Developing Consumerism in the American Century: Brazil’s Revolution That Was

This paper engages two sets of phenomena that are generally considered separately: developmentalism and developmentalist ideas, on the one hand, and consumerism and consumerist ideology.  The classic position on the left, most closely associated with the writings of Celso Furtado, is that the consumption patterns of Brazil’s “haves,” patterned as they were on North Atlantic and especially North American models, was a misallocation of resources away from developmental projects that could better the lives of the country’s have-nots (i.e., that consumerism was antithetical to development), while liberal social science held that consumerism (the “age of high mass consumption,” in the classic Rostowian formulation) would follow development (i.e., that development was anterior to consumerism).  This paper proposes to look at the imbrication of U.S.-style consumerism and capitalist development in Brazil between the 1950s and the 1970s, in relatively democratic and nakedly authoritarian contexts.  The focus is on discussions among emergent Brazilian business and media elites, though further evidence is presented regarding these groups’ accession to positions of ever-greater power and wealth, as well as their “publicity work” for other audiences.  Throughout, it is argued that the twinning of development and consumerism was a key part of Brazil’s “revolution that was,” its “great arch,” for those who prefer the Thompsonian metaphor, in the shadow of which Brazil’s contemporary history continues to play out.