Readers and academic reading of Karl Marx (São Paulo, 1958-1964)

Abstract

Ideas, books and concepts of Karl Marx and various Marxist authors was incorporated into scientific and cultural institutions. It is one of the political sphere importation into the academic implying sense of speed in relation to its origins and gave to Marxism, through the practices of the agents of this transfer, support for their preservation, dissemination and transformation. Concurrently, there is the incorporation of these lines to the required reading of the humanities and the repertoire of cultivated layers. Examination of appropriations that academic and cultured elites made of Marx, situate them (such work and such elites), institutionally. This is what this article does. Arguing that the legitimacy of the uses of a tradition result not only of their intrinsic value, but the work oriented agents interested in it, is elected an exemplary experience for research. This article looks at two university groups initially focused on the study of Karl Marx's work, made in the late 1950. It begins by proposing a collective biography, the reading program and the various uses they made of them. To refine the analysis and proof the advocated method selects for vertical take, within a group (the first one) and a discipline (sociology), two contrasting trajectories (Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Octavio Ianni) and various forms Marxism (theoretical and empirical / dominant and dominated). Finally, it discusses the profits propitiated to have operated with three concepts of cultural sociology: habitus, « field » and « patterns of intention » – taken from the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Baxandall.