“Climbing the ranks”: Social promotion among liberal intelectualls

Abstract

In Portugal, after the liberal victory in 1834, many intellectuals of humble extraction proceed along a successful life course that pushes them often on important functions and makes them win a considerable reputation. Using a corpus of life stories of the concerned intellectuals, this article examines how certain factors contribute to their promotion, namely their initial experiences and learnings, as well as their later political interventions to change Portugal and to assure the position of the intelligentsia to which they belong. The final synthesis puts forward a set of constants as a contribution to explain this process of rising mobility in cases of low social origins.