Abstract
This paper discusses the Brazilian essayism of the first decades of the twentieth Century by identifying the key topics, and issues around which an authentically sociological imaginative horizon gradually has been built in Brazil. We argue that the issue of colonization, slavery, and the large-scale rural ownership constituted the ways which Sociology systematicity in Brazil by defining a common repertoire of concepts, categories and, methods. The arguments are developed in the following sequence: a) the analytic place of essayism in Brazilian social thought; b) the analysis of the theoretical proposals and, interpretative results achieved by three emblematic authors of the period – Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), SergioBuarque de Holanda (1902–1982) and, Caio Prado Júnior (1907–1990). More than that, we draw the historicity of their ideas and, highlight some theoretical convergences and, divergences among them; c) the reach and, limits of these interpretations on Brazil considering their present-day relevance.
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Notes
One of the first references to ‘Brazilian thought’ can be found in Djacir de Menezes’s “O Brasil no Pensamento Brasileiro”/ Brazil in Brazilian Thought (1957).
Under Getúlio Vargas’s (1882–1954) leadership, the most relevant characteristics of this era were political centralization, control of the labor force, and economic development under State rules. Censorship also marked this period with several restrictions on press freedoms, as well as limitations in the organization of the political party system.
Freyre worked as professor of Sociology at Normal School in Recife (1929–1930). Also taught Sociology and Anthropology at Federal District University in Rio de Janeiro (1935–1938), though he also taught short and medium-term courses at various universities around the world. His most decisive institutional activity was the foundation of the Joaquim Nabuco Institute of Social Research in 1949, a research and teaching body directly linked to the Ministry of Education.
Precious metals were discovered in the Minas Gerais region just at the end of the seventeenth Century. The discovery was important to the expansion of colonization, until then concentrated mostly along the coastal regions of the territory.
Here the author evokes a critical debate with the synthesis made by the poet Ribeiro Couto whereby the Brazilian contribution to civilization was cordiality: that is, Brazil gave the world the ‘cordial man.’
Throughout Raízes do Brasil, we can note a series of references regarding the mismatch between a slavery economy, rooted in the patriarchalism and personalism entrenched by a centuries-old tradition, and a bourgeois democracy, copied from socially advanced nations. The discussion that unfolds in the debate on the belief in the miraculous power of ideas suggests a secret horror of our reality, as well as an indication of the circulation of positivism in Brazil. Ultimately, democracy would be a lamentable misunderstanding, imported by a rural and semi-feudal aristocracy that attempted to adapt it, within the bounds of the possible, to its own rights and privileges. Liberalism seems to to suffer from the same affliction, operated, to a large extent, as a rejection pure and simple of a bothersome authority, confirming an instinctive horror of hierarchies.
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Funding
This study was funded by São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), Grant number: 2019/ 04817–8.
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Miggiolaro Chaguri, M. Essayism and Sociology in Brazil: Notes on Colonization, Slavery and Nation. Am Soc 51, 306–317 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-019-09428-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-019-09428-x