Maria da Conceição Tavares An Affectionate Memory from Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo

Still immersed in my sadness and bitterness from bidding farewell to my great companion in so many battles, I offer a profile more affectionate than academic, of my dear friend Maria da Conceição.

Colleagues and students who lived with the Professor Tavares know that her restless and irreverent intelligence did not attack the interlocutor, even in terminal cases where the person showed severe symptoms of neoliberalism or infantile leftism.

When a controversy arose, Conceição wielded complex arguments with a speed well above the average allowed for ordinary people. This fueled the myth. When things got heated, Professor Tavares’s analytical and abstract ability laid bare the adversary. Be it Pedro, João, or Francisco, the opposing side transformed into a form, a support for the ideas in dispute. Nothing personal. Often, she took the opponent’s weapon, reordered the terms of the argument, and began to corner the person in their own field. But if the person wasn’t flexible, they ran a serious risk of ending the tournament with their self-esteem at their heels or, as I often observed, with their intellectual pride in tatters.

Those accustomed to the precariousness of reason know that this peculiar dialectic is a method of advancing knowledge and understanding. I know few intellectuals so detached from their own (authentic or supposed) originality. Conceição granted and received contributions with enormous generosity. She rejected the two forms of pettiness of the culture of narcissism: patenting one’s ideas and hiding that the idea belongs to someone else. That’s why the theoretical and other “disagreements” that Conceição sustained with her friends and colleagues ended in master’s and doctoral theses, co-authored articles, and published books.

Conceição sought Brazilian particularity, without rejecting the concepts and values with aspirations to universality born from the generalization of social, economic, political, and cultural relations born from the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. This historical specificity was not constructed through abstract and rebarbative opposition between abstract models but through historical investigation—the only way to give life to concepts.

The diversity of experiences within the common framework of aspirations for “modernity” was the emblem of the Trente Glorieuses that followed the World War II. It was possible then for the intellectuals of emerging nations – and Conceição among them – to design the space in which the utopias of equality and freedoms would be constructed through the “invention” of their own paths, in an enriching emulation of the core countries. Thus, the convergence towards the values, forms of coexistence, and political institutions born from the Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions, and the Industrial Revolution, would be accompanied by the differentiation of styles, the appreciation of cultural traditions, and the respect for “local” processes of social integration.

In Brazil, the so-called progressive forces were impotent in promoting the necessary reforms and advancing a national development project that could surpass the strict bounds of mere economic growth. The advance of industrialization and social and political modernization was thwarted by regional and class political alliances that incorporated the most retrograde and reactionary interests into the “developmental bloc”.

This circumstance explains the immediate post-war defeat of political tendencies that sought greater national autonomy. Such a claim did not mean, as conservative cosmopolitanism pretends, the pursuit of an autarkic economy. Conceição always insisted on the need to keep under national control – state or private – the sectors that are decisive from a financial and technological strategic viewpoint, which are crucial for economic governance and, above all, essential for coordinating investment decisions.

The continued renegotiation of the commitment to conservative cosmopolitanism was, in fact, responsible for the trajectory that led Brazilian capitalism to the impasses that currently immobilize it: the systematic deformation of popular will imposed by an oligarchic and intrinsically anti-republican political system; the astonishing persistence of the agrarian structure that is at the root of the reproduction and amplification of social inequalities transferred from the countryside to the city.

Inflated egos, festive leftists, or rigid minds would do well to keep their distance from Conceição. In this group, my dear friend had a legion of resentful individuals. It was difficult to convince those affected, but she did not fight with people, and much less did she intend to humiliate her antagonists. Appearances may have indicated otherwise, but Conceição abhorred peremptory personal verdicts and detested moralists and gossipers. She showed more tolerance for the misinformation and foolishness of innocents than for the pontification of those who indulge in proclaiming solemn banalities, a hallmark of our time. Anyone looking for a good quarrel could simply mouth pretentious trivialities like those that have entangled the country, things like: “we need to cut public spending”.

She was always criticizing, fighting with ideas, hers and others. If there were to be any consolation for those who felt hurt after a skirmish, it would be to know that her own ideas were the first to suffer in the Polish corridor of her critical habit. Conceição could spend hours, days, whole months reviewing and reformulating what she has already thought and said. But she did not forget what she had written.

Conceição’s interlocutors often had difficulty – often understandably – in comprehending that she did not want to defeat them in the debate in any sense. This would be a minor, contemptible, and petty goal. For her, it was much better if the opponent showed the ability to defend and counterattack. When the discussion heated up, she would hit harder. But this was merely a peculiar way of incorporating the other’s arguments. The contender, taken by surprise, received back their own reasons as if they were hers, usually re-presented in an inventive and innovative way.

Reverential fear, zero. The old Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado, Aníbal Pinto – masters and friends – figures that she admired and respected – heard a few harsh words. Old Prebisch felt a bit uncomfortable, Celso condescended, but Aníbal, the most Brazilian of Chileans, took it in his stride: “this is Maria Conce.”

At a seminar in 1981 in Mexico, gently and didactically, in impeccable English—discounting the Adolpho Celli-like accent (the James Bond villain in Thunderball)—Conceição destroyed the export-led growth model that the Cambridge economists, on the eve of the 1982 external debt crisis, were trying to sell to the Mexican government. Academic business, it should be said, was booming. Joan Robinson’s disciple, John Eatwell, now Lord Eatwell, cornered and unable to respond to objections, resorted to verbal aggression. The next day, at breakfast, he was forced by Nicholas Kaldor to apologize. Conceição, Luciano Coutinho, the Argentine Arturo O’Connell, Fernando Fajnzylber, and I heard Eatwell say in English under Lord Kaldor’s watchful eyes: “I was foolish, arrogant, and inconvenient”. Finally, Eatwell had managed to say something useful at that seminar! Conceição, eating a sandwich, responded in Portuguese between bites: “let it go, I’ll take care of my sandwich”.