A Book in Motion Through History

There are books that transform with time. Yes, they are read differently by different generations. But beyond that, they lock down ideas that their authors must come to terms with for the rest of their lives. Roots of Brazil, by Brazilian historian and literary critic Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902–1982), is one such book. First published in 1936, it was significantly revised for its second edition in 1948 and later modified, in some instances quite significantly, for later editions published between 1956 and 1969.

It is rare for a book to display so clearly the weight of history in its pages. In Buarque de Holanda’s analysis of the origins of Brazilian civilization, he devised a series of metaphors and explanations that became canonical in the Brazilian scholarly imagination. While some of his ideas would solidify the paths he would take in his later research, others were unsettling and would come to haunt his trajectory like ghosts.

It is impossible to reduce a book as rich as Roots of Brazil to a single theme. Yet, despite the variety of topics weaved into its pages, the book is categorized most commonly as an “interpretation of Brazil.” The label is not incorrect. Alongside the works of Gilberto Freyre, Paulo Prado, and Caio Prado Júnior (and that’s without discussing the paintings of Tarsila de Amaral, poetry of Mário de Andrade, or music of Heitor Villa-Lobos), Roots of Brazil may be viewed as a classic in the “modernist” canon. The so-called modernist generation sought to understand the country by elevating elements of popular culture that, they believed, the early 20th-century cultured elite had ignored in its depictions of the nation. This desire to understand Brazil from within often led to the idealization of these “popular” elements. It also promoted a sort of post-romanticism that imagined an exotic world of exuberant subjects, bordering on the stereotype of the luxurious tropics. In a similar vein, the European vanguard—the intellectual lodestar of the Brazilian modernists—fell in love with the “primitive,” unable to completely abandon the colonialist gaze that turned the “Other” into an object of esteem and desire.

The reduction of Roots of Brazil to “interpretation of Brazil,” however, sidelines other significant characteristics, such as its faltering, essay-like quality, capable of pointing in one direction and then quickly in another. The ambivalences expressed in the book may be understood, too, as a careful and nuanced response to the era’s mounting wave of works that sought to interpret Brazil. This was a time, after all, when the national pact was in the spotlight. Debates encompassed problems as far-reaching as national unity, slavery’s recent past (Brazil was the last country in the world to abolish the institution, in 1888), industrialization, urbanization, and, of course, changes in sociability and the formation of a public space, the democratic character of which was an open question.

Such was the climate in Brazil under the first government of Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945). On a global scale, the limits of liberalism were tested as totalitarianism revealed its power. Political forces adopted both nationalist and internationalist ideas, with ranging degrees of commitment to open discussion and freedom of thought. In the parts of the Americas colonized by Iberia, it was a moment of contestation over the role of personal relations in politics and the emergence of populism in the region. Debated, too, was public policy’s ability to meet the demands and necessities of a population simultaneously revered for its “mestiço” character and distrusted by those who sustained a racialist discourse, influential among the era’s intellectuals and their institutions.

It was this cultural breeding ground that gave birth to central debates on the direction of the nation during the Estado Novo (New State), the dictatorial period of the Vargas regime (1937–1945). It is in this context, too, that people began to read Roots of Brazil, which originally had been conceived between 1929 and 1930 under the provisional title of “Theory of America.” At the time, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda was based in Berlin, working as a news correspondent. Even as he witnessed the rise of National Socialism in Germany, he believed that the country would never deviate from the pacifistic spirit of the Weimar Republic.

In essence, Roots of Brazil appeared at a time in which Brazil was defining itself and, more broadly, the world was debating the reaches and limits of liberal democracy. But it is important to note that, even faced with these socio-political questions, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda provides paradoxes and impasses, not clear lines of explanation. Roots of Brazil is not a book about the country’s “more intimate and essential world” (an expression the author uses ironically); it is an essay that tackles Brazil’s historical formation. Not by chance, Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza (1918–2017), one of the intellectuals most concerned with the “formation” of Brazil, would become one of the best-known interpreters of Roots of Brazil, viewing it as part of a triptych including Gilberto Freyre’s The Master and the Slaves (1933) and Caio Prado Júnior’s The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil (1942). Candido’s interpretation of Roots of Brazil as a “radical” and unequivocal champion of democracy has been more fiercely contested in recent years.¹

The Historical Genealogy of Colonization in Brazil

At the heart of Roots of Brazil is the notion of “European frontiers.” Espoused by many of the era’s thinkers, it is the idea that the Iberian Peninsula constitutes a sort of separate universe, simultaneously belonging to and set apart from the rest of the European continent. In Brazil, Gilberto Freyre theorized that the exceptionality of Portuguese colonization stemmed from its peculiar Iberian civilizational matrix—one that, during the colonizing period, would stress personal (“intimate” or “domestic,” in the words of Freyre) relations, thus giving way to a universe of social relations averse to impersonality in public space.

In Roots of Brazil, Spain and Portugal are distinguished by the central importance of “personalism,” a culturalist hypothesis that cuts across the book and has vast explanatory consequences for the Brazilian societal matrix. For Buarque de Holanda, unlike Freyre, the importance of personal relations in Brazil would explain the “lack of cohesion” in public space. According to Buarque de Holanda, this lack of cohesion frequently triggered (and, it is worth noting, still triggers) regressive fantasies of a return to “tradition,” in which order can finally be imposed on the messiness of daily life. Indeed, one of the author’s principle objectives in Roots of Brazil is to refute these fantasies. He dedicates particular attention to historical change and to the challenges of implementing a new, less personalist political order in Brazil.

At the same time that Buarque de Holanda critiques personalism, he also questions the devaluation of privacy and intimacy in Iberia’s predominantly Catholic formation. In a notably Weberian hypothesis, Roots of Brazil presents the streamlining of modern life as dependent upon the individual’s capacity to internalize order. While Buarque de Holanda argues that this process has already taken place in Protestant society, he does not believe that it has happened—or could happen, at least immediately—in Iberia. For him, in Iberian mentalities, order always exists outside the individual and depends upon a body that is both superior and external: a Government, Father, Leader, or Law mandated from above.

Additionally drawing from North American social theory, Buarque de Holanda proposes a typology that breaks down forms of collective life into two basic principles: work, which entails planning, persistence, and rationality; and adventure, which implies looseness, unpredictability, and a desire “to pick the fruit without planting the tree.”² This image seeks to clarify a model of occupying space that is indifferent to permanence, oriented toward immediate profit, and unconcerned with the long-term consequences of economic advancement.

This “adventurous” spirit presupposes the relative flexibility of the individual, who must easily adapt to new physical and social scenarios. This hypothesis sheds light on a later phase in Buarque de Holanda’s historiographical production, which focused on the westward advancement of Portuguese colonizers, bandeirantes, and monçoeiros across their American territories.³

The supposed malleability of the Portuguese colonizer is not treated as an innate cultural feature or timeless essence that explains the type of territorial occupation carried out in the Americas. Roots of Brazil provides a long historical genealogy that, in calling back to commercial practices from the dawn of colonization, suggests the gradual formation of a kind of sociability less predetermined by rigid forms of social differentiation. This opens up a can of worms in Buarque de Holanda’s work, as he assumes “the complete, or nearly complete, absence of any racial pride among the Portuguese.”⁴ This thesis is reminiscent of Gilberto Freyre, who, around the same time, was planting the theoretical seeds of what would later be deemed Brazil’s “racial democracy.”⁵

Roots of Brazil opens with a large generalization about the cultural peculiarity of the Iberian Peninsula and uses it as a starting point for unpacking its many differentiations. The book highlights the dilemmas of a form of colonization with “rural roots”—one marked by unpredictability and deeply shaped by slave labor. Even as they adapted to local conditions, lands, and peoples, the Portuguese colonizers upheld the unlimited exploitation of the earth as their supreme goal. This rural colonization was carried out, however, without the continuous and rational labor that would be necessary years later in an industrialized economy that demanded the modernization of work relations. Following abolition, this modernization would unfold on a plane that, in theory, included the rural world, which, in the wake of the slavery crisis, witnessed steady changes in its relations of production. The backdrop of these arguments is, once again, the contrast with Protestantism—on the one hand, less universalistic and more exclusionary than Catholicism; on the other, more inclined toward forming communities around methodical labor, which was prerequisite in this new era.

The arrival of this “new era” (as Buarque de Holanda titles one of the book’s final chapters) was trumpeted by the rise of urbanization and the abolition of slavery. The latter, enacted in 1888, demarcates an important temporal shift, in which Brazil’s “rural heritage” (another chapter title) turns into a problematic legacy. This legacy would inhibit the country’s forward movement and progress beyond its preexisting patriarchal order—an order that, in turn, weighed down the development of cities and the monetization of social relations, as well as the cultivation of public relations impersonal enough to pierce the closed family circle.

Roots of Brazil also addresses the occupation of urban space. The book’s initial generalization, which treats the Iberian peoples as a single unit, soon gives way to a chain of differentiations. In the case of urbanization, Buarque de Holanda juxtaposes the rational and geometric urban planning of cities in Spanish America with the sloppiness of their Portuguese American counterparts. The irregular terrains so often chosen by the Portuguese for city-building would oblige them to the most haphazard layout of streets and urban expansion, as if their cities were plopped on top of, not incorporated into, the natural landscape. Unlike the Spaniards in their colonial project, the Portuguese would view new lands not as potentially great population centers but rather as fundamental commercial passageways.

This opposition between the iron will and foundational spirit of the Spaniards and the pedestrian pragmatism of the Portuguese would reappear in Buarque de Holanda’s book Visão do Paraíso (1959), which analyzes the Edenic motives that inspired the initial discovery and exploration of the Americas. In this masterpiece, while the Spanish are portrayed as espousers of riotous fantasies, the Portuguese are shown to be frank interpreters of their surroundings, clinging to their immediate experiences and viewing the New World’s landscape in the most straightforward of manners. Famously, and in part inspired by the reflections of Father Vieira, Buarque de Holanda views the Portuguese colonization as a response to the sower’s order and the Spanish colonization as a response to the builder’s order. Here, as at other points in the book, social types are treated as binaries that are pitted against one another to generate tensions illustrative of certain traits of colonization in the American tropics.

The “Cordial Man”: Myth and Identity

In Roots of Brazil, the simultaneous prevalence of personal relations and inability to accept the abstraction of personality in public space—a space in which all citizens should be treated identically, regardless of blood, friendship, or personal protection—culminates in a polemical expression with great vernacular appeal: the cordial man.

While the expression originates in Hispanic America, it is the poet Rui Ribeiro Couto who first applies it to Brazil, inspiring Buarque de Holanda. The term appears in the fifth chapter of Roots of Brazil and functions as a tool for opposing the notion of the state as a simple extension of the family.⁶ As such, Buarque de Holanda invokes the classic clash between Antigone and Creon. In Antigone’s tragic efforts to bury her brother, she evokes and embodies family values in defiance of Creon, whose imposed order supposedly represents the general interests of the City.

This conceptual dichotomy—Antigone and the family on one side, Creon and public space on the other—is intended to cast a shadow of suspicion over the familial principles guiding Brazilian social formation and politics. In dialogue with philosophers, economists, psychologists, and pedagogues, Buarque de Holanda suggests that the emergence of personal autonomy and modern citizenship depends upon the individual’s ability to withdraw from familial protection. As such, the author uses competition on the labor market and the establishment of a social security network as building blocks in his larger criticism of the patriarchal roots that maintain subjects dependent and always attached to a strict circle of relations—one that simultaneously protects and distances individuals from the sphere of citizenship.

The cordial man is nothing more than an individual born into the logic of this patriarchal society. Incapable of freeing himself from the private domain, he is ill-equipped to constitute himself as a republican citizen. As such, Buarque de Holanda’s argument wraps back around to the constant invasion of public space by small group interests, and to the lack of an adequately modern and impersonal bureaucracy in Brazil. Still, the characteristics attributed to the cordial man are ambiguous. If his “emotional base” holds him hostage to personal relations (the root of cordiality is cor, cordis, meaning heart), that same universe of emotions also makes him a potentially generous and hospitable person. Indeed, the “cordial man” is deeply ambiguous. That said, it is telling that the most prevalent reading of the term in Brazil, even today, focuses on his positive qualities.

One of the first people to read Roots of Brazil and view the cordial man through such rose-tinted glasses was the poet and Estado Novo intellectual Cassiano Ricardo. In texts discredited by Buarque de Holanda himself, Ricardo suggests that the Portuguese colonizers and the Brazilian colonists developed a true “technique of goodness.” In Ricardo’s eyes, the Portuguese advance through the back country was, simply, a “mediation”; the violence in turn inflicted on indigenous populations, merely sporadic.⁷ It follows from this sugarcoated view that Brazil would have been the shining example from which Europe derived the myth of the noble savage, and that Brazilians themselves would have been capable of withstanding and assimilating any sort of conflict or tension. This vision of colonization coincides with the Estado Novo’s practice of concealing violence. Not by chance, it is during this time that Brazil’s greatest national myths took shape, ones that haunt the country to this today. As they transformed into a powerful chain of stereotypes, they became Brazil’s most identifiable features: carnival, samba, and soccer.

Produced in this era of mythology, Roots of Brazil becomes even more challenging to interpret. Of note, Buarque de Holanda ponders how the cordial man’s aversion to civility, politeness, and impersonality simultaneously brings him closer to those around him and renders him incapable of developing a true intimate sphere. A prisoner of his familial circle, he is incapable of “living with himself” or “depending upon himself” and therefore cannot achieve true autonomy. He is a half-baked citizen.⁸ Resigned to the arbitrary nature of particularist interests, he is a victim of the somewhat irrational and potentially violent personalism that instigated Buarque de Holanda’s very research on the roots of Brazil.

On all fronts—in religion, language, and politics—cordial action is guided by detachment from fixed types of relationships. While this affirmation may permit us to believe in a more humane coexistence, as Cassiano Ricardo desired and Gilberto Freyre, albeit in another context, defended, we must also highlight the violence present in Buarque de Holanda’s very conceptualization of cordiality. The emotional base that prevails in Brazilian social relations is not always agreeable. Even so, in the book’s final chapter, the author contemplates the intersections between “cordial” characteristics and democratic ideals—with the latter facing much public scrutiny during the period of Roots of Brazil’s publication.

It must be noted that Buarque de Holanda’s defense of liberal democracy is not unconditional. At the same time that he explicitly opposes domestic attempts, like those of the Estado Novo, to solve Brazil’s problems through authoritarian measures, he does question democracy’s potential to materialize in a country with a historically inflated private sphere, where intimate life itself is dominated by the unpredictability of individual will. As he writes at the end of the chapter on the cordial man:

The inner life of the Brazilian is neither cohesive nor disciplined enough to envelop and dominate the whole personality and integrate it, as a conscious element, into society. Brazilians are free, then, to give in to and to assimilate any broad repertory of ideas, gestures, and forms that they may encounter.⁹

This generalization permits reflection on the disorderly nature of emotions. As they organize the intimate lives of Brazilians, they also become resistant to all forms of self-discipline. For Buarque de Holanda, this signifies a sort of incomplete intimacy—one incapable of cementing together a truly cohesive community because of its propensity to openly assimilate external forces in the form of an arbitrator or indiscriminate authority.

The specter of slavery looms. After all, this lack of social cohesion is more than a simple feature of Brazil’s collective psychology. It is the direct legacy of a social regime based in extreme violence and the unlimited exploitation of bodies.

The Marks of Slavery

Slavery holds great explanatory power throughout Roots of Brazil. Slave labor and the social relations that formed around it constituted the core of a patriarchal society governed by a logic of personalism but devoid of public space where individuals could truly coexist. In the book’s final two chapters—“A New Era” and “Our Revolution,” respectively—Buarque de Holanda discusses the checks on forming a democratic society in a country dominated by an “oligarchy, which is the extension of personalism in space and time.”

The presence of African slaves in Portugal dates back to at least the 15th century, prior to the discovery and occupation of Brazil. Different from Spanish American colonization, one of the consequences “of slavery and the exaggerated growth of large-scale agriculture” in the conquered lands was the relative absence “of any serious cooperation among workers in other productive activities.” It follows that slavery—and the virtual nonexistence of sectors of society unrelated to the servile regime—strengthened forms of association based in person-to-person connection, without outside mediation or the formation of any true privacy. In turn, society struggled to develop “characteristics that tend towards order, discipline, and rationality.”

This socio-economic analysis opens up space for Buarque de Holanda to explore the “affection and sugary sweetness” that permeated colonial life and invaded the world of literature and the arts, especially in the Baroque period. However, just as slavery favored a world of personal relations and formed the backbone of the most lucrative commerce of the 19th century, it also curbed the modernization of society. Curiously, the feverish investment of capital derived from the slave trade—a market officially abolished in 1850—would generate a series of financial speculations viewed with great suspicion by the slave-owning classes, spawning among them a degree of nostalgia for the good times. This nostalgia, which permeated for many years after the abolition of slavery, would be sublimated into Joaquim Nabuco’s memoirs and Gilberto Freyre’s incursions on the colonial past.¹⁰

Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s thesis on slavery as a curb to modernization is made explicit in the third chapter of Roots of Brazil, “The Rural Heritage” (titled “The Agrarian Past” in the first edition). The chapter announces a line of thought that would occupy Buarque de Holanda much later, in the 1960s and 1970s, and result in the publication of his book Do Império à República (1972). A product of his research into the slave-owner’s mentality as an obstacle to modern life, the book explores the political crisis of slavery’s imminent abolition by delving into parliamentary debates from the final three decades of the empire through the advent of the republic (1889).¹¹

In contrast to Freyre’s idealization of the heritage of slavery, Buarque de Holanda sees the crisis surrounding its dissolution as the birthplace of Brazil’s greatest dilemmas on its path to modernity:

The suppression of the slave trade was the first step in abolishing barriers to the decisive triumph of urban merchants and speculators, but the work begun in 1850 would only completely end in 1888. Not only did openly retrograde elements, represented by unrepentant slaveholders, resist abolition during this forty-year interval, but so too did forces seeking to restore a threatened equilibrium. How could one expect profound transformations in a country where the very situation to be overcome was maintaining the traditional foundations of society? As long as economic and social patterns inherited from the colonial era remained intact and powerful on the large properties served by slave labor, the boldest transformations would necessarily be superficial and illusory.¹²

These surface-level transformations led Buarque de Holanda to coin another well-known phrase, though not as famous as “cordial man.” It is the idea that “democracy, in Brazil, was always a lamentable misunderstanding.” That is to say, democracy had always been a façade, in which ideals shone brightly but were never connected to reality. Nineteenth-century Brazil, with its combination of liberal consciousness and slavery, represents the clearest distillation of this process.¹³

The Annihilation of the Iberian Legacy and the Formation of a Republican State

Roots of Brazil contains an almost musical, even rhythmic, understanding of the political processes operating within the individual:

We are notoriously averse to slow-moving and monotonous activities, ranging from aesthetic creativity to servile activities, where a subject must deliberately submit to an external order; the individual personality finds it hard to put up with taking orders under a demanding and disciplined system.¹⁴

Discipline, in this case, is associated with retreat, or an individual’s ability to patiently give in to the rhythm of daily life. In Brazil, rapid and arrhythmic movements of the imagination prevail and are symptomatic of the difficulty of surrendering to the monotony of modern times. Here, once again, the logic of the “adventurer” resonates in strict opposition to that of the “worker.” Looming is a larger discussion of the tragic inexistence of a work ethic in modern Brazil, a country so deeply marked by slavery.

Love for buzzwords, horror at all things indefinite, and resistance to all manners of nuance—such are the characteristics that result from a collective inability to patiently stand back and face the world in its complexity, armed with the tools of methodical labor. According to Buarque de Holanda, Brazilians generally prefer decisive ideas that promise to resolve problems with little difficult thinking. The very success of positivism as a foundational doctrine of the Republic may be explained by the country’s love for fixed forms—ones that negate reality and allow its defenders to live in a sphere of pleasingly false and inconsistent ideas.

While the continuities between the empire and the republic are notorious in Brazil, the abolition of slavery in 1888 would mark, like the tip of an iceberg, a slow shift in society’s center of gravity from rural domains to cities. The logical question haunting Buarque de Holanda’s work is whether or not this change voids Brazilian society’s Iberian roots—and, furthermore, if one might call this new reality “American.”

His answers are ambiguous. After all, while the old world was certainly coming undone, a new world had yet to emerge:

The continuous, progressive, and overwhelming urbanization, a social phenomenon complemented externally by republican institutions, destroyed the rural support that was the foundation of the decayed regime, without succeeding in replacing it with anything new.¹⁵

Looking into the void between the old reality and the absence of a new universe of political relations, Buarque de Holanda’s attention turns, in the book’s final considerations, to the nature of the state. Republican institutions were unable to reconstruct the symbolic mechanisms that, for better or worse, had ensured, even operating within a system of slavery, at least the minimal cohesion of the imperial state. That is to say, the Republic eliminated one reality without creating a state capable of representing and articulating a new, and adequately modern, social model of subjects and free workers.

Some have argued that Roots of Brazil contains subliminal praise for the imperial state, which prevailed through most of the 19th century in Brazil.¹⁶ It is true that Buarque de Holanda affirms the monarchic regime’s stability at several points in the book. However, he also looks to the future and questions why “our political arrangements” are unable to respond to fundamental changes in work and societal organization. As such, Roots of Brazil aims to help Brazilians understand and denounce the state’s inability to respond to the “less harmonious expressions of our society.” Buarque de Holanda draws upon Alberto Torres’s argument that this inability to respond is a result of the divorce between society and representative politics. In his formulation, in Brazil there is a brutal separation of “politics and social life.” That said, Buarque de Holanda rejects the authoritarian ideas advocated by Torres and others who believe that the best solution to this separation is a strong state, capable of articulating clear and, in essence, tyrannical ideas to combat collective dissolution and bring together disparate elements.

Zest for Enlightenment ideas and a certain disregard for reality would explain the idealization of the principles of the French Revolution in Ibero-American nations, where the word “liberty” took on a magical aura, even as it was folded into “the old patriarchal and colonial patterns.” “Caudillismo” is symptomatic of the entrancing power of the notion that a leader should implement “liberty” at any cost. In Buarque de Holanda’s eyes, the emergence of political liberalism, with its defense of the coexistence of distinct and conflicting projects in civil society, precipitated the rise of leaders with deep-rooted, yet sometimes unconscious, antiliberal sentiments, such as Rosas, Melgarejo, and Porfirio Díaz.

One of the book’s thorniest questions is the place of democracy in the future of countries with Iberian roots. In the second edition of Roots of Brazil, published in 1948, Buarque de Holanda draws from North American naturalist Herbert Smith, who discusses the necessity of a revolution in South America. “Not a horizontal revolution,” Smith writes, “in the sense of a surface whirlpool of political strife, which would only serve to engulf some hapless hundreds or thousands. It should be a good, honest vertical revolution, one to bring stronger elements to the top, and forever destroy the old, diseased ones.”¹⁷

The radical nature of this observation is mitigated by Smith’s hope that this movement to suppress the old roots would never come at the cost of the ruling classes’ blood. Buarque de Holanda does not provide his own opinions on the necessity of a radical extermination of the roots handicapping the establishment of a new order. Interestingly, he only cites Smith’s “vertical revolution” in the second edition, published after World War II, when it had become increasingly unsavory to oppose liberalism. It is also important to note that communism—or, more accurately, Soviet socialism—failed to seduce Buarque de Holanda.

The formation of modern parties in Brazil was also plagued by the prevalence of personal relations, as political fights turned into confrontations between factions with personal or clannish interests. Yet, while Buarque de Holanda does criticize the legacy of personalism in politics, he also suggests that some features of the Brazilian national formation bear resemblance to liberal-democratic ideals. He advocates for a zone of confluence between cordiality and liberalism, one that keeps in mind the “rejection by the peoples of America, descendants of colonizers and of an indigenous population, of all orderly hierarchies or of any social order that would become a serious obstacle to the autonomy of the individual.” At the same time, he highlights how a “relative lack of consistency of racial prejudices” and “cordialism” generated a Brazilian “national temperament” in alignment with the notion of “natural goodness.” Here, in a section cut from the book’s second edition, Buarque de Holanda remembers the importance “of inspecting the anthropological foundations of societies in order to understand state doctrine.”¹⁸

Also in the first edition, published in 1936, Buarque de Holanda draws upon Carl Schmitt, who explores the ways that liberal thinkers had elaborated theories of state control and regulation without ever proposing that the state function as “a political principle of construction.”¹⁹ Significantly, the Schmitt citation would be cut from the second edition in 1948. Once again, it can be said that, following World War II, any doubt about liberalism would itself be shrouded in doubt. After the war, Schmitt himself, referenced by Buarque de Holanda and then blotted from his book, would become indelibly associated with Nazism.

In sum, Buarque de Holanda’s thought process was in great flux. Over the years, this back-and-forth has allowed critics to pick and choose quotes that “prove” he was saying one thing, when, in fact, he was saying two or even three things at once.

Regarding his defense of liberal-democratic ideals, Buarque de Holanda notes that the zone of confluence between cordiality and liberalism, which he advocates earlier in the book, is merely superficial. The fact that cordial values are based in personal preference means that they are resistant to the neutral idea of unconditional love for all humans. In this way, cordiality represents the opposite of Jeremy Bentham’s famous phrase, which Buarque de Holanda believes sums up liberalism: “The greatest good for the greatest number.”

If love is an exclusive feature of personal and familial circles, it can never, at least in Buarque de Holanda’s eyes, serve as the foundation of an organization conceived on a broader scale:

Good principles are not created by simple cordiality. Some solid normative element, innate in the soul of the people or even implanted by tyranny, is needed for social consolidation. The view that tyranny does not bring about lasting solutions is just one of the many illusions of liberal mythology that history has yet to confirm. The presence of such illusions, it is true, does not by itself constitute an argument against liberalism, and remedies other than tyranny can consolidate and stabilize a nation.²⁰

At the heart of the issue, hotly debated during the interwar period, is the state’s role in society, as well as the seduction of forms of government based in force. Buarque de Holanda strongly rejects such regimes, calling attention to the spurious alliance between fascism and the material forces that support it. In the case of Brazil, the “integralists,” local admirers of Mussolini, were incapable of maintaining “that coarse, exasperated, and almost apocalyptic truculence that lent so much color to their Italian and German models.” According to Buarque de Holanda, in Brazil,

the arrogant energy of Italian or German Fascism became the poor laments of lethargic intellectuals. This situation was somewhat similar to what happened with communism, which attracted from among us precisely those who seem least fit to carry out the principles of the Third International.²¹

Roots of Brazil is a book replete with dilemmas and questions but with few, if any, clear answers. In its final paragraph, in a notably Hegelian observation, the state appears as an entity transcending the “natural order.” Yet, if the state is opposed to the world’s natural order—that is, if it is opposed to society and all of its particularities—then such opposition

must also be resolved through counterpoint if the social framework is to be internally consistent. There is only one possible order, superior to our calculations for making a perfect whole out of such antagonistic parts. The spirit is not a normative force, except where it serves and adapts to society. Higher forms of society must be hereditary complements to, and inseparable from, society: they continually emerge from its specific needs, never from capricious choices.²²

Once again, the historian’s imaginary is musical in nature. This “counterpoint” consists of a question about the instruments of political representation and how they can be tuned to achieve greater harmony vis-à-vis the syncing of society’s needs with those that guide the state.

After all, in the interwar period during which Roots of Brazil emerged, questions about charisma, leadership, political representation, democracy, and totalitarianism were at the center of global debates.

Ultimately, after a close reading of this provocative work, there is perhaps one burning question left to explore—one that Roots of Brazil does not name, but does force one to ponder, eighty years later. This question is populism, its longevity as a Latin American tradition and, subsequently, the importance of forms of politics that, whether one likes them or not, diverge from that which is still labeled as liberal democracy.

Discussion of the Literature

Roots of Brazil is embedded in the Brazilian imaginary. Even people who have not read Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s book may refer to cordiality as a defining socio-psychological feature of the nation. It is as if the cordial man were more than a metaphor or a concept but a real figure.

This gives way to two different and equally insufficient readings of cordiality. The first reads it as a mere ideology that conceals the daily violence inflicted upon poor classes in Brazil.²³ The second—which is less accepted in academic circles but more common in the country’s official discourse—returns, perhaps unconsciously, to Cassiano Ricardo’s interpretation of cordiality as a “technique of goodness” that Brazilians offer to the world.

In both cases, the concept is devoid of its inherent ambivalence. After all, as suggested earlier, the cordial man represents both a promise of and obstacle to entering the modern world, where political relations cannot or should not be based exclusively in personalism. Indeed, it is cordiality’s fundamental ambivalence that causes such oppositional readings, both equally convincing at different moments. For, in Roots of Brazil, there is always a sentence here or a passage there that corroborates whatever thesis the reader hopes to prove. One of the few analysts to embrace and take full advantage of the concept’s ambivalence is José Miguel Wisnik, in his study of soccer as a lens for understanding the political and historical impasses of Brazilian society.²⁴

In the first decades of the 21st century, readings of Roots of Brazil have grown more sophisticated, as critics have explored revisions made to the text between the first and third editions, published in 1936 and 1956, respectively. It is clear that, over the course of these decades, Buarque de Holanda’s research practice, interests, and other publications pushed him to reconsider and alter some of the book’s original arguments. Luiz Feldman, for example, argues that the author firmly changed perspectives over time; whereas, in 1936, Buarque de Holanda oscillated between tradition and modernity, by 1948 he would have swayed more definitely toward Brazilian society overcoming its Iberian roots.²⁵ Leopoldo Waizbort views the first edition of Roots of Brazil as undoubtedly aligned with conservative thinking. He sees Buarque de Holanda’s mistrust of liberalism as indication of his belief that a social body should develop organically and authentically—a notion that opposes democratic values.²⁶ João Kennedy Eugênio takes his own swing at this organicist mentality, which, operating within Buarque de Holanda’s imagination, would reveal the potentially vitalistic and irrational impulses governing the historian’s thought processes in 1936.²⁷

Significantly, these interpretations of Roots of Brazil’s conservative character challenge the canonical reading that took shape in the late 1960s with Antonio Candido’s preface to the book. As mentioned earlier, Candido viewed the book, written by his friend, as democratic and radical. However, he analyzed it merely in its most current form, without taking into account the original text and its alterations.²⁸

This framework of readings reveals, once again, how the profound ambivalence of Buarque de Holanda’s debut work is responsible for leading even the most serious academics to extreme interpretations, both conservative and revolutionary.

The critical edition of Roots of Brazil, published in 2016 in Brazil, has provided Portuguese-speaking readers with the opportunity to witness, both in the text itself and its evolution over time, the author’s tense relationship with his first book. Buarque de Holanda’s many alterations to Roots of Brazil reveal his discomfort with the many ways it had been read, as well as his own ideas from the 1930s.²⁹

Not by chance, in 1969, at the height of the military dictatorship in Brazil, as Roots of Brazil’s core theses were viewed with distrust by various scholars, Candido recovers the book and reads it as “radical” in his preface. Candido’s interpretation would go virtually untouched for decades, until critics began to toy with the ambivalence of the text, tugging it both to the right and to the left.

More recently, Roots of Brazil was the target of scathing commentary from Jessé Souza, who reads the book as a criticism of the state and defense of a market-based approach to regenerating Brazilian society. According to Souza, Buarque de Holanda leaves room to view the free market as the only force capable of securing rationality in public life—something that personalism had denied society for so long. That is to say, the author of Roots of Brazil would have identified the corruption that still plagues the Brazilian state today as the principal, if not the only, problem to be combatted, which could only be defeated by the rationalizing and modernizing forces of the free market. This reading wipes the interpretive slate clean. It transforms Roots of Brazil into a sort of unconscious mainstay of the anti-corruption movement that has led Brazil, contemporarily, on an authoritarian journey. In its attempts to sweep away and villainize state corruption, the movement has actually reinforced society’s oligarchic and exclusionary structures.³⁰

As can be seen, Roots of Brazil lends itself to the most disparate of readings—some well substantiated, others somewhat eccentric. This diversity of potential interpretations explains the book’s longevity and why it continues to be an academic bestseller.

In some form or another, whether or not readers grasp the critical potential of the book’s ambivalence, one must remember the centrality of Roots of Brazil in Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s trajectory. Indeed, he would spend his whole life attempting to justify a book he wrote in his youth.

Yet, one must also remember Roots of Brazil’s centrality in the Brazilian imagination. Certainly it has created an interpretative framework that is hard to escape, even when one wants to.

Translated by Dylan Blau Edelstein.