Abstract

Notable among the various sources of inspiration mobilized by Roberto Schwarz throughout his trajectory is the absence of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian intellectual responsible for an accurate—albeit fragmented—reflection on the functioning of the intellectual world and of ideas in peripheral countries, a problem that, as we know, cross the Brazilian critic’s thinking. Based on this general approach, to be elaborated in its most detailed arguments in the first three topics, this article develops—in the last two sections—a hypothesis about the intellectual and political conditions of Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s that would explain Schwarz’s lack of interest in Gramsci’s thought, a reticence that does not cancel out, however, the hitherto unheard of affinities between their approaches to the articulation between ideas, nation and class in peripheral contexts.

Keywords
Intellectuals; Periphery; Nation; People; Democracy