Roots of Brazil

Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, G. Harvey Summ

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780268026134
• eBook ISBN: 9780268077648
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Sérgio Buarque de Holanda's Roots of Brazil is one of the iconic books on Brazilian history, society, and culture. Originally published in 1936, it appears here for the first time in an English language translation with a foreword, "Why Read Roots of Brazil Today?" by Pedro Meira Monteiro, one of the world's leading experts on Buarque de Holanda.

Roots of Brazil focuses on the multiple cultural influences that forged twentieth-century Brazil, especially those of the Portuguese, the Spanish, other European colonists, Native Americans, and Africans. Buarque de Holanda argues that all of these originary influences were transformed into a unique Brazilian culture and society—a "transition zone." The book presents an understanding of why and how European culture flourished in a large, tropical environment that was totally foreign to its traditions, and the manner and consequences of this development. Buarque de Holanda uses Max Weber's typological criteria to establish pairs of "ideal types" as a means of stressing particular characteristics of Brazilians, while also trying to understand and explain the local historical process. Along with other early twentieth-century works such as The Masters and the Slaves by Gilberto Freyre and The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil by Caio Prado Júnior, Roots of Brazil set the parameters of Brazilian historiography for a generation and continues to offer keys to understanding the complex history of Brazil.

Roots of Brazil has been published in Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German, and French. This long-awaited English translation will interest students and scholars of Portuguese, Brazilian, and Latin American history, culture, literature, and postcolonial studies.

Chapter 1

European Frontiers

The New World and Old Civilization—Exaggerated Personalism and Its Consequences: Weak Organizational Spirit, Solidarity, Hereditary Privileges—Lack of Cohesion in Society—The Return to Tradition, an Artifice—A Special Feeling of Irrationality about Privilege and Hierarchy—How the Iberian Peoples Anticipated Modern Thinking—Manual and Mechanical Labor, Enemy of Personality—Obedience as the Basis for Discipline

The effort to implant European culture in an extensive stretch of territory under conditions largely foreign, if not adverse, to Europe’s thousand-year tradition is the dominant fact in the origins of Brazilian society and the one that has yielded the most valuable consequences. We have brought our forms of association, our institutions, and our ideas from distant countries, and though we take pride in maintaining all of them in an often unfavorable and hostile environment, we remain exiles in our own land. We can accomplish great things, add new and unexpected features to our human nature, and forge the type of civilization that we represent—nevertheless, all the fruits of both our work and our sloth seem to belong to an evolutionary system from another climate and another landscape.

Before asking to what extent such efforts at development will attain success, we should ask how far we have been able to represent those inherited forms of association, institutions, and ideas.

First, and significantly, we received our heritage through an Iberian nation. Spain and Portugal, along with Russia and the Balkan countries (and, to a certain extent, England as well), are bridge-territories through which Europe communicates with other worlds. They make up a frontier and transition zone, somewhat less laden with the Europeanism that is nevertheless an essential part of their heritage.

Spain and Portugal entered the European scene most decisively in the era of great discoveries. This late entrance intensely affected their destinies, and it was responsible for many peculiar aspects of their historical and spiritual development. They became societies that in some respects developed on the margins of their European counterparts, and they received no European influence that they did not already possess in inchoate form.

On what bases do the patterns of society rest in this indeterminate region between Europe and Africa, from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar? How do we explain many of those patterns without reverting to rather vague indicators, which would never allow us to be strictly objective?

The comparison between patterns in Spain and Portugal and those of Europe beyond the Pyrenees brings out a characteristic peculiar to the Iberian Peninsula, one that it does not share, at least not much, with any of its European neighbors. None of its neighbors developed, at least not to such an extreme, the cult of the personality, which seems to be the most decisive characteristic in the evolution of the Hispanic peoples since time immemorial. The Spanish and Portuguese owe much of their national distinctiveness to the particular importance that they attribute to the very value of the human person, the autonomy of each person in relation to his or her peers. For them, the measure of a person’s value depends above all on how little one depends on others and how self-sufficient one is. Each person is the offspring of himself, of his own effort, and of his own virtues. The sovereign virtues of this mentality are so powerful that they sometimes mark a person’s way of being and even physical features. It is expressed most completely and with least alteration by the stoicism that has been the national philosophy of the Spanish since the time of Seneca.

That concept is faithfully mirrored in a very Spanish word—sobranceria—a word that initially indicates the idea of arrogance. But the struggle and emulation that it implies were tacitly admitted and admired by the people, glorified by poets, recommended by moralists, and approved by governments.

This mentality is largely responsible for the unique weakness of all forms of organization and of all associations, which imply solidarity and order among people. In a land where all are barons, lasting group agreement is not possible unless imposed by a respectable and feared outside force.

Hereditary privileges were never a decisive influence in countries of Iberian origin, at least not as decisive and intense as in lands where feudalism took root. There was no need to abolish such privileges in order to establish the principle of individual competition. Some of the most unusual episodes in the history of Hispanic nations, including Portugal and Brazil, resulted from their weak social structure and lack of organized hierarchy. In Brazil, anarchical elements flourished due to the complicity or the indifferent indolence of institutions and customs. Initiatives, even when meant to be constructive, were constantly taken as means of separating people, rather than uniting them. Government decrees first originated from the need to contain and restrain momentary personal passions; only rarely were they the result of the active intentions of groups to associate permanently.

Our lack of social cohesion, then, is not a modern phenomenon. And that is why those who imagine that the only possible defense against our disorder lies in a return to tradition, a certain tradition, are mistaken. The rules and regulations developed by those erudite men are really ingenious spiritual products, which are detached from and adverse to the world. In their opinion, our anarchy and incapacity for solid organization are nothing more than the absence of the only possible order they deem necessary and effective. If we think about it carefully, the hierarchy they glorify needs such anarchy to justify itself and win approval.

In any case, why resort to the past in searching for a stimulus to better organize society? On the contrary, would that not merely expose our incapacity for spontaneous creation? Really active periods were never purposely traditionalist. Scholasticism in the Middle Ages was creative because it was current. Hierarchy of thought was subordinated to a cosmic hierarchy. Mankind on earth was a simple parable and a pale imitation of the city of God. Thus, in Thomist philosophy, the angels that compose the three orders of first rank—the Cherubim, the Seraphim, and the Thrones—are comparable to the men who form the immediate entourage of a medieval monarch: they help the sovereign in what he does by himself, and they are his prime ministers and counselors. Those of second rank—the Dominations, the Powers, and the Virtues—have a relationship to God like that of a king’s governors, who are charged with administration of the kingdom’s different provinces. Finally, those of third rank in the temporal city correspond to the agents of power, the subordinate officials.1

If medieval life aspired to beautiful harmony and rested on a hierarchical system, nothing would be more natural, since even in Heaven there are degrees of blessedness, as Dante’s Beatrice tells us. The natural order is nothing more than an imperfect and distant projection of eternal order and is explained in terms of it:

… All things, among themselves,

possess an order; and this order is

the form that makes the universe like God.2

Thus, the society of people on earth cannot be an end in itself. Its hierarchical disposition, although admittedly rigorous, aims neither for permanence nor goodwill in the world. There is no place in that society for beings who seek earthly peace in the goods and advantages of this world. The community of the just is foreign to the earth; it travels and lives on faith, in exile and during life. “The earthly city,” says St. Augustine, “which does not live by faith, seeks an earthly peace, and the end it proposes, in the well-ordered concord of civic obedience and rule, is the combination of men’s wills to attain the things which are helpful to this life.”3

The Middle Ages were hardly aware of conscious aspirations to reform civil society. The world was organized on the basis of eternal and unquestionable iron laws, imposed from another world by the supreme organizer of all things. By a singular paradox, society’s formative principle was, in its clearest expression, an enemy to the world and life. All the work of medieval thinkers, of the great builders of systems, meant nothing more than the effort to disguise, to the utmost extent possible, the antagonism between Spirit and Life (Gratia naturam non tollit sed perficit [Grace does not destroy nature but improves it]).4 This is, in a certain sense, a fertile and venerable task, but one whose essential meaning our era does not wish to comprehend. The enthusiasm that this grandiose hierarchical concept can inspire today, as it was known in the Middle Ages, is in reality a passion of professors.

The principle of hierarchy never really mattered among us Brazilians. All hierarchy is necessarily founded on privileges. Long before so-called revolutionary ideas triumphed in the world, the Portuguese and Spanish seemed to have perceived how irrational and socially unjust certain privileges, especially hereditary privileges, were. In the most glorious periods of Iberian history, personal prestige, independent of inherited name, was always important.

At least in this respect, they can consider themselves legitimate pioneers of modern thinking. Everyone knows that the Portuguese nobility was never rigorous or impermeable. During the period of the great maritime discoveries, Gil Vicente noted that the clear divisions between social classes that prevailed in other countries hardly existed among his compatriots:

In France and Germany,

in all France and Venice,

where they live with wisdom and skill,

in order not to live in sadness,

it is not as in this land;

because the peasant’s son

marries a peasant girl there,

and they never rise at all;

and the son of the embroiderer

marries the embroideress:

That is ordered by law.5

One of the most renowned scholars of ancient Portuguese history, Alberto Sampaio, has pointed out, with the help of ample documentation, that the nobility, however great its former preponderance, never succeeded in becoming a closed aristocracy. The general use of the same names among persons of the most varied conditions—he observed—was not new in Portuguese society; such behavior was the result of the continual turnover of individuals, some of whom became famous, while others returned to the masses from which they had come.6

Sampaio further emphasized how, under colonial law, men of noble lineage were of all occupations, from leaders of industry to renters of rural property; honors were denied to them only when they lived by manual labor. The food of the poor—he further stated—was not much different from that of noblemen and, as a result, both were always on intimate terms; not only did nobles eat with the poor, but they even relinquished to them their childraising. This is evidenced by the institution of wet nursing, by which nobles allowed their children to be brought up by peasants, who, in such cases, enjoyed some privileges and immunities.

Even if Iberian peoples exhibited similar characteristics with remarkable consistency, it does not necessarily mean that these characteristics came from some unchangeable biological destiny, or that they could exist, like the stars in the sky, apart and distant from conditions of life on earth. We know that at certain stages in their history, the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula gave proof of a singular vitality and a surprising adaptability to new forms of existence. We know that they were more advanced than the other European states, especially at the end of the fifteenth century, and that they created modern political and economic units. Perhaps the very success of this sudden and perhaps premature transformation was one of the reasons for the stubborn persistence of traditional habits, habits that partially explain their originality.

In the particular case of Portugal, even at the time of the Master of Aviz,7 the rise of artisans and merchants encountered fewer barriers than in those parts of the Christian world where feudalism reigned largely undisturbed. Since the merchant bourgeoisie were not overburdened by the kinds of difficulties that might have resulted from their lack of exclusive economic support, they did not have to adopt a completely new way of thinking and acting or establish a new scale of values on which to base their permanent dominance. Instead, they tried to associate themselves with and assimilate many of the principles of the old, leading classes, and be guided more by tradition than by cold and calculating reason. Aristocratic elements were not completely put aside, and lifestyles inherited from the Middle Ages retained some of their old prestige.

Not only the urban bourgeoisie but even the peasants were infected by the splendor of palace existence with its titles and honors.

Soon there will need be no peasants:

All are of the King, all are of the King,

cried the pageboy in [Gil Vicente’s play] the Farsa dos Almocreves. Strange as it may seem, the very anxiety to display coats of arms and the profusion of studies about nobility and books on lineage were, in fact, aspects of the unshakeable tendency toward a leveling of classes. The lower classes still upheld certain long-established and stereotyped patterns of determining social status as their models. The presumption of nobility was required by ancestral customs, which, despite having a persistent surface value, in reality no longer fit the times. True and authentic nobility does not need to exceed the individual; it depends on his strengths and abilities, since his own eminence is worth more than inherited eminence. The abundance of possessions that comes from good fortune, great achievements, and great virtues is the source of all greatness, and is more useful than any advantages of blood relations. For Iberians, the circle of capital virtues is directly related to the feeling of each individual’s dignity. Common to nobles and plebeians, that feeling is, nevertheless, an ethic of nobles, not of peasants. For the Spanish and the Portuguese, the values inspired by this feeling are universal and permanent.

Personal merit, when founded on such virtues, was always quite important. In the mid-sixteenth century, a similar conception, disseminated in theology, was resuscitated: the old quarrel of Pelagianism [a doctrine of free will], which is most fully manifested in Molinist doctrine [a Spanish Jesuit doctrine that man freely performs good acts with God’s grace]. In that argument, the Company of Jesus, an institution of clearly Iberian origin, which tried to impose its spirit on the Catholic world beginning with the Council of Trent, played a decisive role in opposing principles of predestination.

In effect, the Spanish and Portuguese always looked with distrust and opposition on theories denying free will. They never felt very comfortable in a world where merit and individual responsibility were not fully recognized.

Among the Spanish and Portuguese, that very mentality became the most formidable obstacle to the spirit of spontaneous organization, which was so characteristic of Protestant peoples, especially Calvinists. In fact, doctrines that preach free thought and personal responsibility are all less favorable to human association. In the Iberian nations, which lacked the rational approach to life that some Protestant countries experienced early on, governments were always the unifying factor. The kind of political organization that is artificially maintained by outside force always predominated; in modern times it is typically found in military dictatorships.

An insurmountable opposition to all morality that is based on the work ethic has always motivated the psychology of the Iberian peoples. Their normal attitude was precisely the theoretical opposite of the system of medieval craftsmanship, which placed a high value on physical labor and looked down on lucre, “filthy lucre.” Only very recently did that work ethic successfully gain some ground, mainly because of the greater prestige of peoples of the northern hemisphere. But the resistance it met, and continues to meet, has been so active and persistent that its complete success is still questionable.

“Integrity,” “being,” “seriousness,” “honor,” and “wise action”: these attributes, which, in the words of the Portuguese poet Francisco Rodrigues Lobo, adorn and glorify the noble shield of Portugal, represent essentially inactive virtues through which the individual reflects about himself and refrains from modifying the world. Action about something or about the material universe implies submission to an external object or the acceptance of a law foreign to the individual. It is not required by God, adds nothing to His glory, and does not add to our own dignity; on the contrary, it can harm and debase it. Manual or mechanical kinds of work envisage an objective foreign to man and aim at achieving perfection in a realm different from his.

Understandably, then, the modern religion of work and appreciation for utilitarian activity never became part of the Hispanic peoples’ nature. To a good Portuguese or to a Spaniard, a dignified idleness always seemed more desirable and also more ennobling than the insane struggle for daily bread. Both idealize the effortless and unconcerned life of a grandee. Thus, while the Protestant peoples praise and glorify manual labor, the Iberian nations still see things...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Series Page
• Copyright Page
• Translation Information
• Contents
• Foreword
• The Significance of Roots of Brazil (1967)
• Postscript (1986)
• Preface to the Second Edition of 1948
• Preface to the Third Edition of 1956
• Note to the Translation
• Chapter 1. European Frontiers
• Chapter 2. Work and Adventure
• Chapter 3. The Rural Heritage
• Chapter 4. Sowers and Builders
• Chapter 5. The Cordial Man
• Chapter 6. A New Era
• Chapter 7. Our Revolution
• Afterword
• Notes
• Author Biography