The reasons for Olavo de Carvalho’s success

Abstract

This paper argues that the main reason for the success of Olavo de Carvalho/OC (1947-2022) was the unique fit between his “writing and authoring strategies” and the market for anti-Party reactions at the beginning of the consecutive presidential administrations of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff (2003-2016). On the one hand, OC trained himself, since the 1980s, in confronting academics in the Rio de Janeiro print media, a practice that guaranteed him a position among Catholic polygraph philosophers and the primitive accumulation of anti-intellectual capital. On the other hand, the PT’s educational policies destabilized symbolic hierarchies and stimulated economic and cultural expectations that they did not satisfy. OC knew how to be a spokesperson for these national frustrations, as he had been the bearer of similar disappointments for decades. This case raises critical reservations about the sociology of intellectuals, due to its unusual lack of attention to the link between the education system, morphology and politics in the analysis of the market for “opinions” in which Olavo is “right”.