And of the works of the authors themselves

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Luiz Felipe Bruzzi Curi_Danilo Barolo Martins de Lima

understanding of the internationally appropriated ideas 

of an author: the selective reading in foreign countries, 

the objectives implied when the author is referred to, the 

use of his or her recommendations and prescriptions 

in economic policy – all this broadens the knowledge 

about a given author’s thought.  Secondly, the study of 

the dissemination of ideas allows for a review and a 

clarification of the relationship between predecessors 

and followers, relativizing the aura of “pioneers” or 

“inventors” and enabling us to identify contexts favorable 

to the development of specific ideas. Lastly, it leads to a 

possibility of better evaluating the importance and the 

impacts of heterodox schools of thought in recipient 

countries, calling into question the sometimes rigid 

schemes of classification of thinkers. All those attributes 

can be understood as a means of constructing national 

histories of economic thought (

CARDOSO

, 2003 and 2009).

In his comparative study of the theories of 

underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil, Joseph Love 

states that as we apply this sort of approach, focused on 

the   international diffusion of ideas, the least important 

is to try to establish a direct link between the ideas in 

two different countries. According to him, there are three 

noteworthy processes in such studies: the borrowing 

of original ideas from elsewhere, their adaptation and 

transformation in different places and the independent 

creation or re-creation of propositions originated in 

other time or place. Commonly, there is a lot of debate 

about the question of whether it is right to say that some 

idea was really taken from somewhere else, neglecting 

the process of re-creation and rediscovery of an idea in 

different contexts (

LOVE

, 1996).

Such a research perspective prompts the usage of 

sources not often consulted so far in studies dealing with 

Simonsen’s economic thought. Sources such as books 

that circulated in his time whose contents, as many 

traces of evidence indicate, were appropriated by him. 

We are able to track such texts either by means of textual 

quotations, sometimes in the form of a simple reference 

to the name of an author, or through the identification of 

more general intellectual and theoretical affinities among 

thinkers and lineages of thought. In fact a combination 

of those two types of evidence often produces the most 

interesting results.

Rather than trying to determine categorically the 

analytical origins or the direct influences which conform 

an author’s thought, the sort of study presented here 

can suggest the insertion of a thinker in a given field of 

ideas or intellectual environment, illuminating how he 

mobilizes concepts. By employing concepts taken from 

two German authors – Rodbertus and Wagner – in a 

concrete situation, so as to incorporate them into his own 

arguments, Simonsen gave those ideas new connotations 

and simultaneously linked his position, at least in that 

particular context, to the tradition represented by them.

2_Roberto Simonsen: an industrialist  

between history and economics

Roberto Simonsen is recognized as an important name in 

the history of economic thought in Brazil, being central 

to the theoretical lineages known in Latin America as 

“developmentalist”.

2

Having graduated in engineering at 

the São Paulo Polytechnical School [Escola Politécnica 

de São Paulo] (1909), he started his career in his building 

company in the city of Santos, the busiest port of Brazil 

at the time, located in the state of São Paulo. His activities 

as an entrepreneur soon diversified, as he engaged in 

business enterprises involving the production of pottery 

and liquid fuels, as well as the management of import 

---

Roberto Simonsen and the Brazil-U.S. Trade Agreement of 1935 

Nova Economia_Belo Horizonte_25 (3)_477-500_setembro-dezembro de 2015

480

and export transactions. In the 1920s Simonsen gained 

public reputation as a leader of industrial capitalists in 

the state of São Paulo. With the support of his fellow 

industrialists, Simonsen founded the Center for the 

Industries of the State of São Paulo [Centro das Indústrias 

do Estado de São Paulo, 

CIESP

] (1928), from which 

derived the Federation of Industries of the State of São 

Paulo-

FIESP

, the powerful employers’ association which 

thenceforward has represented the largest industrial 

conglomerate of Brazil. 

Simonsen left an intellectual legacy related to 

economics and to economic history, in addition to 

some technical writings in the field of engineering. 

He wrote various texts about Brazilian economic 

history, emphasizing the role to be played by industry 

in overcoming economic backwardness in Brazil and 

associating the expansion of industrial activities with the 

idea of national progress. In the domain of economics, he 

had manifold international influences. As an advocate 

of protectionism Simonsen adopted the theory of 

international trade proposed by the Rumanian economist 

Mihail Manoilescu and sponsored the diffusion of his 

theory in Brazil, commissioning the translation of 

Manoilescu’s book into Portuguese in 1931. He was also 

an enthusiast of economic planning, having engaged 

in a public discussion with Eugênio Gudin, the most 

prominent liberal economist in Brazil at the time. This 

episode that took place in 1944-45 resulted in an exchange 

of reports that was published as the “controversy on 

economic planning” and became an important reference 

point in the history of Brazilian economic thought.

3

As a historian, Simonsen laid part of the groundwork 

for Brazilian economic historiography when he published 

Economic history of Brazil [História econômica do 

Brazil] (1937), actually the lectures he gave on this subject 

at the Free School for Sociology and Politics [Escola 

Livre de Sociologia e Política], in São Paulo. This work 

consolidated the cyclical approach to Brazilian history, 

which regarded the economic cycles of Brazilian agro-

exporting economy – based on commodities such as 

brazil wood, sugar cane, gold, coffee – as sources of very 

ephemeral wealth, incapable of sustaining the growth  

of an economically vigorous and politically unified 

nation. This interpretation has been long-lasting in 

Brazilian historiography, spawning lively debates until 

the present day.

4

Roberto Simonsen’s parliamentary interventions 

took place during the Constituent Assembly of 1933-34 and 

during Getúlio Vargas’ constitutional government, which 

lasted from 1934 until the coup d’état that introduced the 

authoritarian regime known as Estado Novo in 1937. He 

was elected a class-representative for the industrialists 

from the state of São Paulo, in the corporatist political 

framework that prevailed at the time. When Brazil 

returned to a democratic regime with the overthrow of 

Vargas’ dictatorship, Simonsen was elected senator for 

São Paulo (1947), as a member of the Social Democratic 

Party (

PSD

). He exercised his senatorial office until 

his passing in 1948. In this paper we focus on a specific 

moment in Simonsen’s parliamentary life: the speech 

he delivered in the Chamber of Deputies in September 

1935

, so as to criticize the Free Trade Agreement with the 

United States, which was about to be ratified.

3_The 1935 Trade Agreement:  

history and historiography

The international economic scenario in the first half 

of the 1930s was marked by the turbulence of the Great 

Depression. There was a strong contraction of liquidity 

---