ABSTRACT
During the 1960s and early 1970s, even as the polarization within the growing class of Brazilian intellectuals and professionals reached its climax, cleavage lines were less clear-cut than Gouldner's analysis would suggest. The defeat, indeed repression, of the intellectual vanguard and the popular movement isolated, by the late 1970s, proponents of radical confrontation with the military and its technocrats. Political defeat, repressively imposed by the military, forced an important group of Brazilian intellectuals into exile. The persistence of high inflation, slow economic growth, excessive fiscal deficits, high interest rates, disorganization of public services, and weak steering capacity in the federal government combine to place a large burden on Brazilian society, eroding the social fabric and provoking outbursts of violence and despair. The role of the Brazilian intelligentsia—both the intellectuals/ scholars and the technical intelligentsia—has changed tremendously in the decades between 1960 and 1990.
