Interview with Fernando Henrique Cardoso

Resumo

On April 8, 2013, I was received at the Instituto Fernando Henrique Cardoso (IFHC) in São Paulo by the former president for a conversation that would focus on his oeuvre as a social scientist, Marxism and his conception of politics — incidentally the subject of my PhD dissertation in Political Science at IESP/UERJ. As a sociologist and political scientist and author of numerous books and articles that span the last five decades, his work is an important reference in study of the recent history of Brazil and Latin America. Fernando Henrique Cardoso was president of Brazil between 1995 and 2002 and is one of the leaders of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, the PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira) — and if this prominent political career is not directly mentioned in the dialogue transcribed below, it is evident that it looms over many of the issues discussed.