When development meets culture : the contribution of Celso Furtado in the 1970s

The article assesses the work of Celso Furtado (1920-2004) in the 1970s, when the author promotes an ambitious attempt to redefine the field of development economics. Furtado's works have recently been revisited by several authors, including in the field of history of economic thought. The text is devoted to explore how the author challenges development theory’s perceived failure to explain the reality of underdeveloped nations in the late 1970s by expanding the scope of analysis and giving culture a pivotal role in the dynamics of development and underdevelopment. This theoretical movement happens at the time in which development economics begins to drift out of the mainstream of economic theory. Hence, unlike the concept of underdevelopment introduced in the 1950s, the discussion of creativity and dependence encounters an adverse intellectual landscape, even though it represents one of the author’s most original contributions.