Alberto Guerreiro Ramos's Anthropological Approach to the Social Sciences: The Parenthetical Man

Abstract

Alberto Guerreiro Ramos's intellectual trajectory is analyzed to show his permanent concern with the condition of contemporary humanity. Two moments in his trajectory are specifically addressed. In the first, under the strong influence of Christian intellectual thought, the category of human person was most important to him. In the second moment he sought to demonstrate autonomy from those earlier influences, secularized his thought, and coined the expression Parenthetical Man, which was central to his criticism of the social sciences and especially of organizational theory. From this he proposed his theory of social system delimitation. From this point of view, it is possible to affirm that Guerreiro Ramos's sociology is predominantly antropocentric, in other words, Ramos takes man as the main reference in his design of social systems.