João Martins Pereira. A public intellectual beyond the “small narrow world”

Abstract

The paper intends to counter the scarcity of studies on the generation of intellectuals who, from mid-1960s onwards, illegally or semi-legally, would eventually modernise the political discourse in Portugal. In contrast to other countries, Portugal shows a historiographic gap in terms of the study of the thought and work of less catalogable intellectuals, of a non-dogmatic and radical nature, and disconnected from the dominant orthodoxies. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to historically situate the independent and heterodox thinking of João Martins Pereira, among a generation of intellectuals marked by the influence of Marxism or
proximate thereto. The main spindles of this article are: understand the variety of concepts and theoretical
premises behind the political outlook of the author of Pensar Portugal Hoje and, consequently, view this public intellectual as a left-wing supporter, but, largely removed from the small narrow worlds of intellectuals linked to both Communist and Socialist and Social-Democratic parties. The aim of this paper is to remove Martins Pereira’s essayism, theoretical critique and political propositions from the shadow of some of the
best acknowledged Portuguese authors from the second half of the 19th century.