José Murilo de Carvalho (1939–2023)

With the death of José Murilo de Carvalho on August 13, 2023, Brazil lost one of its foremost historians and leading public intellectuals. Born in rural Minas Gerais, educated at a Franciscan seminary but lacking the vocation for the priesthood that his parents had seen in him, Carvalho studied sociology and politics at the Faculdade de Ciências Econômicas of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) from 1962 to 1965. These were heady days for the Left, and Carvalho joined the Catholic Ação Popular, working in rural education and labor organization. The dreams of socialism, as he later put it, crumbled like a sandcastle with the rapid success of the 1964 military coup and the long dictatorship that followed. Much of his life's subsequent work sought to explain the Brazilian republic's failures that had seemingly culminated in the coup.A scholarship from the Ford Foundation enabled Carvalho to do his doctorate at Stanford University in political science, but with a historical dissertation, “Elite and State-Building in Imperial Brazil,” defended in 1975. From 1969 to 1978 he taught in the newly created political science department of UFMG, after which he moved to Rio de Janeiro to take a position at the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro, where he taught in its graduate programs in political science and sociology. From 1986 to 1996 he also had an affiliation with the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, where he led a research project on Brazil's Old Republic. In 1997, Carvalho took up a professorship at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, teaching there until his retirement in 2009. He held numerous visiting positions at universities in the United States, England, France, and Spain; particularly important was his 1980–81 stint at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.Four broad themes run through Carvalho's scholarship. In the two books that resulted from his dissertation, A construção da ordem: A elite política imperial (1980) and Teatro de sombras: A política imperial (1988), he sought to explain the Brazilian Empire's distinctiveness in comparison to Spanish America (the monarchy, Portuguese America's postindependence political unity, and the Brazilian Empire's relative political stability). He broke with paradigms that stressed the planter class's dominance or the overweening state and its bureaucracy, instead focusing on the political elites and their actions as they mediated between state and society through the monarchical regime.A second theme—nation and citizenship—flowed naturally from his reflections on the imperial state. Neither the empire (1822–89) nor the republic that followed it effectively constructed a national state or a nation, Carvalho repeatedly emphasized. A formação das almas: O imaginário da República no Brasil (1990), the only one of his books translated into English (in 2012 as The Formation of Souls: Imagery of the Republic in Brazil), demonstrated the limits of the republic's symbolic project and the endurance of monarchical symbols. The companion volume, Os bestializados: O Rio de Janeiro e a República que não foi (1987), traced how the Carioca populace's relations with the republican state included apathy when it came to formal political participation, violent reaction when faced with direct state intervention (as in the 1904 revolt against obligatory vaccination), and pragmatic pursuit of favors (which he dubbed estadodania instead of cidadania). This theme culminated in his 2001 Cidadania no Brasil: O longo caminho, his best-selling work. Carvalho revisited T. H. Marshall's classic formulation of citizenship's progression to argue that, in Brazil, political rights preceded civic and social rights, which meant that, since independence, there has been an insufficient foundation for political rights.Several of Carvalho's major works examined institutions, and these constitute a third theme in his oeuvre. His first book, A Escola de Minas de Ouro Preto: O peso da glória (1978), examined the development of mineralogical and metallurgical sciences. Edited books on the Academia Brasileira de Letras and the Academia Brasileira de Ciências in 2009 and 2017 respectively continued this interest in intellectual institutions. Perhaps the most important contribution in this area, however, came in the form of pioneering articles on the armed forces in politics in the first half of the twentieth century, which appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s (this journal published a revised version of one of these articles in 1982). Instead of reducing military interventions to their class origins, he sought to understand the internal organizational changes that turned the armed forces into a “destabilizing power.” Forças armadas e política no Brasil (2005; it was reissued in revised form in 2019) finally brought these (and other previously published texts) into a single work that also reflected on the proper role of the armed forces in twenty-first-century Brazil.Intellectual history and biography constitute the fourth theme in Carvalho's oeuvre. His biography of Brazil's second emperor, D. Pedro II (2007), explored the tensions between the individual, Pedro de Alcântara, and his role as emperor. Jovita Alves Feitosa: Voluntária da pátria, voluntária da morte (2019), the last book that he published, presented the available sources on this young woman who volunteered to serve in the Paraguayan War and became a minor celebrity in 1865 but, rebuffed by the War Ministry, fell into prostitution and committed suicide, all before her 20th birthday. In addition to important articles on positivism and the thought of Francisco José de Oliveira Viana and Evaristo de Moraes Filho, Carvalho edited selected works or correspondence of leading nineteenth-century Brazilian political figures, including Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, the Viscount of Uruguay, and Joaquim Nabuco (the last in collaboration with Leslie Bethell). “Clamar e agitar sempre”: Os radicais da década de 1860 (2018) provided a critical edition of the radical liberals’ conferências, the public meetings through which these reformers sought to mobilize the populace of Rio de Janeiro in support of their political reforms—reforms that were, in fact, more radical than those proposed in the 1870 Republican Manifesto. The largest of these documentary projects, in collaboration with Lúcia Maria Bastos Pereira das Neves and one of us (Marcello Basile), involved collecting and publishing all the extant manuscript and printed pamphlets that circulated in Portuguese America at the time of independence. Published as Às armas, cidadãos! Panfletos manuscritos da Independência do Brasil (1820–1823) (2012) and the four-volume Guerra literária: Panfletos da Independência (1820–1823) (2014), these texts demonstrated the breadth and depth of political debate and show that independence was more than just an arrangement among political elites.During the last two decades of his life, Carvalho led four collaborative research projects on nation, citizenship, and the state in nineteenth-century Brazil, funded by the Programa de Apoio a Núcleos de Excelência (PRONEX). The PRONEX workshops brought together scholars from Brazil and several other countries, resulting in five edited books (a sixth volume, which will include a posthumous chapter, is forthcoming). They built an intellectual community and set a scholarly agenda for future research on nineteenth-century Brazilian politics.Carvalho's work received numerous awards. Both A formação das almas and D. Pedro II won the Prêmio Jabuti, Brazil's top literary award, while Os bestializados was recognized by Brazil's social sciences association as the best book of 1987; Cidadania no Brasil won the Premio Casa de las Américas. In 2004 he was elected to the Academia Brasileira de Letras, the culmination of a long list of accolades that he received during his career. Despite this recognition, José Murilo, or Murilo, as his friends and colleagues knew him, remained a man of simple habits; like a good Mineiro (someone from Minas Gerais), he cultivated a modest public and private persona. An indefatigable researcher and writer, mentor to numerous students and scholars, internationally recognized, he kept his sense of humor, commenting that, although he was an “imortal,” as the 40 members of the Academia Brasileira de Letras are known, he remained “morrível.”A short text cannot do justice to the breadth of Carvalho's contributions, among them his pioneering efforts to bridge the gaps between history and the social sciences; his willingness to take on topics that were viewed with disdain back in the 1980s, such as the study of the armed forces or political elites; his independence from the Marxist paradigms prevalent in the Brazilian academe during much of his career; and his pioneering work on citizenship and political imaginaries. While his work was always based on rigorous empirical research and careful theoretical reflection, Carvalho wrote for a broad audience, his fellow Brazilian citizens who deserve more from their republic and its elites, who need to understand their elites’ failure—or unwillingness—to construct a fully inclusive democratic citizenship and an economy that adequately provides for all. Sadly, the events of the last decade or so in Brazil left Carvalho pessimistic about his country's future, as expressed in the title of one of his last books, a collection of essays from 2017: O pecado original da República (The republic's original sin).

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