Abstract

In his seminal work of 1939 about the idea of progress, published and awarded in the University of Coimbra intellectual milieu, the young Vasco Magalhães-Vilhena wrote what is probably the first major philosophical essay in the Portuguese language, deeply connected with a Marxist world vision. The essay is a well-established academic master-piece, where the philosophical esotericism, underlined by Leo Strauss, is intensively at work, disguising, with some areas of deliberately ambiguity, almost completely the traces of Marx and his larger constellation involving authors like Engels and Feuerbach. What is entirely visible to the attentive reader is the subtle mind of the writer, and his capacity to address important topics of social and political philosophy, like those linked to the dialectical understanding of contemporary capitalism and its intrinsic contradictions, both as an economic model and a civilization paradigm.