Francisco de Oliveira was right when he wrote in the preface to his book, A navegação venturosa, about Celso Furtado: we owe him everything. This majestic plural naturally applies to successive generations of economists and social scientists who stubbornly seek to discover and rediscover Brazil. We owe Furtado our understanding of the specificity of underdevelopment and our understanding of the central issue: the nations on the edges of capitalism are condemned to “inventing” their own development strategies. If they don’t, they risk handing over their destinies to the processes of repetition and reproduction of conditions that generate dependency and backwardness.

Celso believed, above all in the capacity of rational transforming action. Positivist thinking was his intellectual source. “Not this caricature that is bandied about these days”, he told me in an interview that was published in the Carta Capital magazine, “but the idea that man has the means to transform the world, to build a better world, and that these means are ruled by science, which results from formidable progress in scientific knowledge. When I discovered the idea of social planning, I was enchanted and said: this is the path, the path we must follow to exit. To put your city in order, you must have a plan; so I focused myself on the study of planning.”

Celso Furtado wrote his most important work at the height of “developmentism”, developmentism that one should emphasize, was not some kind of idiosyncratic invention by a group of exotic nations but rather an adequate response to the challenges and opportunities created by the Great Depression of the 1930s and its catastrophic international environment. National development and industrialization projects on the peripheries were born from the same cradle that produced Keynesianism in central nations. It was a reaction against the misery and ills produced by the capitalism of the 1920s.

The wave of developmentism and the Keynesian experience reached their zenith in the three decades that followed the end of the Second World War. The political and social climate was saturated with the idea that it was possible to adopt national and international strategies of growth, industrialization and social progress. Celso, honoring ideas inherited from Raúl Prebisch, knew that the pretension of controlling one’s own destiny depended crucially, at the peripheries, on the constitution of productive forces generated by industrial capitalism. But, he did not ignore the fact that it was impossible to reproduce the trajectory of developed nations. There was a perception that the goal of bringing the nation closer to the desired forms of production and coexistence could not be achieved within the scope of the old and ruined international division of labor, nor even by means of a simple operation of “natural” market forces. In the period following World War II, the expansion of capitalist internationalism commanded by the United States and the polarization of the Cold War put forth new challenges to the progression of the developmentist agenda. He who has developed the habit of repeating, without any critical sense, that Brazil pursued an autarchic “model”, or a closed economy, falsifies the facts: Brazil’s industrialization process was closely followed by a profound internationalization of its productive economic structure. As Professor Carlos Lessa once said, almost all the important multinationals are here.

The results, whilst still not evenly balanced, were not all bad. Compared to any other period of capitalism that came before or after, the developmentist and Keynesian era performed much better in terms of rates of GDP growth, the creation of jobs, real increases in wages and, in the case of countries like Brazil, only fell short in terms of universalizing social and economic rights.

Clearly, it is not a simple case of reinventing or lamenting lost “developmentism”, which a singular historical experience of capitalism. But, it is possible to conclude, at least, that the “developmentists” understood a good deal about development. During the 1990s, liberal cosmopolitanism entered into an adventure of de-construction of the idea of the nation. To this end, it sought to hide and deny the existence of hierarchies and domination in international relations, to exalt the regenerating virtues of competition and to stigmatize interference of the State.

The result, which was disastrous on a material level and, furthermore, unstable in theoretical formulation, pointed with crystal clarity to the need to resume, and update, the development agenda within the new conditions of the international economy. This vital adherence to reality and to our times is not a task that can be outsourced to research centers or entities alienated from the historical circumstances and the economic peculiarities of different peoples or regions. To oppose mental dependency forms part of this aggiornamento (updating). In fact, this mental dependency found in Celso Furtado an obstacle of intelligence and sufficiently strong character to make him a reference of heterodoxy even whilst still alive. The International Celso Furtado Center for Development Policies is born with the aim of honoring the trajectory of the master. From the outset, this implies an intellectual commitment to face with equal resolution the theoretical and political challenges of development in our times.