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MERQUIOR, JOSE GUILHERME
José Guilherme Merquior was a professional diplomat, a university teacher, a scholar and a thinker, and a prolific writer. He was born in Rio de Janeiro on 22 April 1941, and studied law and philosophy in Brazil before undertaking postgraduate work in Europe. He gained a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics, and a literary doctorate from the University of Paris. His interest in the theory of culture matured at the Collège de France, where he was a student of Lévi-Strauss; subsequently, in England, he studied political sociology under Ernest Gellner, and was Brazil`s cultural attaché at the Court of St James. He was a professor of political science at the University of Brasilia, a member of the Brazilian Academy, Brazilian Ambassador to Mexico bewteen 1987 and 1989, and head of the Permanent Brazilian Mission to UNESCO, 1989-90. Before he could revise this book for its second edition, he died in New York City on 7 January 1991.