Boldness and redemption: José Honório Rodrigues’ Institute of Historical Research

Abstract

This paper analyzes a “future past”: the Institute of Historical Research (IPH), designed by José Honório Rodrigues between the mid-1940s and early 1950s. The Institute is an unaccomplished horizon. Amid the tensions that marked the making of a professionalized historiography, the IPH aimed at becoming the landmark of a decisive turnaround to inaugurate a new phase in the Brazilian History. This social and institutional place would centralize almost every step in the making of historical knowledge in Brazil, to the point of competing with the schools of philosophy in terms of research and in the training of historians. I evaluate here its proposal and what was at stake for its idealizer when he formulated the project.