemonic apparatuses and business-military circles enabled possible an ideological positioning and a sense of common political action, expressed in the conception and dissemination of hegemonic projects for the development of capitalism in the periphery of the world system.