Marilena Chaui

Early Life and Formation in São Paulo

Marilena de Souza Chaui was born on September 26, 1941, in São Bernardo do Campo, in the industrial belt of São Paulo, Brazil. She studied philosophy at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), where she became a student of José Arthur Giannotti and later of Gérard Lebrun — the French philosopher who spent decades at USP and profoundly shaped Brazilian philosophical culture. Her doctoral work focused on Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology, but the encounter with Spinoza, which began in the late 1960s, became the organizing intellectual passion of her career.

Chaui began teaching at USP in 1967, and has spent virtually her entire career there, becoming a full professor and one of the most influential teachers in the history of Brazilian philosophy. Her seminars on Spinoza were legendary, running for years and drawing successive generations of students into a rigorous engagement with the 17th-century Dutch philosopher. Her own intellectual formation occurred in the context of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985), and this political context is inseparable from her philosophical work: the question of how philosophy relates to political liberation runs through everything she has written.

Spinoza Scholarship

Chaui's Spinoza scholarship is recognized internationally as among the most rigorous and original contributions to Spinoza studies produced outside Europe. Her major Spinoza work, 'A nervura do real' ('The Sinew of the Real'), was published in two volumes: Volume I, 'Imanência e liberdade' ('Immanence and Freedom,' 1999), and Volume II, 'Liberdade e necessidade em Espinosa' ('Freedom and Necessity in Spinoza,' 2016). These volumes represent the fruit of decades of reading and constitute a comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's entire philosophical system.

Chaui's interpretation emphasizes the political dimensions of Spinoza's metaphysics. She reads Spinoza's concept of substance (the one infinite reality of which all things are modes) as grounding a philosophy of radical immanence — reality has no transcendent source, no external lawgiver, no hidden essence beyond its expressions. This ontological immanence has democratic implications: if there is no transcendent authority, no natural hierarchy, no divine sanction for political domination, then political authority can only be legitimated by the power and right of the multitude.

On democracy, Chaui argues that Spinoza's claim that democracy is 'omnino absolutum imperium' — the most absolute form of government — is not a peripheral remark but the necessary conclusion of his political philosophy. Democracy alone corresponds to the constitutive power of the multitude; all other regimes are partial alienations of that constituent power. This reading connects Spinoza to contemporary debates about constituent power and radical democracy.

Philosophy of Culture and Brazilian Ideology

Chaui's second major contribution is her critical theory of Brazilian culture and ideology. Her book 'Cultura e democracia' ('Culture and Democracy,' 1981) and the subsequent 'Brasil: Mito fundador e sociedade autoritária' ('Brazil: Founding Myth and Authoritarian Society,' 2000) develop her concept of 'authoritarian sociability' (sociabilidade autoritária).

The thesis is that Brazil was constituted as a society — from colonial period through independence and republic — without passing through the bourgeois revolutions that in Europe and North America created civil society as a sphere of relatively autonomous citizens confronting the state. Instead, Brazilian social relations have been organized around hierarchical, personalist, and clientelist structures in which the distinction between public and private is systematically blurred, the poor relate to the rich through favor and dependence rather than rights, and authority operates through personal patronage rather than impersonal law. This is not a superficial cultural trait but a structural feature of Brazilian social formation.

Chaui coined the term 'cidadania tutelada' ('tutelary citizenship') to describe the way in which Brazilian political culture conceives of rights as concessions granted by the state or by powerful patrons rather than as universal entitlements claimed from below. This analysis was politically urgent during the dictatorship and remained so through the redemocratization process and beyond: it explains the persistence of authoritarian structures even within formally democratic institutions.

Related to this is her critical analysis of what she calls 'o mito fundador do Brasil' — the founding myth of Brazil as a harmonious, racially mixed, non-conflictual nation. Drawing on Roland Barthes's concept of myth as the naturalization of the historical, Chaui argues that this myth functions ideologically to suppress the reality of racial, class, and gendered conflicts that constitute Brazilian history. The image of Brazil as a 'racial democracy' (democracia racial) — a term associated with Gilberto Freyre — is, on Chaui's analysis, a founding myth that legitimates existing inequalities by making them invisible.

Political Engagement and the PT

Chaui was a founding member of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT — Workers' Party) in 1980, the party formed around the metalworkers' union movement of the São Paulo industrial belt, led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Her engagement with the PT was not merely organizational but philosophical: she saw the workers' movement as the emergence of a genuinely new social actor capable of transforming Brazilian authoritarian sociability from below, creating new forms of democratic subjectivity in the process of political struggle.

She served as Secretary of Culture of the city of São Paulo during the administration of Luíza Erundina (1989–1992), where she attempted to implement a democratic cultural policy based on participatory programming, support for community cultural centers, and the integration of the peripheral populations of the city into cultural life.

Her 2013 lecture 'Uma nova classe trabalhadora' ('A New Working Class'), published as part of 'Manifestações ideológicas do autoritarismo brasileiro' (2013), analyzed the PT governments and the social transformations of the Lula era, praising the expansion of rights and incomes while critically examining the limits of a model that did not challenge the structural features of authoritarian sociability.

Epistemology and Philosophy of Education

Chaui has also made important contributions to philosophy of education and to the epistemology of the social sciences. Her textbook 'Convite à filosofia' ('Invitation to Philosophy,' 1994) has been one of the most widely used introductions to philosophy in Brazilian secondary and university education, known for its accessibility without sacrifice of rigor. Her epistemological work, developed in lectures and essays, critically examines the ideological presuppositions of social scientific 'competence' — the claim that technical expertise, rather than democratic deliberation, should govern social decisions.

Recognition and Legacy

Chaui has received honorary doctorates from numerous Brazilian and international universities. She was awarded the Prêmio Jabuti (Brazil's most prestigious literary prize) multiple times. Her work has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese across Latin America. She remains intellectually active, continuing to write and lecture on Spinoza, Brazilian politics, and democratic theory.