With the death of José Murilo de Carvalho on August 13, 2023, Brazil lost one of its foremost historians and leading public intellectuals. Born in rural Minas Gerais, educated at a Franciscan seminary but lacking the vocation for the priesthood that his parents had seen in him, Carvalho studied sociology and politics at the Faculdade de Ciências Econômicas of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) from 1962 to 1965. These were heady days for the Left, and Carvalho joined the Catholic Ação Popular, working in rural education and labor organization. The dreams of socialism, as he later put it, crumbled like a sandcastle with the rapid success of the 1964 military coup and the long dictatorship that followed. Much of his life's subsequent work sought to explain the Brazilian republic's failures that had seemingly culminated in the coup.
A scholarship from the Ford Foundation enabled Carvalho to do his...