Cambridge Journal of Economics 2017, 1 of 22

doi:10.1093/cje/bex021

When development meets culture: the

contribution of Celso Furtado in the 1970s
Alexandre M. Cunha and Gustavo Britto*

The article assesses the work of Celso Furtado (1920–2004) in the 1970s, an ambi-
tious attempt to redefine the field of development economics. Furtado’s work has
recently been revisited by several authors in the history of economic thought. This
text explores Furtado’s response to the perceived failure of development theory
to explain the reality of underdeveloped nations in the late 1970s. Expanding the
scope of analysis and assigning culture a pivotal role helped explain the dynam-
ics of development and underdevelopment. This theoretical movement occurred
as development economics was drifting out of the mainstream of economic theory.
Unlike the discussion of underdevelopment in the 1950s, this discussion of creativ-
ity and dependence encountered an adverse intellectual landscape despite being
one of Furtado’s most original contributions. This theoretical turning point is inter-
estingly connected to Furtado’s second term at the University of Cambridge. Like
the first discussion of underdevelopment during the 1950s, which was critical to
the formulation of his historical-structural analytical method, the discussions of the
1970s also led to this Brazilian author’s vivid and interesting contributions to the
field of development economics.

Key words: Celso Furtado, Underdevelopment, Creativity, Culture

JEL classifications: B20, O14

1.  Development economics and the idea of culture

Only a handful of authors in economics have engaged in theoretical endeavours as
ambitious as the one that Celso Furtado undertook in the late 1970s. Although the
outcome of his effort could be considered limited in comparison to the intent of his
1976 Prefácio a Nova Economia Política [Preface to a New Political Economy], the
book contained both a sharp criticism of economic science and an audacious project
to reconstruct the field’s conceptual framework, specifically, an attempt to redefine the

Manuscript received 19 March 2015; final version received 3 January 2017.

Address for correspondence: Alexandre M. Cunha, FACE/Department of Economics, Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais, Av. Antônio Carlos 6627, Belo Horizonte, MG, 31270-901, Brazil; email: alexandre@cedeplar.
ufmg.br
*Cedeplar/UFMG. This paper is dedicated to the memory of our beloved friend and colleague, Professor
Rodrigo Ferreira Simões, who passionately taught and inspired a generation of structuralist and regional
economists. The authors wish to thank José Luís Cardoso, Maurício Coutinho and Mauro Boianovsky as
well as two anonymous referees for their comments. Additional thanks also go to Julie Coimbra (Latin
American Studies Library, University of Cambridge) for providing us a copy of Furtado’s working papers
from 1974. Financial support from CNPq (the Brazilian National Research Council) and FAPEMIG (the
State of Minas Gerais Research Foundation) is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.
© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society.
All rights reserved.
Page 2 of 22   A. M. Cunha and G. Britto
field of development economics. Furtado criticized the field’s failure to explain and
effectively change the socio-economic reality of underdeveloped nations; his methods
expanded the scope of analysis, assigning culture a pivotal role in the dynamics of
development and underdevelopment.
The addition of culture is not a novelty in itself, as connections between culture and
economic dynamics have been pursued by various authors and from different perspec-
tives at least since Weber (1905), particularly in relation to ethics and religion. More
recently, this theme has been explored by Ruttan (1989) and Landes (1998) as the
idea of cultural endowments.
Gerald M. Meier (2005) devotes a chapter of his book on the evolution of develop-
ment economics to addressing these connections and exploring the role of national
culture in producing differential rates of growth. This concept is used, for example,
in the works of Hagen (1968), Hoselitz (1960) and McClelland (1961). At the same
time, Meier emphasizes the difficulty of implementing a variable as broad and complex
as culture. The main sense in which Meier considers culture as it relates to economic
development is as a dimension of social capital, together with institutions and social
capability. Meier highlights the role of these concepts in modern growth theory in
comparison to works from the 1950s such as those of Arthur Lewis, insisting that ‘the
link to development, however, should not be through a questionable appeal to “cul-
ture” but instead through the recognition of differences in the quantity and quality of
“social capital”’ (Meier, 2005, p. 196).
What is of particular interest here is that Meier, in his history of the field of devel-
opment economics, emphasizes the connection between culture and development in
one chapter and lists Furtado as an early contributor to development economics in
another. However, he fails to mention Furtado’s work in the 1970s in which culture is
an important dimension by which to understand development and underdevelopment.
Moreover, culture understood as a dimension of social capital differs significantly from
Furtado’s perspective, which connects culture to the idea of creativity to analyse par-
ticular dynamics of the development process, as we will discuss below.
The subject of culture has been present since the origins of development econom-
ics, albeit with a distinct focus. For example, it is no coincidence that what is probably
the first journal dedicated to development economics, founded by Bert F.  Hoselitz
in 1952 at the University of Chicago, was named Economic Development and Cultural
Change. Since its establishment, the journal has been characterized by an interdisci-
plinary approach to the study of economic development.1 It paid particular attention
to anthropological themes and to the debates cultivated by Hoselitz at the University
of Chicago, which represents one of the first efforts to effectively introduce non-eco-
nomic factors into development economics.
It is certainly plausible to place Furtado close to this tradition, especially if one fol-
lows the trail of clues in his autobiographical essays (Furtado, 1997, vol. 1, pp. 191–
98). For instance, he describes visits to research centres in the USA in 1951, which
decisively contributed to the theory Furtado later proposed, as analysed by Boianovsky
(2010). Meetings with Hoselitz and the anthropologist Melville Herskovitz, the author
of pioneering works in the field of cultural change, are singled out. Furtado notes that
Herskovitz bordered cultural determinism and privileged a synchronic (anthropologi-
cal) stance rather than a diachronic (historical), which reveals Furtado’s flirtation with

 We are indebted to an anonymous referee for bringing this journal to our attention.
1
 When development meets culture   Page 3 of 22
the anthropological literature. However, the Brazilian author considered historical
analysis one of his most important analytical tools, and his contact with the anthropo-
logical literature on culture was very cautious.
Furtado provides another good example in describing in his autobiography the pro-
cess of writing his first book (A Economia Brasileira, 1954). Therein, Furtado insists
that ‘comprehension of the phenomenon of development required a wider focus on the
process of cultural change, “the creative force of civilizations,”’ as the starting point of
his considerations (Furtado, 1997, vol. 1, p. 285). In fact, in that book’s introduction
(Furtado, 1954, p. 21), he highlighted the relevance of cultural change to development
economics.
These passages clearly indicate the influence of Chicago on his views. The theme
of cultural change is not found in his writing before that 1951 trip. The topic appears
frequently in his subsequent texts, albeit without further theoretical development.
Chapter  2 (‘Economic development in the process of cultural change’) of the book
Dialética do Desenvolvimento [Dialectic of Development] (1964) is perhaps the best
example of a direct reference to anthropological themes (Furtado, 1964, pp. 26–27).
However, the novelty of Furtado’s work in the 1970s is not associated with debates
about cultural change. In fact, in his arguments, the relevance of culture is strongly
linked with creativity on a rather different analytical level. In fact, the term ‘cultural
change’ is used neither in Criatividade e Dependência na Civilização Industrial [Creativity
and Dependency in Industrial Civilization] (1978)2 nor in other works from the same
period. Instead, Furtado focused on the theme of creativity, which allowed him to
advance with renewed force the theme of dependency by repositioning the issue of
technological dependence, as addressed by import substitution industrialization, in
terms of wider cultural dependence.3
The emphasis on creativity, however, did not lead Furtado to a narrow concept of
culture restricted to artistic creation. In his work, culture refers to a system of values,
beliefs and perceptions, which should be the perspective considered throughout. To
understand how culture enters the debate, it is important to situate the concept within
the broader context of Furtado’s body of work. Furtado strove to explain why and
how distinct economic structures formed in response to European economic expan-
sion, some of which reached high levels of development but the vast majority of which
remained in a persistent state of economic backwardness (Furtado, 1997, vol. 3, p. 11).
His initial explanation was formulated in the 1950s in his theory of underdevelop-
ment. During this period, Furtado made lasting contributions to development eco-
nomics, particularly through what became known as the historical-structural method.
By analysing the process of industrialization in rich and poor nations, he showed that
underdevelopment was not a stage through which a nation passed but a self-perpetuat-
ing condition. In doing so, Furtado distanced himself from both Marxist analysis and
the view that economic growth proceeded through a series of well-defined stages. In
addition, Furtado was the first author to associate the persistence of underdevelopment

2
 This book was published in English in 1983 under a different title, Accumulation and Development.
Hereinafter, all references to this book, including quotations, refer to the English-language publication
Accumulation and Development ([1978] 1983).
3
  It is also important to highlight that Furtado’s understanding of the connection between culture and
development in the 1970s was influenced, at least to some degree, by methodological concerns. In line with
the detailed analyses of this matter in Boianovsky (2015), this should be understood in connection to the
attempt Furtado made to reconcile Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism with Braudel’s historicism.
Page 4 of 22   A. M. Cunha and G. Britto
with high degrees of income concentration as both a cause and a consequence of the
dual nature of economic structures that characterized these countries.
In the mid-1970s, Furtado engaged in a marked redefinition of his original proposi-
tions. In this revision, the blind reliance on industrialization, with all its internal contra-
dictions, as the cure for underdevelopment is all but replaced by the central role of the
context in which industrialization occurs. The evolution of Furtado’s theory of under-
development during this time was fuelled by a multitude of factors. It was partially
related to the discrediting of development economics in general and of Latin American
structuralism in particular. It was partly explained by the failure of Latin American
industrialization to produce effective development. It was also his full-fledged contri-
bution to the dependency debate to which he had contributed decades before, perhaps
in reaction to criticism received from dependency authors in the late 1960s. Last but
not least, like that of many authors, Furtado’s intense intellectual effort was motivated
by the challenge posed by the rise of monetarism in Latin America.
The main objective of this paper is to analyse Furtado’s redefinition of his theo-
retical scope during the 1970s. Furthermore, Furtado’s contribution to development
economics is similar in nature to the efforts undertaken in the early days of the field.
Just as Furtado’s historical-structural analytical method broadened the horizons of
economic theory to enable a fuller understanding of the economic divide between
developed and developing countries, the introduction of the concepts of culture and
creativity in the 1970s expanded the discipline’s horizons, allowing for a much broader
view of the dynamics of underdeveloped economies.
In the mid-1970s, Furtado faced the challenge of theorizing about social forma-
tions, eventually producing an original interpretation of economic development as a
broad historical process resulting in the diffusion of what he described as industrial
civilization. He was particularly interested in understanding the relationship between
the process of accumulation and the realm of values that govern social life, as well as
their shifts in different societies over time. To accomplish these objectives, a return to
classical political economy was required to allow the reconstruction of the conceptual
framework within which economists operate. In addition, this reconstruction should
be based on an overview of historically identified social structures (Mallorquin, 2005,
pp. 263–64). Specifically, the theoretical boundary he was trying to overcome was the
essentially static nature of economic analysis. In his view, economic problems are not
detached from the overall social context. Hence, economic reality is always immersed
in a broader temporal dynamic (Furtado, 1976, pp. 10–11).
The articulation of economics with history, however, produces additional chal-
lenges. From his perspective, the use of history to complement economics fails in most
cases because the simplified modelling of economics incorporates historical reflection
poorly. Hence, the effective incorporation of history into economics requires a theo-
retical redefinition of the conceptual framework of economics.
The theoretical contribution planned by Furtado did not include re-forging the field
of economics. The author described his contribution as a mere preface to the work that
remained to be written. This is the ambition and scope of Prefácio a Nova Economia
Política (1976). It is appropriate to note, as does Mallorquin (2005), that even as a
preface, the book’s theoretical proposition is itself a relevant contribution that helps
us introduce different aspects of Furtado’s work in economic theory in general and in
development economics in particular.
 When development meets culture   Page 5 of 22
At its core, this effort reconsiders the economic theory of accumulation (and of
social surplus) and the search for a global social theory. However, Furtado stressed
that this broader theory should not be restricted to the pursuit of interdisciplinary
studies. On the contrary, it meant the effective incorporation of a broader perspective
into economic analysis. It is with this idea in mind that Furtado started a deliberate
movement to open the field of economics to other social sciences, incorporating an
original perspective on the theme of culture.
Culture, as defined by Furtado, is critical to understanding the issue with which he
was concerned in the 1970s: the realization that capital accumulation and economic
growth were unable to overcome the barriers created by a concentrated income dis-
tribution in the context of underdevelopment. On the contrary, the process tended
to dynamically reproduce income inequality. The explanation for this recursive pro-
cess presupposed an understanding of the dynamics of modernization of consump-
tion through capital accumulation and the diffusion of industrial civilization. The
role of culture appears as a fundamental connection to the historical dynamics of
economic systems. Hence, this is a turning point in Furtado’s argumentation of the
most general theme in his work: the production and reproduction of development and
underdevelopment.
Of Furtado’s publications during this period, Accumulation and Development ([1978]
1983) can be considered the main work. That book contains both the core and the later
argumentation of the issues presented here; Furtado conducts a broad investigation
of various areas of the social sciences and humanities with the goal of increasing the
analytical scope of economics to explain the reproduction of underdevelopment (and
dependency4) over the course of the worldwide expansion of industrial civilization.
Often mentioned in passing, the importance of culture and cultural dependence in
Furtado’s work has been considered only recently. The most comprehensive appraisal
of the role of culture in Furtado’s theory of underdevelopment was provided by Octavio
Rodríguez ([2006] 2009), who analysed several of Furtado’s works, starting with those
from the 1950s, with special attention to Accumulation and Development. In particular,
Rodríguez highlights Furtado’s concept of industrial civilization and its high degree
of abstraction, which functions as an ideal type against which the development pro-
cesses of central and peripheral countries are compared to reveal the specificities of
underdevelopment in the fashion of Furtado’s historical-structural method of analysis.
Rodríguez also perceptively notes that Furtado’s cultural dependence and the ideol-
ogy of progress present in accumulation and dependence are linked to the process of
endogenous development proposed by Furtado in Cultura e Desenvolvimento em Época
de Crise [Culture and Development in Times of Crisis] (1984).
However, Rodriguez’s intention is mainly didactic and concerned with the pres-
entation of Furtado’s general theoretical contributions and of the interplay between
development and cultural dependence, which imparts an unnatural impression of lin-
earity to the process of development in Furtado’s work on the subject. Rodriguez’s
exposition of Furtado’s view of culture resonates with Furtado’s own recollections,
highlighting that the theme of culture, broadly defined, can also be found in Furtado’s
earliest works (Rodríguez, [2006] 2009, p.  415). However, there is no inquiry into
how early concern with development and cultural change yields a complex interplay

4
  A full discussion of the different interpretations of dependency in the literature is beyond the scope of
this paper. For an introduction on the subject, see Palma (2008) or Love (1990).
Page 6 of 22   A. M. Cunha and G. Britto
among technological imitation, creativity and cultural dependence in the 1970s. In
other words, there is no exploration of how cultural dependence became a ‘phenom-
enon of a higher order than underdevelopment’ in his theory (Furtado, 1974C, p. 9).
This paper is divided into five sections. Following this introduction, a brief pres-
entation of Furtado’s intellectual trajectory provides a glimpse of his intellectual for-
mation and career, highlighting the connection between analytical work and public
action throughout his life. The next section focuses on Furtado’s specific contributions
throughout the 1950s, the period during which he helped establish the canon of devel-
opment economics. An analysis of Accumulation and Development ([1978] 1983) fol-
lows. Finally, brief concluding remarks are presented.

2.  Intellectual trajectory: permanences and redefinitions5

Born in northeastern Brazil on 26 July 1920, Furtado moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1939
to study at the University of Brazil. Furtado began his academic training at a time
when the teaching of economics was still incipient in Brazil (Iglésias, 1981, p. 162). His
first contact with economic analysis did not provide more than generic references to
the main debates in Brazil at that time. However, as indicated in his publications from
that time, exposure to themes in public administration shaped Furtado’s interests in
the field of economics.6 In 1946, he moved to France to pursue further studies at the
University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he was granted a scholarship and admitted to a
doctoral programme in economics.7
Furtado returned to Brazil in August 1948, resuming his functions as a civil serv-
ant and joining the economic staff of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro.
Nevertheless, early the following year, he moved to Santiago (Chile) to join the newly
founded United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (best known by
its Spanish acronym, CEPAL). In 1950, Raúl Prebisch, the Executive Secretary of
CEPAL, nominated thirty-year-old Furtado to direct its Development Division. It
was a moment of intense intellectual creativity during which Prebisch produced his
most original work, including the keystone of Latin American structuralism, Problemas
teóricos y prácticos del crecimiento económico [Theoretical and Practical Problems of
Economic Growth], which is widely considered the most complete account of what
would be known as CEPAL’s theories.8
At the time, Furtado’s intention was to work exclusively on his theoretical ideas
of underdevelopment, having obtained authorization from Prebisch to visit research
centres in the USA in 1951. There, he visited different universities and had contact
with the work of de Vassili Leontieff, Walt Rostow, Melville Herskovits and Theodor
Schultz, among others. This trip, in fact, fundamentally shaped Furtado’s theoreti-
cal trajectory (Furtado, 1997, vol. 1, pp. 191–201).9 The results of his reflections on

5
  Furtado’s three-volume autobiographical work is the source of the information presented in this section,
unless otherwise indicated (Furtado, 1997).
6
  Furtado (1944, 1946A and 1946B). See also Silva (2010).
7
  Although having written a thesis on the Brazilian colonial economy under the supervision of Maurice
Byé, it is of particular importance for the reflection upon his intellectual trajectory to note that it was
François Perroux who most impressed and influenced Furtado during this period (Boianovsky, 2008; Britto
and Cunha, 2014).
8
  See Prebisch, Raúl. 1952. ‘Problemas teóricos y prácticos del crecimiento económico’/’Theoretical and
practical problems of economic growth’. México, DF: CEPAL.
9
 It is also likely that he met Alexander Gerschenkron. For an analysis of this theme, see Boianovsky
(2010).
 When development meets culture   Page 7 of 22
development materialized in the following year with the publication ‘Formação de cap-
ital e desenvolvimento econômico’ [Capital Formation and Economic Development]
in the Revista Brasileira de Economia. The paper was then translated and published in
International Economic Papers and included, some years later, in the well-known volume
edited by Agarwala and Singh (1958).10
Furtado would remain affiliated with CEPAL until 1958. Beyond the theoretical
reflection undertaken during those years, he was in charge of several missions in Latin
American countries. From 1953 to 1955, he lived in Rio de Janeiro as the head of a joint
CEPAL/BNDE (Brazilian Development Bank) group, developing a supporting study
and development programme for Brazil for the 1955–1962 period. During this period,
he also promoted the creation of the Clube dos Economistas [Economists Club] and the
Revista Econômica Brasileira [Brazilian Economic Journal], both based in Rio de Janeiro.
Bielschowsky (1995) identified Furtado as the most important name in what he
called a development movement with nationalist tendencies.11 In his evaluation, the
influence and scope of Furtado’s work imparted a degree of cohesion to the economic
thinking of policymakers engaged in the planning of Brazilian industrialization. In this
sense, Furtado’s theoretical work throughout the 1950s was strongly associated with
the practical appeal of transforming the Brazilian economy. Furtado was an effective
leader among his country’s economists and a symbolic figure of Brazilian hopes for
development during the 1950s (Bielschowsky, 1995, pp. 132–34). This is a key theme
in the analysis of the evolution of Furtado’s thought, i.e. his deliberate combination
of intellectual creativity with continuous transformative actions on economic issues.
In 1956, Furtado moved to Mexico City on a CEPAL mission. However, the next
year, at Nicholas Kaldor’s invitation, he took a sabbatical to study at King’s College
at the University of Cambridge. There, he wrote what would become his most popu-
lar book in Brazil (now in its 34th edition, with approximately 350,000 copies sold)
and would be translated into nine different languages: Formação econômica do Brasil
[Economic Formation of Brazil], published in 1959.
At Cambridge, he attended seminars on themes of economic development, worked
on his book, and engaged in academic debates with distinguished figures, such as Joan
Robinson, James E. Meade and Richard Kahn, as well as rising stars, such as Piero
Garegnani and Amartya Sen, in addition to Kaldor himself. As Furtado would later
argue, this academic milieu ‘usefully vaccinated me against insidious forms of mon-
etarism that sterilize contemporaneous economic thought, emptying it from all social
concern’ (Furtado, 1997, vol. 3, p. 222, and vol. 1, pp. 327–59).12
In 1958, Furtado returned to Brazil and formally resigned from CEPAL and
accepted the position of Director of the BNDE. Brazil was experiencing a period of
intense political dynamism. President Juscelino Kubitschek chose Furtado to head the

10
 ‘Formação de capital e desenvolvimento econômico’. Revista Brasileira de Economia (set. 1952). Rio
de Janeiro, ano 6, 3, pp. 7–45. In English: ‘Capital formation and economic development’, in International
Economic Papers (1954). Londres, nº 4.  In Spanish: ‘La formación de capital y el desarrollo económico’,
em El Trimestre Económico (jan-março 1953). México, v. XX, 1, pp. 88–121. As a book: The Economics of
Underdevelopment (1958). A. N. Agarwala and S. P. Singh (org.), J. Viner, C. Furtado, P. A. Baran, W. W.
Rostow, R. Nurkse, H. W. Singer et al. New York: Galaxy/Oxford University Press.
11
  For an analysis of the relationship between nationalism and economic development in Latin America
see Cunha and Suprinyak (2017).
12
  All translations from the original Portuguese texts are ours.
Page 8 of 22   A. M. Cunha and G. Britto
Working Group on the Development of the Northeast (GTDN in Portuguese), which
was responsible for designing a development plan for the region. This effort resulted in
the foundation the Superintendence for the Development of the Northeast (SUDENE
in Portuguese), with Furtado as its first head. This prominent public life also led him
to be named the first head of the Ministry of Planning in 1962.
However, his career trajectory was abruptly interrupted in March 1964 by the mili-
tary coup that revoked his political rights for ten years. Furtado was compelled to flee
his country. After spending time in Chile at the invitation of CEPAL’s Latin American
Institute for Development Studies and moving to the USA to serve as the research
director of the Center for Development Studies at Yale University, Furtado settled in
Paris in 1965. There, he was the Chair of Economic Development in the Faculty of
Law and Economics of the University of Paris (Sorbonne), a position he would hold
for twenty years.
Throughout the 1970s, Furtado was a visiting professor at major universities, increas-
ing his international travels and deepening his academic reflection. However, a key
moment in his academic life was marked by his return to the University of Cambridge
in 1973 as the Simón Bolívar Professor in Latin American Studies and as a Fellow of
King’s College. During the next academic year, Furtado prepared two working papers
(Furtado, 1974B and 1974C) and formulated the original argument presented in one
of his most ingenious books, Accumulation and Development ([1978] 1983).
After the political amnesty of 1979, Furtado travelled frequently to Brazil, increasing
his involvement in national politics. After the end of military rule in 1985, he assumed
the post of Brazilian Ambassador to the European Economic Community. From 1986
to 1988, he was Minister of Culture for the indirectly elected government of President
José Sarney. In the following decade, he would take part in various international com-
missions, such as the World Commission on Culture and Development (established by
UN and UNESCO). His intellectual work during these years remained connected to
different aspects debated over the course of his career and in the writing of his mem-
oirs. Furtado passed away in November 2004 at his home in Rio de Janeiro.

3.  Underdevelopment and dependency: early contributions

Furtado was prolific in terms of both intellectual output and firsthand experience
in shaping the economic development of Latin America. Cross-fertilization between
these two fronts renders the analysis of his theoretical contributions to development
economics inextricable from his biography.
Through an extensive body of work from the early 1950s to the late 1960s, Furtado left
an indelible mark on a construction of a new branch of economic literature that sought
to understand the realities of underdeveloped countries (Boianovsky, 2010). During
a time of intellectual effervescence, Furtado joined Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Arthur
Lewis, Ragnar Nurkse, Albert Hirschman, Raul Prebish, Alexander Gerschenkron,
Walt Rostow, Simon Kuznets, Paul Baran and Paul Singer, among others, in shaping
what became the field of development economics.13 The many contributions of these
authors were also at the core of the creation of an international institutional framework
composed of the UN, CEPAL, IMF, IRDB and IEA, which greatly influenced actual
processes of development throughout the world.

13
  Meier and Seers (1984), Meier (1987), Agarwala and Singh (1958).
 When development meets culture   Page 9 of 22
According to Bielschowsky (2006), Furtado’s contributions to Latin American
structuralism can be broadly divided into three groups. The first is the addition of
a historical perspective to the analysis of development processes in Latin America
(Furtado, 1959, [1969] 1970). The second is the thesis that growing modern, urban
sectors insufficiently absorb the large contingents of the population from backward,
largely agricultural, activities. Hence, socio-economic inequality, or social heterogene-
ity, tends to persist despite industrialization.14 The third major contribution is found in
Furtado’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Deeply rooted in the analysis of the
Brazilian case, Furtado advances the debate regarding the relationship between under-
development and the income distribution (Furtado, 1966, 1968, 1972). The latter, by
determining specific demand patterns, tends to straitjacket growth and, ultimately,
development.15
Furtado also broke new ground by proposing a concept of dependency underlying
the relationship between developed and underdeveloped countries. This concept is
associated with patterns of technological use and change in underdeveloped countries.
In his view, burgeoning modern sectors are projections of developed economies in
underdeveloped countries that create a dual structure whose development depends
on imported—and ultimately inadequate—technology. This type of dependency also
produces a series of shortcomings related to mismatches between new consumption
patterns and local productive structures.
As will be observed later, the interplay among transplanted technologies from devel-
oped countries, the permanence of income inequality and the ensuing waves of the
modernization of consumption patterns are at the heart of Furtado’s realization of
the limits of industrialization in Latin America. This notion, we argue, ultimately led
the author to venture beyond economic literature to shed light on the development/
underdevelopment divide.

3.1  Development and underdevelopment

Furtado departs from criticism of standard economic theory and its failure to ade-
quately explain the characteristics and processes underlying underdeveloped countries.
In particular, he notes that by focusing on the distribution rather than the produc-
tion side of the economics process, standard theory can dispense with a historical
perspective.
At first, Furtado’s concept of development was similar to that of the pioneers of
economic development and to that of CEPAL. At this point, development was equated
with labour productivity gains associated with capital accumulation and the incorpora-
tion of new technologies through capital accumulation.
However, Furtado’s historical-structural analytical method rendered an otherwise
standard definition for the period a much richer view of underdevelopment and of the

14
  In reality, Furtado develops and anticipates an original concept of dualism. His analysis of the dynam-
ics of underdeveloped economies went beyond Arthur Lewis’s model and showed the real possibility of
accelerated urbanization with persistent unemployment (Furtado, 1961).
15
  Dobb (1965) notes that by introducing the importance of the income distribution, Furtado estab-
lished demand-side determinants of the process of accumulation, given that the patterns of consumption
of distinct income levels create specific demand structures that determine whether development becomes a
cumulative process. See Bielschowsky (1995) for a discussion of Furtado’s original contribution to Brazilian
economic thought.
Page 10 of 22   A. M. Cunha and G. Britto
process of development itself.16 Given that new production techniques are introduced
within pre-existing economic structures, the main task of development theory becomes
the analysis of the impacts of growing modern sectors and their repercussions in terms
of productivity gains, distributive patterns and the use of social output.
Hence, beyond apparent similarities in definitions, Furtado’s emphasis on the pro-
cess of capital accumulation has a clearer purpose. By studying the details of how
industrialization takes place, he demonstrates that what is generally treated by the
growing literature as a relatively homogeneous process—a process commonly equated
with development itself—is, in and of itself, the origin of underdevelopment. According
to Boianovsky (2010), in doing so, Furtado differentiated the sources of growth in
developed and developing countries. In the latter, output and productivity growth
stemmed from physical capital accumulation, whereas technological progress was the
main driver in the former.

3.2  History and the genesis of the core-periphery system

Furtado then turned to historical analysis to explain how distinct economic structures
arose from the waves of expansion of capitalism after the Industrial Revolution. The
first wave consisted of the spillover of the new methods of production into Eastern
Europe. The second wave saw such methods sprawling across colonies in temperate
climates (New Zealand, the United States, Canada and Australia). Finally, in a process
heavily dependent on international trade, the technologies created in the Industrial
Revolution gained a foothold in relatively densely populated areas where pre-capitalist
systems had already developed.
This distinction is crucial to Furtado’s concepts of development and underdevel-
opment, as the phases define the type and depth of the impact of new production
techniques on a local economy. The difference between the economic structure of a
country and the process of technology creation generates a hybrid structure in which
modern and backward methods of production co-exist indefinitely.
According to Furtado, it is only in the Industrial Revolution that the process of devel-
opment described by Lewis (1954) takes place. In its early stages, as new production
techniques and forms of organization are created, growth is fuelled by the transference
of labour from traditional to modern sectors. Hence, industrialization is accelerated by
the typical mechanism of profit accumulation in the modern sectors. As the supply of
labour becomes inelastic, a qualitative change takes place given that the labour supply
constrains growth. A temporary solution is to shift excess production of capital goods
to external markets. A permanent solution is to reconcile, over time, the production of
capital goods itself with the factor endowments. This is achieved through technologi-
cal change in the capital goods sector, which moves towards labour-saving techniques.
Consequently, the economy’s capital to labour ratio increases further, upending the
downward trend in profits through sustained productivity gains.
What is important to retain from the process described by Furtado is that technol-
ogy advances gradually. Thus, for all the social conflict that may and has taken place,

16
 According to Furtado, ‘[t]he problem in the abstract or historical nature of the method with which
economists work is not independent, thus, from the problems that are of his concerns. … Each developing
economy faces a series of problems that are specific to itself, even if several of them are common to other
contemporaneous economies’ (Furtado, 1961, p. 22).
 When development meets culture   Page 11 of 22
the process of technical change solves distributive pressures along the way. The central
tenet of Furtado’s theory is that the process described above cannot be generalized and
applied to underdeveloped countries, as occurs in Rostow’s (1952) stages of develop-
ment and, to a certain extent, in Lewis’s model of development with an unlimited
supply of labour.
According to Boianovsky (2010), Furtado’s approach is similar to Gerschenkron’s
(1952) concept of relative backwardness. However, in Furtado’s construction, the spe-
cificities of late industrialization, i.e. the advancement of modern production methods
over archaic social, institutional and economic structures, creates its own dynamics.
Hence, contrary to Gerschenkron’s advantages of economic backwardness, what fol-
lows from Furtado’s chasm between development and underdevelopment is that the
latter is a condition rather than a stage. The economic and social imbalances inherent
to underdevelopment are self-perpetuating.
Furtado thus argues that economic theory must have a separate set of concepts
to assess underdevelopment. As the productive methods of the Industrial Revolution
reached and were disseminated across former colonial areas, the initial stimulus for
industrialization is provided by foreign trade, which can set off a development process
without the previous accumulation of capital. From this starting point, a new com-
bination of factors of production is possible given imports of new technologies and
machinery. The resulting rise in income is concentrated in the trading sector, which
on the one hand, creates an increasing economic surplus that furthers the process of
accumulation, but on the other hand, increases the level of income concentration.
The growth dynamics are thus unconventional in underdeveloped countries. In
developed countries, which followed the processes described in phases one and two
above, the productivity gains associated with capital accumulation result in a cumula-
tive cycle of income, profits and wage (as demand increases) growth, which channels
further resources into new investments. In underdeveloped countries, given that the
growing income tends to be concentrated in the hands of a few groups, wages remain
stagnant, and the process of capital accumulation subsides. Hence, the pace of devel-
opment is connected to the functional division of income.
As Furtado clearly argued, ‘[t]he result has almost always been the formation of
hybrid structures, part of which tended to behave as a capitalist system, and another to
keep itself within the previous structure’ (Furtado, 1961, p. 180). The process of the
creation of such hybrid or dual economies is associated with a specific international
division of labour, which Prebisch (1950) defined as the core-periphery system. Rather
than development proper, what takes place is a process of capital accumulation linked
to the modernization of consumption patterns. The latter is a requirement, given that
local production must find a market. In Furtado’s view, therein lies the main problem
of development. Late industrialization is, by definition, conducted using imported pro-
duction techniques that are inadequately matched to local factors of production. On
the other hand, consumption patterns are structurally incompatible with local income
levels. As a result, industrialization and modernization of consumption standards
require increasing levels of income inequality (Furtado, 1974C). Furtado’s concept
of a dual economy is associated with the coexistence of capitalist and pre-capitalist
methods of production, as occurs in the context of underdevelopment. This implies
the interdependence of modern and archaic, which perpetuates the dual nature of the
system and preserves its backward characteristics. According to Furtado, the concept
Page 12 of 22   A. M. Cunha and G. Britto
can be fully understood only in a system of international relations that include the
phenomenon of dependency (Furtado, 1974B, p. 7).

3.3  Accumulation dynamics in the periphery

Notably, Furtado uses a concept of structural heterogeneity similar to that used within
CEPAL. In the CEPAL view, the lasting coexistence of a small number of productive
activities with a large number of low-productivity sectors is a defining characteristic of
peripheral countries. Furtado starts from the same definition, showing how such struc-
tures formed in Latin American history. What is distinctive about Furtado’s contribu-
tion to development economics is that the structural heterogeneity associated with
the productive structure, as described by Prebisch (1950) and others, is inextricably
entangled with a high degree of social heterogeneity whose economic expression is
steep income concentration.
The social heterogeneity observed in the periphery is instrumental in slowing the
process of development even as industrialization accelerates. As the economy’s produc-
tivity and income levels rise, income concentration hinders the emergence of cumula-
tive processes of growth because of equally high inequality in consumption patterns
within the country. A  large proportion of the population is effectively marginalized
from the market economy, whereas a minority mimics the patterns of consumption
in developed countries. Accordingly, local market growth is lower than the potential
growth under the same rate of accumulation. The result is lower growth rates associ-
ated with persistent levels of socio-economic inequality (Furtado, 1974C, p.4).
The concept of social heterogeneity, together with the historical-structural analyti-
cal method, illustrated Furtado’s intellectual process and contribution to development
economics in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, showing his unease both with the
economic literature and with socio-economic reality, the author expanded the theory’s
scope, searching for new perspectives outside economic theory.
Another stint at the University of Cambridge would alter the course of Furtado’s
theoretical contributions. Two short discussion papers published by the Centre of
Latin American Studies marked two major departures from development economics
as understood in the literature.
In the first paper, Underdevelopment and Dependence: The Fundamental Connection,
published in 1973, Furtado laid out the basic ideas that he would later explore in
Accumulation and Development ([1978] 1983), which will be discussed at length below.
In that paper, Furtado argues that it is not possible to properly understand the dynam-
ics of underdevelopment without examining the process of production, which is con-
ducted using imported technology through import substitution industrialization,
together with the process of circulation, which is dictated by expanding patterns of
consumption that emulate those of rich countries. Thus, underdevelopment engenders
a high degree of cultural dependence, which ‘is rooted in a persistent disparity between
the level of consumption (eventually including part of the working class’ consumption)
and the level of capital incorporated into the productive apparatus’ (p. 9).
The consequences of the dynamics described above for the field of development
economics are far reaching and are explored in the second paper, The Myth of Economic
Development and the Future of the Third World, which would be expanded upon and pub-
lished in 1974 as a book of the same name. In this work, Furtado argues that economic
 When development meets culture   Page 13 of 22
development, viewed as the reproduction of the process of industrialization of rich
countries throughout the underdeveloped world, is an illusion.
On the one hand, such a widespread process would be impossible given the natural
resources required and the subsequent environmental impacts. On the other hand,
Furtado argued that industrialization is, by nature, distinct in underdeveloped areas
and thus incapable of providing the same gains in well-being: ‘to maintain the pat-
tern of consumption of the rich minorities, diversifying industrial technology has to
be geared to the most sophisticated processes in highly capitalized economies, not-
withstanding the much lower level of capital accumulation of the peripheral country’
(p. 10). Hence, increasing social inequality, which is incompatible with development
proper, is a feature of industrialization and tends to persist as long as matching con-
sumption patterns between centre and periphery remained a necessary outcome of the
process.

4.  Creativity and dependency: technological dependence as cultural

dependence
In Accumulation and Development ([1978] 1983), Furtado explicitly connects the process
of development proper and culture as part of a broader strategy of widening his view of
the social context and its dynamics. From the perspective of Furtado’s economic the-
ory, these connections are logical extensions of the processes he carefully described in
Desenvolvimento e Subdesenvolvimento [Development and Underdevelopment] in 1961.
In particular, the objective is to explore the consequences of the process of industri-
alization in the periphery, which extends beyond the productive side. Hence, true to
his criticism of economic theory, Furtado establishes important connections between
changes in production and changes, or lack thereof, in distribution.
It is in this context that the concept of dependency arises throughout Furtado’s
work. On the supply side, its duality stems from the alien nature of the technology that
is adopted in the process of industrialization by the periphery and from the reliance on
increasingly expensive imports for further productivity gains. On the demand side, its
duality stems from the income distribution and the associated consumption patterns
that it ultimately enables.
Bresser-Pereira (2011) highlights a fundamental aspect of dependency theory that
frequently escapes most analysts and allows for better differentiation of each author’s
contribution. The central argument is that the term ‘dependency’, when applied to
the periphery, is the counterpart of the term ‘imperialism’ in reference to the core.
This leads imperialism to be equated with dependency in explanations of economic
backwardness. The distinction proposed by Bresser-Pereira sets apart what he called
the national-bourgeois interpretation and its broader idea of imperialism, which was
common in Latin America in the 1950s and can be related to CEPAL’s structuralism,
from the dependency theory that gained favour in the 1960s. The latter argues that
economic backwardness is not exclusively caused by exploitation by the imperial core
but by the inability of local elites to act according to national interests (Bresser-Pereira,
2011, p. 49).
This distinction is instrumental in placing Furtado’s own views of dependency
within the broader field of dependency analysis in the 1960s. On many occasions, par-
ticularly in his autobiography, Furtado emphasized the theme of dependency since the
Page 14 of 22   A. M. Cunha and G. Britto
1950s. This is unequivocally stated in his writings in the 1970s with the overt objective
of demonstrating the precedence of his propositions in the debate.
What certainly cannot be found in Accumulation and Development ([1978] 1983) is
any noticeable retort to the fierce criticism by Tavares and Serra (1971) of the stag-
nationist thesis proposed in Subdesenvolvimento e Estagnação na América Latina
[Underdevelopment and Stagnation in Latin America] (1966). The issue at hand is
complex and departs from the scope of our main argument, but two points need to be
made. First, according to the detailed exposition by Coutinho (2015), Furtado’s argu-
ment on the matter is better known because of the version offered by Tavares and Serra
than because of his own book. Second, and more importantly to the issues explored in
this paper, Furtado lays bare the permanence of the original view of dependency and
advances it substantially by interweaving technological dependence with the dynam-
ics of creativity, thus creating a view of technological dependence as part of a wider
cultural dependence.
What Furtado describes is a significantly more complex vicious cycle than that
depicted by Kuznets (1958). The low rate of accumulation compatible with late indus-
trialization is combined with persistent reliance on imports, lower rates of growth of
employment and the need to emulate the consumption patterns of developed coun-
tries. Hence, the supply and demand sides of the economic system are inextricably
linked to heterogeneous structures that also have inseparable social and economic
characteristics.
In such a cycle, structural unemployment and income concentration are both instru-
mental and consequential. Given this dynamic, Furtado argues:
Dependency should be understood firstly as a set of structural features that are determined by
historical circumstances: the form of entry into the international division of labour system will
engender backwardness in the development of productive forces; industrialization promoted by
modernization programmes will reinforce trends towards the concentration of income; the need
to import certain techniques will facilitate control of economic activities by transnational enter-
prises. … The struggle against dependency is no more than the effort of the peripheral countries
to change this structure. Since technology is the key resource and since it is also monopolized
by central countries, dependence can be said, first and foremost, to be technological. (Furtado,
[1978] 1983, pp. 7–8)

What is evident from this line of argumentation is that from a broader perspective,
i.e. that of society as a whole, technological dependence means cultural dependence.
Culture is a cumulative system from which chains of actions and reactions are initi-
ated and have the potential to cause structural change. This process, in turn, is what
Furtado calls ‘development proper’. It is linked to two processes of creativity. First, it
has an essentially technical side, which he also labels ‘material culture’, composed of
instruments that increase society’s capacity to act. Second, there is the effective use of
such instruments, or non-material culture, in the form of social organizations, science,
art, philosophy, music, religion, morality, customs and other forms of social heritage.
Furtado would argue that creative processes, which are always associated with cul-
tural changes, imply further changes that ripple through the material and non-mate-
rial sides. However, it is changes in non-material culture that are usually linked to
social conflicts. It should be no surprise to the reader that Furtado argues that the
process of industrialization in the periphery is not a process of development proper.
This is because industrialization does not proceed to overcome technological depend-
ence. On the contrary, it occurs as successive waves of expansion and diversification
 When development meets culture   Page 15 of 22
of consumption patterns. This process is viable only because the imitative pattern
observed on the technical side is replicated on the consumption front, i.e. on the mate-
rial culture side.
What can be observed from Furtado’s work in the late 1970s is the repetition of
a pattern observed in the 1950s. Just as it seemed impossible for him to properly
understand the divide between development and underdevelopment in the early years
of development economics without referring to the broader historical process of the
worldwide expansion of the Industrial Revolution—and to the peculiar forms of capi-
talism that began in the periphery—in the 1970s, it became impossible for Furtado to
understand what he termed ‘cultural dependence’ and ‘creative processes’ from within
the straitjacket of economic theory. Hence, in Accumulation and Development ([1978]
1983), he undertook the daunting task of breaking open the doors of economic theory.
To understand the specific moment when culture became a fundamental analytical
concept, we must distance ourselves from the general outline of Furtado’s theoretical
work and assess its intellectual history, investigating the 1960s and 1970s in detail.
In Pioneers in Development. 2nd series (1987), Furtado analytically reconstructed his
intellectual career in the field of development economics. The result was the identifi-
cation of a linear path in which his original contributions to CEPAL’s structuralism
in the 1950s led to dependency theory and to his original formulations in the field of
culture.
Such an analysis may hold from Furtado’s perspective, particularly given that he
remained faithful to his analytical method and devoted increasing amounts of effort to
understanding many of the issues he had studied since the 1950s. However, a broader
view of Furtado’s path in development economics does not exhibit this degree of lin-
earity. Rather, together with the development of his previous ideas and concepts, the
late 1970s produced a considerable theoretical reorientation of his work.
A view of Furtado’s work in the 1970s as a process of searching for new theoretical
paths permits us to not only reassess the author’s original route but also reflect on his
contributions to economic theory in the second half of the twentieth century. From
this perspective, Furtado’s intellectual path is not one of a constantly progressing set
of ideas and concepts but an intellectual struggle with the inability of mainstream eco-
nomics to encompass all the issues involved, as well as their interrelations, in underde-
velopment and development proper.
According to Furtado’s analytical reconstruction of his own contributions to devel-
opment economics, a global picture derived from history, connected to the concept
of a system of productive forces, has produced the so-called ‘structuralist’ approach
(which is not directly related to the French structuralist school). It is the view that
one cannot separate the study of economic phenomena from their historical contexts,
which is particularly relevant to understanding (socially and technologically) heteroge-
neous economic systems, as in the case of underdeveloped countries.
In the story told by Furtado, he is a protagonist in the construction of dependency
theory. However, strictly speaking, this theory became popular in the 1970s as a cri-
tique of the first generation of CEPAL structuralism. Furtado, addressing this issue in
his 1987 autobiographical text, refers to a working paper written at Cambridge in 1973
(Furtado, 1974C) on the fundamental connection between underdevelopment and
dependency. He states, ‘it was my studies on the dynamics of demand and moderniza-
tion in the reproduction of underdevelopment that guided me to the idea of depend-
ency, first cultural and then technological’ (Furtado, 1997, vol. 3, p. 39).
Page 16 of 22   A. M. Cunha and G. Britto
Furtado had already explored the importance of cultural factors in the process of
development in previous works.17 He argues that it was thanks to such a comprehensive
approach that it was possible to further the understanding of the linkage between external
and internal forms of social domination. The phenomenon of dependency, except the
features that had developed during the period of colonial domination, had been initially
expressed in cultural terms through the transplantation of consumption patterns that
could be adopted due to the surplus generated by static comparative advantage in foreign
trade. It was this dynamism of the modernized part of the consumption structure that
projected dependency in technological terms, inscribing it into the productive structure.
The adoption by periphery elites of the consumption patterns and ways of living
engendered by industrialization in developed countries is correlated with the occur-
rence in the underdeveloped world of waves of industrialization and increases in
income inequality. Economic growth thus tends to rely progressively on the capacity of
the classes that capture the collective surplus to force the majority to accept increasing
levels of socio-economic inequality. Furtado’s conclusion is sharp: only political will
can change this picture.
The effort to rationally reconstruct his intellectual career results in the concomitant
articulation of his theoretical efforts during the 1950s and 1960s with those of the
1970s. What emerges is an apparently cumulative body of work on a comprehensive
theory of development and underdevelopment.
A detailed analysis of Furtado’s autobiographical writings provides another interpreta-
tion of this route. A key moment occurred during the period between April and September
1964 while Furtado stayed in Santiago (Chile) and was affiliated with the ILPES [Latin
American Institute for Development Studies]. Upon returning to Chile, Furtado organ-
ized a weekly seminar with the intent of evaluating CEPAL’s legacy. Based on a shared
concern regarding the loss of dynamism among Latin American economies, particularly
among those that had made progress in industrialization, this seminar was responsible
for some of the themes and critical bases of what would become known as dependency
theory.18 Furtado devoted two sections of his memoirs to this period under the titles ‘A
new reading of CEPAL’s texts’ and ‘From cultural to technological dependence’.
Undoubtedly, in this and others of Furtado’s work, there are enough elements to
have a clear view of his importance in shaping the concept of dependency and his sin-
gular analysis of the issue of technological dependence. However, it also seems clear
that the terms in which it could be expressed as a process of cultural dependence and
its connection to the concept of creativity in a specific historical dynamic are issues
that would take shape several years later. Nevertheless, he clearly suggests in his auto-
biography his leading position in the early debates on these subjects and his apprecia-
tion for an open exchange of ideas at that venue, with no one reserving certain ideas
for their personal work:
For the very first time, a group of economists and sociologists was meeting to discuss the issue
of development/underdevelopment taking as reference a series of theoretical texts elaborated in
Latin America itself and collated with many of our real experiences. The experience was far from

  This point is also made by Rodríguez (2009, p. 442, n. 11).

17

 The seminar series started in July 1964, and was attended by Cristóbal Lara, Eric Calagno, Fernando
18

Henrique Cardoso, Ricardo Cibotti, Norberto Gonzáles, Benjamin Hopenhayn, Carlos Matus, Gonzalo
Martiner, José Medina Echevarría, Julio Melnick, Luis Ratinoff, Osvaldo Sunkel, Pedro Vuscovic and
Francisco Weffort (Furtado, 1997, vol. 3, p. 65).
 When development meets culture   Page 17 of 22
an academic seminar because nobody was engaged in personal games, marking cards, or pre-
serving their supposedly original ideas for their own publications. (Furtado, 1997, vol. 3, p. 65)

The intellectual core of Furtado’s work completed between 1964, when he was cut
off from Brazilian public life, and the beginning of the 1970s was effectively con-
nected to the same theoretical core of development that he formulated in the 1950s,
albeit at increasing levels of sophistication.19 Suffice it to say, his main book in this
period is precisely his most solid on economic analysis: Teoria e política do desenvolvi-
mento econômico [Theory and Policy of Economic Development] (1967), which was,
at least in its first edition, directly connected to Desenvolvimento e Subdesenvolvimento
[Development and Underdevelopment], published in 1961. Although it was more
elaborate, Teoria e política do desenvolvimento econômico repeats and reproduces por-
tions of Desenvolvimento e Subdesenvolvimento without advancing any content related to
the theme of cultural dependency. Subsequent editions of the book published in the
1980s, however, incorporated those new ideas.20
According to Szmrecsányi (2005), Furtado wrote three books on economic analy-
sis (taken in the Schumpeterian sense), which help us demarcate the different stages
of his career. They are Desenvolvimento e subdesenvolvimento (1961), Teoria e política
do desenvolvimento econômico (1967) and Pequena introdução ao desenvolvimento—um
enfoque interdisplinar [Short Introduction to Development—An Interdisciplinary
Approach] (1980). Teoria e política do desenvolvimento econômico (1967) reassesses the
core of Desenvolvimento e subdesenvolvimento (1961) with greater theoretical acuity and
maturity but without expanding its scope. Pequena introdução ao desenvolvimento—um
enfoque interdisplinar (1980), which would be revised in its third edition and published
under the title Introdução ao desenvolvimento: enfoque histórico-estrutural [Introduction to
Development: Historical-Structural Approach] (2000B), connects all the theoretical
fronts opened at different times in his work in the same analysis. Finally, the cultural
perspective assumes the foreground, as we observe in Furtado’s presentation of the
third edition of the book:
The idea of development is at the centre of the worldview that prevails in our time. It is founded
on the process of cultural invention that lets you see man as a transforming agent in the world.
Give it as obvious that man interacts with the environment in an effort to reach his potential. On
the basis of reflection on this theme is implicit a general theory of man, a philosophical anthro-
pology. The failure of this theory often responds by the sliding to economic and sociological
reductionism. ... The study of development, therefore, has as a central theme, cultural creativity
and social morphogenesis, which remains largely untouched. (Furtado, 2000B, p. 7)

Another autobiographical text from 197321 helps explain Furtado’s view on these
issues before they had assumed a definitive form in his books. In the 1970s, Furtado
had clearly perceived the limits of his theoretical framework and the necessity of a bold
move to widen the analytical scope of economics. However, he could not yet articulate
these limits. Despite this, he insists that his activity as a professor allowed him to search
for answers to these questions. He faced the future with anticipation and confidence,

19
  These books are Análise do ‘modelo’ brasileiro (1972); Formação econômica da América Latina (1969); Um
projeto para o Brasil (1968); Teoria e política do desenvolvimento econômico (1967); Subdesenvolvimento e estag-
nação na América Latina (1966); Dialética do desenvolvimento (1964).
20
  For a more in-depth discussion of the differences between these editions, see Szmrecsányi (2005).
21
  This autobiographical text was originally published as Furtado, 1973. However, the references here are
from the English translation: Furtado, [1973] 2000A.
Page 18 of 22   A. M. Cunha and G. Britto
assuming the mission of moving forward with his hypotheses, which at times revealed
the narrowing of the discursive field of economics. His own words on the subject are
revealing:
The military coup d’état in Brazil, in 1964, deprived me of my political rights and made it
practically impossible for me to continue to work in my country, changing the course of my
life. Having participated indirectly and directly for 15 years in the elaboration of policies, I am
now convinced that our main weakness lies in the inadequacy of our theoretical analyses and
our key ideas. As from the standpoint of a dependent subsystem it is very difficult to get a view
of the system as a whole, one tends to follow the line of least resistance—that is to say, of ideo-
logical imitation. Alongside my teaching activities I continued to seek answers to the riddles of
underdevelopment, from time to time putting forward new hypotheses around some questions:
… The theory of growth that blossomed immediately after World War II became a conventional
dynamization of macroeconomics models, following Keynesian or neoclassical lines, but inquiry
into the reasons for backwardness is meaningful only in terms of the historical context, which
demands a different theoretical approach. I believe that because of its nature, underdevelopment
could not be explained by growth theories. (Furtado, [1973] 2000A, pp. 200–201)

Furtado’s second term at the University of Cambridge is symbolic of this theoretical

turning point. The University of Cambridge occupies an important place in Furtado’s
intellectual path. As mentioned above, it was there during the 1950s that he formu-
lated his historical-structural analytical method in Formação Econômica do Brasil.
Upon his return in the 1970s, a new moment of intellectual ferment would come,
leading to a sequence of original works: O mito do desenvolvimento econômico [The
Myth of Economic Development] (1974A), Prefácio a nova economia política (1976),
Accumulation and Development ([1978] 1983)  and Pequena introdução ao desenvolvi-
mento—um enfoque interdisplinar (1980). At Cambridge, Furtado lectured on develop-
ment in what ‘was, in reality, an exposition of ideas elaborated in the previous decade,
which allowed me to insist on the specificity of underdevelopment and the need to
depart from a global view of international relations and of the process of the propaga-
tion of technological progress’ (Furtado, 1997, vol. 3, p. 222). The course discussions
would not, however, be the centrepiece of his work during this time: ‘most of my
time I dedicated to participating in seminars related to themes that interested me, to
discussing with colleagues the idea of the reconstruction of political economy, to rear-
ranging my own ideas, to pushing my mind to decipher enigmas that had eluded me
for some time’ (Furtado, 1997, vol. 3, p. 223). Furtado’s objective was to ‘elaborate
a language common to the distinct branches of social sciences that was able to com-
prehend development as the realization of human potential’ (Furtado, 1997, vol. 3,
p. 224).
Accumulation and Development ([1978] 1983)  was the culmination of this effort.
Furtado’s intentions are clear in the preface, which is a warning of sorts to the reader:
The pages which follow are intended to be an academic anti-book. The problems are too broad
to fit into the test-tubes of the social sciences—though this does not prevent them from appear-
ing in more solemn tomes under guises suited to individual taste. The connecting thread is the
author’s perplexity in the face of the shadowy world surrounding the tiny clearings in which the
social sciences are conducted. It was this perplexity that led me to approach the same problem
from a number of different problems. If the subject matter is imprecise and the methods inad-
equate, how can we hope to follow a straight path? (Furtado, [1978] 1983, p. iv)

The book contains eight chapters. The first chapter (‘Power and space in a global
economy’) elaborates on how the process of expansion of the world economy in the
 When development meets culture   Page 19 of 22
third quarter of the twentieth century produces new questions for industrial civiliza-
tion. These questions largely stem from the progressive shift of coordinating power
in international economic relations from nation states to large transnational enter-
prises (Furtado, [1978] 1983, p. 23). This chapter also introduces a few examples of
how interrelated forces among nation-states exacerbate the alarming distance between
developed and underdeveloped countries in terms of labour productivity and pressure
on the workforce.
According to Bosi (2008, p.  13), chapters two and three (‘The emergence and
spread of industrial civilization: 1 and 2’) in the most recent edition of the book form
its backbone. Bosi recommends a different reading strategy by combining these two
chapters with chapter seven (‘A retrospective view’). In these three chapters, Furtado
analyses, from a historical and structural perspective, the long-run process that results
in industrial capitalism and in the hegemony of the European bourgeois. Undoubtedly,
therein lies the nucleus of Furtado’s notion of industrial civilization. In addition, these
chapters reveal how the diffusion of this type of society is not only the continuation of
the same process that led to the industrialization of the Occident, as in some cases, the
process resulted from the reactions of countries that saw their sovereignty or dominant
geographical position threatened.
In chapter four, Furtado elaborates with a high degree of sophistication how the
idea of progress gave way to that of development in underdeveloped countries. He
also confronts the problem of industrialization in the context of dependency, which
not only constitutes a historical stage of the process that would lead underdeveloped
economies along the process of development but also provides no evidence that the
same process would lead to stable social structures. It is plain that the main example
of such a process, although there is no direct explicit reference, is the Brazilian case.
Instead of stability, Furtado describes a scenario of increasing social heterogeneity
with resulting urban marginalization and political instability, which creates space for
‘preventive’ authoritarianism. In this context, Furtado unveils the ideological traps
that were particularly pertinent to his country at the time:
Thus, authoritarianism is less an instrument designed to foster rapid accumulation than a repres-
sive weapon to be used against the social forces which dependent industrialization has failed to
channel in constructive form. Since development is an expression of the capacity to create origi-
nal solutions to the specific problems of a society, authoritarianism frustrates true development
by blocking the social processes that foster creativity. (Furtado, [1978] 1983, p. 81)

From the fifth chapter onwards, Furtado reflects on the future of and possibilities
for transforming the current reality. The keyword then becomes creativity, and the
argument makes its way into the next chapter (‘Dependence in a unified world’),
where the interrelation between cultural dependence and technological dependence
is made clear.
After a retrospective analysis presented in the seventh chapter, Furtado concludes
the book with a chapter (‘In search of a global view’) in which, amidst philosophical
investigation driven by the question of human freedom, he sees myriad possibilities of
resistance to the oppression imposed by the global expansion of industrial civilization.
These possibilities take shape as social forms of organization and political activism
that are themselves the most authentic manifestations of creativity. This chapter is the
most unrestrained in an already unconventional book. As Bosi notes, Furtado remain
faithful to ‘the task of writing an academic anti-book’. In the final pages, he ‘takes flight
Page 20 of 22   A. M. Cunha and G. Britto
towards a horizon of a thought that dialogues with several philosophical, aesthetic and
political strands, having as a common thread a single value, the creation of a society
in which the potentialities of an individual and of his peers are continuously elevated’
(Bosi, 2008, p. 30).
Furtado’s intellectual journey and analytical formulations have many implications
for economic theory and development economics. Several of his subsequent texts,
such as the Pequena introdução ao desenvolvimento—um enfoque interdisplinar (1980),
make explicit many of the connections between development and creativity in eco-
nomic terms. However, it is not difficult to understand why work that is so overtly
different from an economic theory has had a limited impact on economists and has
remained among the least well known and studied of Furtado’s works.

5.  Final remarks

The objective of this paper was to reassess the work of Celso Furtado, especially one
of his least well-known works, Accumulation and Development ([1978] 1983). Our main
argument was that despite the relatively limited attention paid to this book, in terms of
the extent of the contribution to development economics, it is similar in nature to that
undertaken in the 1950s. At the dawn of development economics, Furtado’s histori-
cal-structural analysis expanded the scope of economic theory, enabling him to show
how the divide between, as well as the continuous reproduction of, development and
underdevelopment was itself a product of the expansion of the Industrial Revolution.
In the 1970s, as the discipline of development economics began its decline in main-
stream economics, Furtado engaged in a second charge against what he perceived to
be boundaries too narrow for economic theory to fully encompass the dynamics of
development. Widening the horizons of the debate, Furtado introduced culture, and
creativity in particular, as defining concepts of development proper and of the waves
of modernization of consumption patterns associated with capital accumulation in the
periphery.
In this sense, the research programme designed and followed by Furtado in the
1970s and thereafter represents an effective analytical rearrangement. Although there
were indications of the importance of the theme of culture to the development process
in his writings in the 1950s, this reflection was initially related to the idea of cultural
change and was not actually prominent in his analysis. The resumption of reflection
on culture, specifically in discussions of creativity, was related to the broader argument
about technological dynamics and consumption patterns, effectively allowing impor-
tant modifications to Furtado’s argument and providing a new analytical perspective.
Furtado’s reconstruction of his intellectual trajectory is fundamental to the investi-
gation presented here. His autobiographical texts, written in different periods, make it
possible to follow his doubts and uncertainty about certain theoretical aspects of his
interpretation of development and underdevelopment as he endeavoured to recon-
struct his intellectual career in a linear fashion.
The line of argumentation presented here follows from a close examination of
Furtado’s path in the field of development economics, as well as of an analysis of his
contributions to the field since the 1950s. Special attention was paid to the two periods
that he spent at Cambridge as defining moments of his theoretical work and career.
The analysis of his ideas since the 1950s, along with the consideration of his complete
 When development meets culture   Page 21 of 22
autobiographical works, enabled the identification of the specific moment at which
culture and creativity were included as fundamental analytical concepts in his work.

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