Maria da Conceição Tavares: Exemplar of Courage in the Fight for Knowledge Tribute from Miguel Henriques de Carvalho, Marcelo Pereira Fernandes, and Vinicius Carneiro

“In addition to our classes and economic contributions, the important thing is to leave them with a feeling of optimism and hope to inspire future generations. I don’t give up on this country. Despite all of today’s misfortunes, I still think that Brazil is the country of the future. That Brazil has a future” – Maria da Conceição Tavares, 2019.

In June 8, 2024, Professor, Economist and Politician Maria da Conceição Tavares (1930-2024), Portuguese by birth and Brazilian at heart and by choice, one of the greatest exponents of the Brazilian and Latin American economics, passed away. In in few fields of knowledge, in few places in the world, were there people like her who so consistently  combined the search for knowledge, creativity, courage and combativeness, in the fight for her socially progressive ideals. Professor Conceição Tavares had a notable presence within Brazilian university circles, educating and enlightening  a legion of people, being among those mostly  responsible for the development and relevance of critical economic thinking in Brazil, in its different aspects. Both in academia and in public policy debates, her great legacy continues to this day.

After getting her first degree in Mathematics in Portugal in 1953, she arrived in Brazil in 1954. From the start, she sought to understand Brazilian society and tirelessly engaged in the fight for economic development, social justice and democracy in this county. As her Portuguese degree was not recognized by the Brazilian bureaucracy, in 1956 she enrolled in the undergraduate Economics course at the University of Brazil  (now the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ), where she graduated in 1960, becoming an Assistant Professor at this university in the following year. She would become “Livre Docente” (Full Professor) at the UFRJ Institute of Economics in 1974, “Titular” Professor (a higher category that exists in Brazil) in 1978 and Emerita in 1993. At Unicamp (State University of Campinas, in São Paulo state), she served as Full Professor between 1974 and 1987.

Professor Conceição Tavares, along with Professors Carlos Lessa (1936-2020) and Antonio Barros de Castro (1938-2011), composed a fundamental trio of the Latin American structuralist tradition (all connected to both UFRJ and UNICAMP). This perspective had been initiated years earlier by Celso Furtado (1920-2004) and Raúl Prebisch (1901-1986) at ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), an organization linked to the UN, created in 1948, with headquarters in Santiago, Chile, to research the specificities of the region’s economic problems (in which Conceição, Castro and Lessa worked in the 1960s and 1970s).

Professor Conceição Tavares’ economic thought was characterized by her frontal criticism of free market liberal thought and its economic policy prescriptions. In the development of her economic thinking, Conceição Tavares was the heir, without dogmatism, of great thinkers such as Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, and Schumpeter, as well as Prebisch and Furtado. There was also a decisive influence from Ignácio Rangel, another important Brazilian economist based at the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES), especially concerning the analysis of the financial aspects of contemporary capitalism, one of her main research topics throughout her career.

She participated intensely with other colleagues, including Lessa and Castro, in the institutional building and management of two of the world´s leading centers of heterodox economic thought, the postgraduate programs at Unicamp (1974) and UFRJ (1979). These were bravely created during the times of the Military Dictatorship (1964-85) in Brazil, with Conceição Tavares even being briefly arrested as a political prisoner once. Seeking to follow her own path and with spectacular creativity (although always acting collectively) Professor Conceição Tavares left a vast body of work, covering various topics, including books, scientific articles, interviews, interventions in the press, in addition to supervising several academic theses, and opening new lines of research. She was responsible for seminal works that remain unavoidable key references today – whether to advance her propositions, or to refute them – on Macroeconomics, Political Economy, Brazilian Economy and International Political Economy.

Among her numerous contributions, it is important to mention her analysis of the Brazilian experience of industrialization through import substitution, her first published work, which came out  in 1962; and the pioneering way in which she applied Kalecki´s macroeconomic schemes of reproduction, based on  the Principle of Effective Demand, for  a demand-led growth  analysis  of the Brazilian economy  during the 1970s. She did this not just as a purely intellectual exercise, but rather to seek to understand the movement that took place in Brazil between 1967 and 1973, during the height of the military government, simultaneously experienced rapid economic growth and a drastic  worsening of income distribution, as publicly revealed by the Brazilian Demographic Census of 1970.

Years later, her text “The resumption of North American hegemony”, published in 1985, became the starting point for several researchers. This culminated in 2008, in the creation at UFRJ of the first postgraduate program in International Political  in Brazil, a program in which Conceição Tavares also taught. It is very difficult to find any Brazilian economist with a critical perspective, working in the areas in which Conceição Tavares made contributions, whose work has not been influenced by her.

In order to overcome the situation of underdevelopment characteristic of primary exporting Latin American countries such as Brazil, Conceição Tavares argued that the State should play a crucial role, both in the promotion of productive transformation and diversification and technological progress and also for the ensuring effective social inclusion, guided by universal social policies that are required for the full exercise of citizenship.

This was also reflected in her political activities, as she actively participated in several notable episodes of Brazilian political life from the second half of the 1950s. Thus, during Juscelino Kubitschek’s presidential term (1956-60), she collaborated with the  “Plano de Metas” development plan, between 1958 and 1960, as an employee of the BNDE (Brazilian National Development Bank, currently BNDES) and was part of the ECLAC staff in Chile between 1961 and 1974. In the 1980s, she was an active member of the PMDB (Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement), then a center left party, during the re-democratization period. She played a key role in the drafting of the Federal Constitution of Brazil (known as the “Citizen´s Constitution” due to the ample social rights it introduced) as an advisor to the party. Between 1995 and 1997, as a deputy elected by the (then more leftist)  PT (Workers’ Party), Conceição Tavares was in the trenches of resistance against the dismantling of the developmental state and the attempts to roll back the recently won social rights brought about in the heyday of  neoliberalism during the presidential terms of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002). From 2003 onwards, during PT’s presidential terms, first with Lula (2003-10) and then with Dilma Rousseff (2011-16), although she remained affiliated with the party, she both praised as well as criticized different aspects of the PT governments, without ever renouncing her intellectual independence and her commitment to the country’s structural transformation towards a more inclusive and materially developed society. From 2016 onwards, she joined the currents critical of the rightwing shift observed in the country after Dilma´s removal by a parliamentary coup, contributing with opinion articles and other occasional public interventions.

On her long journey, the fight for democracy was present at every moment of her life, particularly as she lived in places and moments that were marked by different authoritarian regimes. Conceição Tavares experienced three military coups and was persona non grata of the dictatorial regimes that were installed. She came to Brazil in 1954, fleeing the Salazarist regime in Portugal. Later, after the 1964 coup in Brazil, she was welcomed at the ECLAC office in Chile, where she would stay until 1973. Then, after the military coup suffered by President Salvador Allende, she returned to Brazil.

In recent years, videos of some of her interviews and classes became available on the internet and short clips based on excerpts from these have become a great success on social media. In these clips, she analyzes, in a didactic and yet profound manner, aspects of global and Brazilian capitalism that remain disconcertingly relevant. Professor Conceição Tavares will continue to be a fundamental reference for all those interested in understanding Brazil and the world we live in, and an example that theory and action need to walk together in the collective effort to transform the established social order. Among her countless teachings, she left an important warning to economists: “if you don’t care about social justice, about who pays the bill, you are not a serious economist, you are a technocrat”.