This blog is a spinoff of  the Brazilian Blog Na Prática a Teoria é Outra (which translates from Portuguese as something like, “In Practice, there’s a whole different theory”, a slightly absurd expression, probably invented by an obscure Brazilian politician, that points to the need to develop ideas from a somewhat pragmatic standpoint.

While NPTO (as it is known by the valorous minority of Brazilians who read it) has been a real pleasure to write, it has become a little too obsessed with Brazilian politics to my taste. I am enough of a pervert for Brazilian politics to be my favourite topic, but I missed having more theoretical discussions, hence BTBM. Writing in English was a natural choice, to expand the number of people I can discuss with, especially since most NPTO readers can read English (and shouldn’t miss the opportunity to practice).

This blog’s name comes from one of my favourite authors, Jon Elster, who said (in the eighties) that the slogan for the left should be “Back to the British Museum”, a reference to Karl Marx’s self-exile in the reading room of that much honoured institution while he was writing the no-so-honoured-these-days Das Kapital. It was necessary to come up with some new ideas.

Enough about not-me. My name is Celso F. Rocha de Barros, and I have a DPhil in Sociology from Oxford University. Please don’t blame oxonians for my English, I left Britain a couple of years ago, and the language starts coming less naturally to you after a while. I plan to have some great Brazilian bloggers guest-blogging here eventually, so that I can profit from their cheap labour introduce you to many interesting discussions in the Brazilian blogosphere.

Initial topics will include the causes of the 2008 Crash, the socialist calculation debate, rational choice theory, and some French-sounding theory for balance. That is, we will usually begin by discussing such things; but the mind wanders.