From a young age, I wanted to understand the society in which I lived. In addition to football and cinema, this was the obsession of the teenager born in Campinas in 1945.
It was this enormous curiosity that led Moisés —who died this Friday (13), at the age of 80— to study social sciences at USP, which he entered in 1966. That same year, as a member of Ação Popular, a resistance organization to , he was arrested and spent a week at Dops, in São Paulo.
He completed the course in 1970 and became one of the most respected political scientists in the country in the following decades. Some names were decisive for its formation, such as the anthropologists and the sociologist and, mainly, the
Among the canons that guided him are, and
There are few academics in the country who have studied and debated democracy as diligently as Moisés, who became a full professor of political science at USP.
“Democracy was his passion as an academic and, in equal measure, as a public intellectual. Having reached adulthood under authoritarianism, understanding how the democratic system could take root and acting to make it so were inseparable things. The academic approached the issue by looking at the expectations and opinions of ordinary Brazilians. The militant intellectual bet on the strength of organized society”, says Maria Hermínia Tavares, a political scientist like his friend and columnist at Sheet.
Moses’ most relevant books are analyzes of democracy from different angles. He released “Lessons of Freedom and Oppression”, in which he detailed the importance of the trade union movement of the late 1970s in the fight against the dictatorship. The preface of the book, published in 1982, was signed by an exponent of this new unionism.
Two years earlier, Moisés had participated in the founding of the Workers’ Party. The relationship with , however, gradually deteriorated.
In the 1989 presidential election, the political scientist defended that the party should position itself as a strictly democratic left, far from the “real socialism” represented by the Soviets. For Moses, this was not what happened, which accentuated his separation.
In 1995, he was invited to take over the Culture Support secretariat of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government. By accepting the position, he sealed his departure from Lula’s party, but he never joined FHC’s party.
That same year, Moisés released “Os Brasileiros e a Democracia”, perhaps his most relevant work. It discussed democratic transitions in several countries and, based on extensive research, analyzed the population’s behavior towards politics. The book also showed the obstacles in the country’s public policies that hindered democratic legitimization.
After the years in Brasília, he resumed his academic life, was an active voice in the press and participated in pro-democracy movements.
In an interview with the Center for Research and Documentation of Contemporary History of Brazil (CPDOC), last year, Moisés expressed concern about the country’s situation. “I would say that Brazil has democracy, it survived with enormous effort, now it has some holes that, if not resolved, in the medium term, will lead to more acute crises than the one we have now.”
For , a senior professor at USP, Moisés was one of the most important political scientists in the country. “It’s an immense loss,” says she, also a political scientist.
Sadek says that, in recent months, Moisés was organizing a book in honor of Weffort. We can only hope that someone continues the work, which would become a tribute to two masters who lived to understand Brazil and its democracy.
