A propósito de uma Construção Interrompida

The article discusses Celso Furtado?s hypothesis that Brazil faces, in the 1990s, an interruption of its process of national economic formation. The reasoning draws upon the structuralist tradition, introducing state power and international geopolitics into the center-periphery analysis. It goes back to the common origin of capitalism and its interstate system of political management, so as to rethink the specificity of peripheral states. After that, and based on Karl Polanyi?s idea of ?double-movement?, it explores the hypothesis that the ?liberal-internationalizing? project is at least as old and strong as the project of formation of a national economic system, as conceived by Brazilian intellectuals, and specially by São Paulo?s elites and intellectuality.