Carlos Real de Azúa (March 15, 1916 – July 16, 1977) was a Uruguayan lawyer, professor, essayist, sociologist and historian.

He was a Catholic and, in his youth, an enthusiastic fascist and anti-liberal, an admirer of the Falange Española (a Spanish Fascist movement that was active in 1933-34), a fan of the right-wing journalist and politician Benito Nardone (who would later become president of Uruguay in 1960-61), and an outspoken critic of Batllism (the statist and redistributionist political philosophy of José Batlle y Ordóñez, president of Uruguay from 1903 to 1907 and 1911 to 1915).

His work was frequently described as “arborescent,” which means “resembling a tree,” but which in his case was used by critics in the sense established by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, namely “to characterize thinking marked by insistence on totalizing principles, binarism, and dualism.” The critic Roberto Echavarran called him “the baroque historian.” Rama praised him as a first-rate example of the “sociological imagination.”[2] His influence on Uruguayan culture can only be compared to that of Carlos Vaz Ferreira, Carlos Quijano, José Enrique Rodó, and Juan E. Pivel Devoto.

[7] A 1984 special issue of weekly magazine Jaque consisted of a collection of tributes to him by César Aguiar, Mariano Arana, Lisa Block de Behar, Tulio Halperin Donghi, Enrique Fierro, Carlos Filgueiras, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Juan Oddone, Carlos Pellegrino, Blanca París, Mercedes Ramírez, Juan Rial, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Ricardo Rodríguez Pereyra, Marta Sabelli de Loucau, and Ida Vitale.

A centenary tribute described him as “a solitary gentleman” and noted that while he did not write explicitly about sexual orientation, he emerges in his work as an “elegantly melancholic” figure who is “like a character out of Luchino Visconti.”[2]