By Daniel Oppenheimer
Welcome back to Peer Reviewed, a podcast series within the larger Extra Credit universe that puts one of our UT Austin Liberal Arts faculty in conversation with a colleague of theirs at another college or university who has written something recently that struck our UT Austin faculty as really profound and important. The goal is to give listeners a glimpse under the hood at the kinds of conversations that scholars have amongst themselves and within their disciplines — and to expose the listeners to an important new article or book in the world.
My co-host for today’s episode is Seth Garfield, professor of history here at UT Austin. Garfield is an expert on Brazilian history and the author of a number of books on the topic, including the award winning Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2022.
Our guest is Melissa Teixeira, associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and, like Seth, a historian of modern Brazil. Her interest is in legal history and the history of economic life in Brazil, and the text that struck Seth as an important contribution to his discipline is Melissa’s new book, A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal, which was published last year by Princeton University Press.
A Third Path explores Brazil’s response to the political, economic and social crises of capitalism following the Great Depression, and it highlights the pivotal but understudied interwar experiment in Brazil with corporatism, an economic model that promised a third path between capitalism and communism.
I found this conversation fascinating and and surprisingly relevant to our contemporary situation which is, in some ways, like the 1930s. It’s both a conversation about history but also indirectly — and in some cases directly — a conversation about where we are now and how we think about what the possibilities are for economics and governance.
You can listen to the podcast here on Substack or wherever you get your podcasts. Please share with anyone who might be interested, and let us know if you have any requests or ideas for future installments of Peer Reviewed.
