ABSTRACT
The intellectual reflection on national development taking place in mid-twentieth-century Brazil was generally structured around a binary reasoning juxtaposing agriculture-based versus industry-based economies, and export-led versus domestic-oriented activities. This logic was paradigmatically displayed in key intellectual studies conducted at the time, particularly in the examinations produced by the group of prolific nationalist thinkers who gathered at the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (ISEB) in the second half of the 1950s. Moreover, instead of the broad political support ISEB members expected, divergent developmental positions continued to exist within different realms of the federal administration. One view favored a higher role to be played by the government in economic promotion along with growing restrictions to be placed on foreign capital participation in what were considered to be strategic areas On the other ideological extreme, a much smaller but increasingly influential group of leading technocrats defended the higher involvement of private investors and more strict control on public expenditures.
