The spirit of capitalism reviewed from the periphery

expressions of bourgeois rationality in Florestan Fernandes

Abstract

Although Florestan Fernandes did not write systematic texts on the attributes of typically capitalist conduct, we will argue for the possibility of tracing, in some of his texts written between the late 1950s and the 1970s, a conceptual outline on the singular forms of manifestation of the spirit of capitalism in peripheral and dependent social formations. This outline can be taken as a significant re-elaboration and expansion, in a critical dialogue with the work of Werner Sombart and Max Weber, of a typology of bourgeois rationality, capable of equipping us heuristically and critically to approach capitalist conduct in its spatio-temporal diversity and the explicit fraying in the present time, in the North and South, of the alliance between capitalism and democracy.