Conceptions of weakness: the Brazilian Northeast and regional development in Brazilian national tought

Abstract

The following article aims to identify, in the path of the Brazilian National Thought (here represented by Gilberto Freyre, Josué de Castro e Celso Furtado), the conceptions of Northeastern Brazil as a poor, problematic, and even "explosive" region. The conceptions of those Brazilian national thinkers expressed in their work as much as in some of their commentators , were presented as they are mentioned it the text, with each thinker corresponding to a section: Freyre's Brazilian Northeast, sweetened by tradition and salted by modernity; Castro's "explosive" Northeast; and the Brazilian Northeast as periph eral and "problematic", according to Furtado. Such order of authors reveals the ways by which some Northeastern Brazilian intellectuals made germinate the idea of a characteristically Northeastern pattern of poverty, to be fought only in the presence of state intervention.