From culture in Portugal to Portuguese culture: Marxism, globalization and nationalism in António José Saraiva

By examining the career of a Portuguese essayist and historian, this article seeks to examine the relations between culture, nationalism and globalization during the second half of the twentieth century. The article follows the career of António José Saraiva from the 1940s to the 1990s, describing his transformation from expressing a universalist and progressive idea of culture to a nationalist and romantic one, and relating it to the transformations of communist internationalism and to the developments of capitalism and globalization. Considering the ruptures, but also the continuities within Saraiva’s thought, it is argued that his commitment to the problem of alienation plays a key role in this transformation While contributing to the history of one of the most read Portuguese intellectuals of the twentieth century, this article stresses the need for historians and social scientists to move beyond – at least partially – some binary oppositions that often command our approach to culture: namely the conflict between culture and economy on the one hand, and the national and the global, on the other.