Caio Prado Júnior

Caio da Silva Prado Júnior (São Paulo, February 11, 1907 – São Paulo, November 23, 1990) was a Brazilian historian, geographer, writer and politician.
His works inaugurated a new historiographic tradition in Brazil, identified with Marxism, which led to new interpretations of the Brazilian colonial society.

Caio Prado graduated with a degree in law from Faculdade do Largo de São Francisco, São Paulo in 1928, where he would later become a Professor of Political Economy. He was politically active during the 30's and 40's, including during the 1930 Revolution. In 1933, he published his first work - Evolução Política do Brasil (Political Evolution of Brazil) - an attempt to understand the country's political and social history. In 1934 he took part in the foundation of Brazilian Geographers Association.

After a trip to the Soviet Union, at the time under Stalin's dictatorship, he published URSS - um novo mundo (Soviet Union - a New World), which was banned by Getúlio Vargas' government's censorship. He then joined the Aliança Nacional Libertadora which he chaired in São Paulo.

In 1942 he published the classic Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo - Colônia (Formation of Contemporary Brazil - Colony, which should have been the first part of a work on Brazilian historic evolution. However, the following volumes were never written. In 1945 he was elected deputado estadual for the Brazilian Communist Party. He published the newspaper A Platéia and, in 1943, with Arthur Neves and Monteiro Lobato, he founded Editora Brasiliense (Brasiliense Publishing House), for which, later, he published Revista Brasiliense, between 1956 and 1964. After 1964, he was persecuted by the military dictatorship.

In 1966 he was elected Intellectual of the Year by the União Brasileira de Escritores, following the publication of A revolução brasileira (Brazilian Revolution).

The most important works of Caio Prado Junior are:

• 1933: Evolução política do Brasil
• 1934: URSS - um novo mundo
• 1942: Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo (translated as The colonial background of modern Brazil Berkeley : University of California Press, 1967)
• 1945: História Econômica do Brasil Access here
• 1952: Dialética do Conhecimento
• 1953: Evolução Política do Brasil e Outros Estudos
• 1954: Diretrizes para uma Política Econômica Brasileira
• 1957: Esboço de Fundamentos da Teoria Econômica
• 1959: Introdução à Lógica Dialética (Notas Introdutórias)
• 1962: O Mundo do Socialismo
• 1966: A Revolução Brasileira
• 1971: Estruturalismo de Lévi-Strauss - O Marxismo de Louis Althusser
• 1972: História e Desenvolvimento
• 1979: A Questão Agrária no Brasil
• 1980: O que é Liberdade
• 1981: O que é Filosofia
• 1983: A Cidade de São Paulo