Celso Furtado: um economista com lentes de literato

abstract

This essay discusses the affinity between Celso Furtado’s literary practice and his analytical perspective as an economist. As his autobiography, diaries, and interviews reveal, his passion and flirtations with literature were recurrent and important in his trajectory. It is possible to argue that Furtado’s proximity to literature contributed to making him an economist sentient both to narratives inhabited by individuals who in no way resemble the homo œconomicus of neoclassical economic theory and to scenarios shaped by social, cultural, and power structures that frame the actions of those individuals. This essay focuses on the project of a novel outlined by Celso Furtado in 1955, and recorded in his Diários intermitentes 1937-2002 (2019). The text is examined as a privileged viewpoint to apprehend the sociological imagination and the historically- and culturally-rooted interpretation of Brazilian economy and society that made Celso Furtado an inexorably heterodox economist.

keyword:
Celso Furtado; Literature; Diários intermitentes; Sociological imagination; Economics