145 PJSS 15 (1) pp. 145–148 Intellect Limited 2016 Portuguese Journal of Social Science Volume 15 Number 1 © 2016 Intellect Ltd Book Review. English language. doi: 10.1386/pjss.15.1.145_5 Book ReVIew Marcello caetano: UMa Biografia Política, J. M. T. CasTilho (2012) hb, Coimbra: Almedina, 1012 pp., ISBN: 9789724049861, €35.00 Reviewed by Francisco Carlos Palomanes Martinho, Universidade de São Paulo In Men in Dark Times, Hanna Arendt said that in biographies history is not treated as a person’s background, but rather time suffers from the interfer- ence of their actions, without which history would be different. Likewise, the subjects of the biography are also changed by the events of their time (2008: 41). In the case of Portugal, starting with the assumptions of German philoso- phy, twentieth-century history has been shaped by the action of some men and women who have only recently been the subject of substantial biographi- cal studies. Once the post-25 April 1974 ‘fascism’ fever passed, the first studies of the 1910–1926 republic and of the 1926–1974 authoritarian regime were more concerned with their economic and social structures and their ideologies than they were with the actions of their agents. Renewed political history research, however, has made it possible for the people at the centre of Portugal’s recent to come out of the shadows: a process that, rather curiously, began with the leading opponent of the New State, the communist leader Álvaro Cunhal, who was the subject of an important biographical study by José Pacheco Pereira (2005), while Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses has written biographies of Afonso Costa and António de Oliveira Salazar (2010a, 2010b). There was still nothing about Marcello Caetano. Born in 1906 into a lower- middle-class family, he was only 20 years old when the First Republic entered its death throes in 1926. In 1974, at the age of 68, he was the prime minister when the dictatorship came crashing down. For almost half a century he split his time between academe (which he said was his true vocation) and politics 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. PJSS_15.1_Review_145-148.indd 145 3/25/16 5:46:36 PM Copyright Intellect Ltd. 2016 Do not distribute.