Ordering time, nationalising the past: temporality,

historiography and Brazil’s “formation”

Maria da Glória de Oliveira
Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro

Rebeca Gontijo
Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro

Fábio Franzini
Federal University of São Paulo

The modern “scientific” model of historiography experienced a twofold –

epistemic and political – triumph in the nineteenth century, when history imposed
itself as evidence, due to the possibility of a direct grasping of the past in a
methodologically verifiable way.1 At that moment, historical narratives became
instruments through which collectivities could construct their own genealogies as
nations, based on a specific notion of time as an intrinsic and immanent quality of
the real world.2 As objects of historians’ writings, nations acted as an
unsurmountable frontier for elaborations about past experience and expectations
1 regarding the future, and, consequently for the conceptions of history itself, as it
was establishing its place as a discipline in the European context.3 In fact, if, on
the one hand, the uses of the past and of history-writing were beyond doubt in the
construction of the political identities of nineteenth-century nation-states, on the
other the opposite is no less important if we call to mind the manifold and
persistent uses of the “nation” category by historians, in spite of the semantic
complexity of the concept, as the organising principle of a corpus of significant
texts that constituted the histories of historiography.

From this perspective, the present article briefly assesses Brazilian

historiography from the 1840s to the 1950s and identifies impasses, tensions and
disputes that marked the concomitant processes of nationalising the past and
institutionalising historical research in the country. The central reasoning to be
explored is that, in those decades, the writing of Brazil’s history demanded
several types of narrative and interpretative reconfigurations regarding the
2 colonial past. They portrayed a nation with multiple temporalities and contrasts,
then perceived as structural features of the present time and causes to explain its
alleged “backwardness”, thereby contributing to a continuous postponement of
the future expectation of fully attaining modernity. Thus, in the following pages,
we propose a panoramic, rather than exhaustive, examination of representative
works and authors at decisive moments in the history of Brazilian historiography,
keeping as a focus of our analysis the relationship between the writing of history,
 the issue of nationality and the development of variable modes of the experience
of time.

Ordering time and the nationality rhetoric

In the nineteenth century, the most effective efforts to construct a historiography

in Brazil emerged in the context of institutionalising historical research and
writing, with the creation of the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute
(Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, IHGB) in 1838, in Rio de
Janeiro. The consolidation of the IHGB as a leading locus of knowledge
production coincided with the centralisation process of the monarchical state in
the 1840s and 1850s and marked a continuity of the civilisational project that
3 started with the Portuguese colonisation.4 The institution took up the tasks of
providing the historical, geographic and ethnographic references of what “Brazil”
and the “Brazilians” were, and these references were expected to contribute to the
identity amalgam of the elements involved in the heterogeneous formation of a
society marked by slave work and the existence of indigenous populations. The
nation, conceived as a regulatory ideal in the IHGB’s historiographical project,
was understood as a tropical unfolding of a white and European civilisation. 5

National history immediately became the object of a debate that resulted in

different perceptions of how writing about it should be. How could one possibly
change a society that “emerged from the coinage of colonial currency” into the
object of a historical narrative in the model of the histories of civilised European
nations?6 An even more specific challenge involved determining what time and
place could be ascribed in a history of Brazil to those “others” who populated its
territory – indigenous peoples and Africans – as extraneous elements to
civilisation. It was the task of a botanist and explorer, Carl Friedrich von Martius,
to outline the first proposal of a solution to the problem in his dissertation “How
to write the history of Brazil” (“Como se deve escrever a História do Brasil”,
1844), which provided guidelines for approaching the national past through a
narrative that should inescapably integrate the elements with a distinct nature that
4 added to the emerging Brazilian population, whose particularity was found in the
mixture of three races: the American, “copper-coloured” race; the white or
“Caucasian” race; and the dark-skinned or “Ethiopic” race.7 The investigation of
the national past should extend back to the time before the overseas conquest to
include the history of Brazil’s “primitive” inhabitants. The original aspect of
Martius’ proposal consisted not only in the attempt to integrate the indigenous
element to the formation-process of a nationality – which may be attributed to the
Romantic component of Brazil’s nineteenth-century culture – but, above all, in a
recognition of its condition as a historical reality previous to the arrival of the
Portuguese. Such a fact was not evinced in the historiography of the day, for
which the history of Brazil had effectively started with the Portuguese discovery
and occupation.

A response to the overarching wish to consolidate the imperial order, to

5
construct a “rhetoric of nationality”, was to assume a retrospective look towards
 the experience of the pre-independence past in the hope of making it intelligible
as a stepping-stone in the historical process leading to national political
unity.8 The first work to embody such sense of purpose was the História Geral do
Brasil (General history of Brazil), published from 1854 to 1857, by Francisco
Adolfo de Varnhagen, with a narrative based on a vast array of documents, which
Capistrano de Abreu referred to as a “cyclopean mass of accumulated materials”.
Varnhagen produced a historical narrative that intended to portray “the genuine
national point of view” and, thus, to represent progress, in contrast to the accounts
of chroniclers and historians of colonial times, for whom Brazil was merely an
appendix of Portugal.9 It was up to Varnhagen, who became the viscount of Porto
Seguro, to establish the links of continuity between the colony and the nation in a
temporal order through which the past becomes a forger of the present and the
future. In spite of its place as a foundational milestone of national historiography,
this narrative model would become limited vis-à-vis the time experience of the
generation of intellectuals who became active from the 1870s.

The spatialisation of time: civilisation and its “others”

In 1879, the writer Machado de Assis referred to a “new generation” that had
emerged in the country, recognising in his poetic works the expression of
“something that is not yet the future, but no longer is the past”.10 Taken from one
of the author’s famous critical texts, this citation is noteworthy as it points to the
ambiguous situation of Brazil’s intellectual production in the final decades of the
nineteenth century. An opposite view to Machado de Assis can be identified in a
phrase of Sílvio Romero, which was bound to predominate as a watchword for
identifying the intellectual context of the 1870s: “a whole batch of new ideas”
6 were in motion in Brazil, marking the rupture with the Romantic past and the
dismantling of the imperial tradition in all instances. It is important to point out
that the profusion of works on themes that were at once literary, historical and
ethnographic was a sign of the incipient delimitations of disciplinary boundaries,
and that criticism, far from being a practice of specialists, represented an attitude
of reflexive openness for issues that were raised as “national issues”, which
would be rethought based on the scientificism of new European theoretical
references.11

The problem of national formation lingered amid an acute and repeated

questioning, for instance by Capistrano de Abreu in 1911: “is the Brazilian
population a new people or a decrepit one? And are the facts idealised throughout
time worthier than the current ones?”12 Abreu was not the only one to recognise
the failure of some reformist aspirations – highly- prized for men of letters born
in the second half of the nineteenth century – that aimed at an effective political
7 and social transformation of the country after the crisis of the Second Regency,
the abolition of slavery (1888) and the establishment of the Republican regime
(1889). Differently from the generation of Romantic writers of the beginning of
the previous century, who were driven by the belief in a temporal order capable of
forging links of continuity between the past, present and future of the nation, the
“frustrated paladins” of the First Republic shared a burden of doubt and disbelief
regarding the form of the newly constituted nationality in Brazil.13 It was therefore
 inevitable that the criticism of obsolete institutions, values and practices of the
monarchical regime should also extend to the foundations that explained the
historical ordering of the national past, exposing the limitations of the
historiographical model of which Varnhagen was the main exponent. It became
necessary to overcome the explanatory logic of a historiography committed above
all to the purposes of the imperial state, which saw the colonial movements that
were “engendering” independence as the product of a crisis, since they were
opposing an allegedly necessary and inevitable order of things – that is, the
formation of a centralised and territorially unified national state as the crowning
achievement of a civilising process in the tropics that had started with
colonisation.

The sense of incompleteness regarding the formation of nationality, as it

stood before the ideals of civilisation and progress (and linked to the awareness of
innumerable gaps to be bridged in relation to colonial times), was broadly shared
by the authors who emerged in Brazil’s intellectual scene in the late nineteenth
century, thus indicating the impasses around historical writing. The expectations
of grasping the deepest extracts of the nation’s past converged in a renewal of the
interpretation of the country’s history based on ethnographic references, which
allowed the enigmatic, “obscure” indigenous history to be approached. After
1870, this history no longer could be written without considering the historical
8 background of the “savages”, which meant to qualify them as “primitives” living
at a specific stage of the modern temporal order.14 Nor could such a narrative
confine itself to the events of the coastal conquest; it needed to shed light on the
inland’s slow-paced occupation. As much as the “indigenous question”,
the sertão (Brazilian backlands) was an enigmatic object to be studied and an
unavoidable task for deciphering the nation’s history. This was, in short, an
attempt to seek the appropriate ways to represent the time of the nation in the
context of a unique historical reality that unfolded in distinct and simultaneous
spaces and times.

The view of Brazil’s geographical, historical and ethnographic

discontinuities reached its most tangible form in Euclides da Cunha’s account of
his journey to Canudos in 1897. Written from the experience of distance and
otherness, his testimony in Os sertões (1902) became a canonical work of
Brazilian social thought, revealing a mismatch between the scientificist
theoretical arsenal mobilised by the author, on the one hand, and the reality that
9 presented itself to observation, on the other; in other words, a mismatch between
the cognitive structures of civilisation and the sertão’s testimony of barbarism.
How could one possibly account for a geographic space marked by a “play of
antitheses” and by the peculiar figure – both “strong” and “retrograde” – of the
local mestizo? How could one to describe and explain such an unknown land and
folk?15

As Fernando Nicolazzi correctly remarked, in Os sertões the solution to the

question brings up a specific conception of time.16 The experience of the distance
covered in the space between the coast of Bahia and the inhospitable backlands,
10
and the view of the sertanejo as the “other” of civilised man, are translated in the
form of a displacement in time, that is, as a “separation between the present and
the past, between the modern and the savage, between culture and nature,
 between history and its denial”.17 The conceptual apparatus used by Cunha made
it possible to apprehend a fleeting and unknown reality, but it also set the limits of
this narrative marked by distance and difference. After all, the Canudos incident
presented itself as an eloquent lesson for the present and a notorious example of
defects in the social evolution of the nation, which, for the author, was
“condemned to civilisation” in spite of the still living presence of the forces of its
past. The journey to the distant sertão highlighted a disagreement in the national
historical order, inasmuch as its geographical remoteness from the “civilised”
coast was an undeniable sign of a time-distance that expressed itself in the
Canudos incident (for him, “a retrocession in history”) and in the existence of the
“retrograde” sertão inhabitants. The acknowledgment of coevalness and of the
spatialisation of time would not be possible without the assumption of civilisation
and modernity as universal values.18 It is not a coincidence that for Cunha, the
solution arose from his strong conviction that the “driving force of history” would
make civilisation advance towards the sertões.19

The acknowledgment of overwhelming differences and considerable time

lapses that set Brazilian society apart from modern European civilisation
accentuated the impasses in the search for historical explanations for the
formation of identity in Brazil. These dilemmas doubtlessly emerged in the
reception of the discourses of modernity in vogue in nineteenth-century Europe,
which asserted not only a hierarchy among the evolutionary stages of societies,
11 but also a concomitant specialisation of different time-notions. The complex task
of deciphering the deepest causes of the alleged Brazilian inability to join the
march of civilised societies exposed a conspicuous disagreement in modernity’s
unitary temporal order, and, as a result, imposed the need for new forms of
representing the past, thus creating space for new interpretations of the national
“backwardness”.

Between past and future

As if the criticisms of the so-called 1870 generation were not enough, the war that
raged in Europe from 1914 became an additional element in the mind frame of
anxieties of Brazilian intellectuals. By presenting the ugly face of the belle
époque, the conflict would suggest the failure of the civilisation that hitherto had
been followed as a model. It imposed, as a result, the need to either deepen or
12 retake in different terms the reflection on the nation and its destiny. This, for
instance, was announced in the editorial of the first issue of Revista do Brasil in
January 1916: “We are not yet a nation that knows itself … we are a nation that
has not yet had the courage to break through onwards by itself, in a rigorous and
fiery projection of its personality.”20

This publication soon became a leading forum for debate on the national
question. It was crucial to evaluate and discuss the above-mentioned
13 “backwardness” of the country and to point out paths for building a suitable and
adequate future for the Brazilian nation – in other words, a future capable of fully
reflecting its singularities.21 As such, the future could only emanate from the
 nation itself; it was urgent to reach back to the past in order to identify the
fundamental traces of the formation of a national identity, or, even
better, brasilidade (“Brazility”), as it was termed. The key to the future was to be
found in the past, and between the former and the latter a present had to be
overcome. Beyond establishing the continuity between distinct historical times, it
was important to record, and even to propose, the rupture between them: this was
the compass by which a large part – but not all – of Brazilian intellectuality
guided itself in the early twentieth century.

At the quintessential locus of historians – the IHGB – everything remained

in order, as showed the First Congress of National History, held in Rio de Janeiro
in September 1914. Having as its focus the period from 1500 to 1871 and the
chronology of the “great political events” of the colonial and imperial period, the
congress reaffirmed the interpretative model of the past, which had been practiced
at the institute since its inception. In the same year, Alberto Torres voiced his
dissatisfaction with the social and political studies on Brazil, which were based
on postulates and data that referred to other countries and found no possible
14
application to the reality of societies formed by colonisation, hence the
conclusion that contemporary intellectuals were undergoing an anarchic crisis (“a
tremendous confusion of ideas”) without a direction and bound to repetition. It
was urgent to become aware of such problems and, in Torres’ view, this did not
involve equipping oneself with concepts and truths, or even becoming attached to
explicative systems or formulas. The path to be pursued was one of analysis and
synthesis.22

A few years later, the discomfort with the intellectual production was
expressed more vehemently. In the 1920s, the discussions on modernity and
modernism were presented as the starting point for “rediscovering” Brazil. In the
debate, Tristão de Athayde acknowledged in 1924 that there was a mismatch
15 between the country’s reality and its existing interpretations. Athayde accused the
previous generation of evading social and political action, and, further on,
expressed a hard-hitting view of Brazil that inserted the country in the Latin
American context. In his words:

we are hurried nationalities, in which all stages of civilisation

coexist, from the savage at the very last degree of decadence to the
Mediterranean and subtle intelligences, which either become
isolated or wilt in these excessive and still primitive tropics. And
all this emanates a sense of ephemerality and a continuous
presentiment of death.23

Thus, Athayde also expressed a consciousness of coevalness between

“civilisation” and “barbarism”, indicating a perception of time that was quite
representative of Brazilian historical and historiographical culture in the first half
of the twentieth century. Hence the diagnosis that Brazilians were standing, as in
16 no other epoch of their history, “before a multiplicity of times of growth”, which
made that moment “anarchic in its appearance … A quite modern world is
pressing itself over, or else inserting itself, here, in a quite past world.” 24 The
acknowledgment of the coexistence of distinct and temporally distant stages
produced a sense of instability in which everything seemed fleeting, ephemeral
 and incapable of creating lasting effects for posterity. In such context, the present
was experienced as a time in which past and future overlapped in a chaotic and
meaningless way.25

In that moment of uncertainties, an author made an invitation to cast a look

“for an instant to the visible, palpable and living reality of this today that
emerges, transforms itself and fades at a glance, as the moving landscape of an
automobile’s ride”. What was seen then was “the spectacle of a people living in a
territory that legend – beyond truth – considers as an immense territory of
unequalled wealth, but not knowing how to explore and enjoy its lot”. This was
how Paulo Prado reaffirmed his purpose in a long postscript to his 1928 Retrato
do Brasil: ensaio sobre a tristeza brasileira(Portrait of Brazil: essay on Brazilian
sadness). As a country full of problems that were worsened by the “vice of
17 imitation” and petty politics, “Brazil does not advance indeed: it lives and grows,
as a sick child grows, with the slow development of a poorly organised body”.
Ignoring the transformations that were taking place abroad, “Brazil sleeps in its
colonial slumber”.26 As its subtitle suggests, the work had the intention of
showing how and why “in a radiant land, a sad folk lives”. Focused on the study
of the colonial period, the Retrato announced in the themes of each of its chapters
the reasons for the “sadness” that defined the “Brazilian national character”: lust,
covetousness, sadness itself and Romanticism – the latter, in the sense of a
sentimental, pompous, egotist and, therefore, useless rhetoric.

According to Prado, the country could only count on two “catastrophic”

solutions to avoid the dismantling of its unity: “war, revolution”. 27 Aware of his
own radicalism, he understood that faced with an intolerable present state, being a
18
revolutionary meant to become a “builder of a new order” and to believe in the
future, “which cannot be worse than the past”.28

Prado’s diagnosis would soon, in 1930, attain a prophetic mood due to the
conspiracy that toppled president Washington Luis, replacing him with Getúlio
Vargas. Even though the Revolution of 193029 was far from achieving the
substantial rupture so many intellectuals yearned for, it did put an end to a
republic, which was henceforth referred to as the “Old Republic”. By doing so, it
19
brought up the urgent need to build a new state and a new society within the
existing nation, as well as the need to establish – perhaps more than ever –
another history capable of corresponding to the newly inaugurated temporal
order.

Homogenous time and the sense of the past

In the section “Notas e comentários” (Notes and comments) of its November

1939 issue, Revista do Brasil highlighted a significant development in the “taste
for historical and sociological studies referring to Brazil”, along with the relevant
20
number of authors who were dedicating themselves to it. This movement sought
“a more intimate and deeper knowledge of our formation, of our development, of
the peculiarities of our national existence”.30 The remark reflected an important
 turning point in relation to the customary grasp of representing the past, that is,
the mere chronological narrative of events was giving way to the investigation of
the manifold elements and dynamics of Brazilian social life.

There was also no doubt in relation to the author responsible for it – a proof
of this fact was that the above-mentioned article in Revista do Brasil nominally
quoted him. In 1933, with the first edition of Casa-Grande & Senzala: formação
da família brasileira sob o regime da economia patriarchal (translated as The
masters and the slaves: a study in the development of Brazilian civilization),
Gilberto Freyre offered some answers to the “national question” that stood out
more sharply in the agenda of Brazilian intellectuals in the early decades of the
twentieth century, through the debate marked by the race mixture issue. It is
important to highlight the proximity of the book with the hypothesis of the
“mixture of the three races” presented by Martius in his 1844 dissertation. For the
generation of Brazilian intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century, the
contact among the distinct ethnic groups – indigenous, white and black – was
seen as the problem that crippled national progress and Brazil’s access to the
values of modern western civilisation. The originality of Freyre’s work resides in
21 the substantive change in this evaluation of the “national problem” and in his
emphasis on the particular value of indigenous and African influences, and of the
hybrid character of Portuguese colonisation.31 His linkage with the North
American anthropology of Franz Boas allowed him to set the notions of race and
culture apart, while ascribing to the latter an absolute primacy in the analysis of
social life. Based on this perspective, the race-mixture notion does not mean a
mystifying idea of the colonial past: it was applied by Freyre, who already in the
first pages of the work loses the aura of his identity as a “pure” European white,
to deconstruct the aura of the identity of the Portuguese colonisers as “pure”
white European. Thus, in Casa-grande & senzala, the formation of Brazil – and
this is the central argument of the work – is defined as a balancing of countless
antagonisms, starting from the deepest of all: the antagonism between the
landowner and the slave. In this process, the African element plays a
preponderant role of mediation between the European and indigenous cultures. 32

One of the distinctive hallmarks of Freyre’s work, which has been

highlighted by many scholars, is the use of a colloquial language with a touch of
orality, resembling a conversation. This feature allows for the creation of a link
between experience and narrative: by using the oral language in many passages of
his work, the author seems to demonstrate the survival of colonial values in the
present. Approaching the patriarchal experience in Brazil’s historical formation,
Freyre builds on a particular conception of time that evinces an intimate and
homogeneous linkage between past, present and future. As Nicolazzi has pointed
22 out, for Freyre, writing about the colonial past is to write out what was seen (even
if through the testimonies of chroniclers and travellers) and what is still seen; it is,
therefore, to bring this past’s presence into the present, and to bring it to life by its
representation.33 Thus, under the “balancing of antagonisms” motto, one may
identify a meaning of temporality, which, far from presenting itself as a lapse and
a mismatch in the temporal order – both, strongly demarcated in Cunha’s
narrative – points out to a possible conciliation between the past and the present
experience of Brazilian society in its future projections.
 The importance attained by Freyre’s interpretation of history did not by any
means prevent other representations of the national past from taking shape in the
1930s and 1940s. One of the most vigorous of these other representations was
written by Caio Prado Júnior in two somehow complementary works, Evolução
política do Brasil (Brazil’s political evolution) in 1933 and Formação do Brasil
contemporâneo (Formation of contemporary Brazil) in 1942, which proposed a
“materialistic interpretation” of Brazilian history. The first of these books, albeit
dealing with the Portuguese colonisation, the conflicts between the colony and
colonial power, independence and the main national tensions in the nineteenth
century, was not, as its author claims, “a history of Brazil” but “a simple essay”
presenting a synthesis of it.34 Theoretically refined and based on the Brazilian
historiography produced up to his time, Prado Júnior analysed the “political
evolution of Brazil” in the light of the economic structure put in place by the
Portuguese, whose logic of exploitation of the territory led to continuities and
23
discontinuities in the formation of Brazilian society. Its purpose was evidently to
grasp such permanencies and ruptures in order to overcome the reality of the
1930s and 1940s, still marked by economic backwardness, social exclusion and
political weakness, as aspects linked to the colonial-heritage problem.35 The very
same issue guided the work Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo, now with a
wider scope, covering “that past that seems to be distant, but still surrounds us
from all sides”;36 more precisely what Prado Júnior called the “colonial system”,
since its inception in the sixteenth century until its exhaustion in the nineteenth
century. This deliberately established arrival point is presented as the “decisive
moment” that, on the one hand, led to the final product of the “work undertaken
throughout three centuries of colonisation”, and, on the other, to the explanatory
key “for interpreting the subsequent historical process and its result, namely
today’s Brazil … erected upon that foundation”.37

Therefore, for Prado Júnior, the historical time of the Brazilian nation not
only had an order, but also a meaning. The first chapter of Formação do Brasil
contemporâneo clearly makes this point both in its title – “Meaning of
colonisation” – and its opening words, which assert that “seen from the distance,
24 every people has a certain ‘meaning’ in its evolution”. The historian’s task, thus,
consists in delimiting the “set of essential facts”, demonstrating the unity that
converges around “an uninterrupted main line of events that follow on each other
in rigorous order and always aimed at a particular orientation”. 38

Contrary to what his words suggest, Prado Júnior’s conception of history

cannot be reduced to a mere teleological statement. Along with his analysis of the
historical chronology in the form of thematic approaches (“settlement”, “material
life”, and “social life”, with several other subthemes), he proposed “the first
logical approach in the history of Brazil”, and, as Fernando Novais affirms, was
possibly the first author “to treat the history of Portuguese colonisation in its own
25
terms, as the history of a colony that becomes a nation”.39 That is, in his work,
time and the past are reordered in a new configuration that propitiates access to
Brazilian history from other avenues, which – interlinked by dialectics –
articulated the totality of the colonial experience to an external dynamic, that is,
to dynamic of a broader system.
 If Freyre pointed towards a possible conciliation between the present and the
past, and if Prado Júnior established a way of reordering historical time and
providing it with meaning, another author on his turn sought to observe the
26 present in the light of the past, contributing to the reflection on the possibilities of
historical change, of “our revolution”, less as a rupture and more as an ongoing
and slow – but certain – process.

Residual time

Roberto Vecchi has pointed that in the temporal structure of Raízes do Brasil, the
past acts as a residue capable of determining the contemporary condition of the
country. According to him, the axis at the heart of this work consists in the
combination of two antagonistic times: a regressive time associated with the past;
and a progressive time related to the future and to a sluggish revolution. The
present, then, appears as a “residual time” or as a “time in between” forged by
this bent and simultaneously inscribed in both temporalities. In other words, the
present is “a remnant of the clash between the regressive time of the leather-like
cordial past in its existing ruins … and the other, antagonistic and progressive
temporal directive of modernity”. There are, therefore, two antagonistic times: the
time of the past, which remains, and the time of the “revolution” in progress –
both seen from the vantage-point of the present.40 For Tristão de Athayde in the
27
1920s, such a present had “a multiplicity of times of growth”, capable of making
it “anarchic in its appearance”.41 The prospect of overcoming the colonial roots in
the future sustained itself by a denaturalisation of the past as a contingency (what
did happen could have otherwise not happened), and this was precisely what
provided legitimacy to action in the present, according to another commentator of
the work, Thiago Lima Nicodemo.42 In other words, Buarque de Holanda sought
to break up a nationalist perspective that projected a “meaning” onto the history
of Portuguese America as if this history were a sufficient and necessary clue to
the formation of Brazilian nationality. Thus, he turned the assumption of
nineteenth-century nationalist historiography into a historiographical problem, by
challenging its anachronism.

For Nicodemo, this work describes Brazil’s formation process as a “not yet”
that seeks to annul the nation as a teleological assumption of the historical
narrative, since only by overcoming the archaic, Iberian-rooted past would it be
possible for the country to establish itself as a culture and a society on its own. It
is a matter of understanding the nation as a historical construct and not as a
teleological assumption. The central element in Buarque de Holanda’s conception
of history is, therefore, the interaction of two distinct temporal dimensions. One
28 of them is found in the dialectics involving Iberian elements and native elements
in the colonisation process. The other is the analysis of how these elements, while
carrying their own logic, were reused in the formation of the Brazilian state and
nation in a process that had unfolded from the nineteenth century to the present,
that is, the 1930s, when the work was published.43 In this sense, for Buarque de
Holanda, the coexistence of distinct times was made possible by considering the
past as residue in the present. At the same time, the break with the past is seen as
possible and the first condition for attaining this break would be to know the
 “roots” of such a past – a metaphor that allows a more complex look at the
formation process, with its manifold aspects and directions.

The idea of modernity gained new contours during the 1940s and 1950s. The
decadence of coffee farming in the 1930s and the increasing strength of industry
precipitated an economic transformation, while the crisis of liberalism and the
reflections on the role of the state as a regulator – with the issues of poverty and
underdevelopment, as their consequences – became internationally debated
themes. If up to the end of the Second World War, modernisation prescriptions
for Brazil indicated the organisation of the state as a priority, after 1945 such
modernisation should be guided by the implementation of development policies
for the country, which could accelerate its economic growth towards
industrialisation and urbanisation, thus enabling the idea of a transition moment,
29
or even of a rupture with the heritage of the colonial past. The evolution of
capitalism, understood as a one-sided process that all countries could adapt under
free-market rules, and theories of change44 dominated the discussions and
provided a basis for the political uses of time. And, if “time can shape the
relations of power and inequality, under the conditions of capitalist industrial
production”,45 then the 1940s and 1950s can be seen as crucial periods in the
consolidation of a particular use of time as a way of defining an object named
Brazil, by building on the conceptual distinction between development and
underdevelopment.46

Coevalness and permanencies

In the debate on developmentalism, one may observe the effort to annul the
national telos constructed in the nineteenth century and to substitute it by a
linkage between the past, present and future, while employing a conceptual and
rhetorical mind frame that is supportive of demonstrating the acceleration of the
process described, as well as the coevalness of distinct times in the same territory.
For many analysts of the period, both the past and the present coexisted in
30
contemporary Brazil, as had been already been pointed since the beginning of the
century. This can be observed in works such as Jacques Lambert’s Os dois
Brasis (The two Brazils) (French edition, 1953; Brazilian edition, 1959) and
Raymundo Faoro’s 1958 Os donos do poder: formação do patronato político
brasileiro (The owners of power: the formation of Brazilian political patronage).

In Faoro’s specific example, the central thesis is that Brazil’s historical

formation had been and was still marked by patrimonial domination, transplanted
from Portugal to America by colonisation. A prevailing idea is the continuity of
the structures that have existed since the creation of the modern Portuguese state
(fourteenth century), strengthened by the linkage between state centralisation and
31
a type of capitalism that was politically bent towards benefitting the monarchical
state. A longue-durée structure remained unaltered in the present: a stratified and
bureaucratic patrimonialism, which had previously (and then, still) prevented the
development of a modern and rational economy.
 Inspired by the writings of Max Weber,47 Faoro’s interpretation of Brazil’s
historical process is marked by the perception of a persistent anachronism, which
corresponded to the forces of backwardness, to the non-fulfilment of modernity
and the non-emergence of a genuine Brazilian culture among Brazilians, as the
expansion of the country’s society remained hampered “by the resistance of
anachronistic institutions”.48 As Marcelo Jasmim noted, the anachronistic forces
arising from the mixture of archaic and modern elements forestalled historical
novelty and the full attainment of modernity.49 In the words of Faoro himself:
32 “From John I of Portugal to Getúlio Vargas, in the course of six centuries, a
political social structure has resisted all fundamental transformations, the deepest
challenges, the crossing of the large ocean.”50 That explains the title of the final
chapter in the work’s 1975 edition, “A viagem redonda: do patrimonialismo ao
estamento” (The round journey: from patrimonialism to stratification), which
expresses a time-view of continuity and permanence, an eternal recurrence that
was perhaps hardly understood when the expectations of development towards
modernity and the future prevailed.

Temporality, historiography and Brazil’s formation

The history of the historiography produced in Brazil since the 1940s and 1950s
must consider the changes introduced by new ways of conceiving and practicing
intellectual work, along with convergences and rifts between history and social
sciences, resulting from the creation of the first university courses in the 1930s. It
33 is also necessary to bear in mind the flow of interpretations about the country
through an essay-writing tradition that persisted into the first half of the twentieth
century, which included authors with several intellectual backgrounds, who
sometimes bypassed the university environment.

In the specific case of history as a discipline, it must be pointed out that the
schools of philosophy and of language/literature became places that aimed above
all to prepare teachers for basic education. Thus, while an academic stance based
on theories, scientific methods and field studies was sought in the domain of
social sciences and literary criticism, historians, on the other hand, continued with
“a bookish and academic training, surrounded by erudition, engulfed by a mass of
facts lacking the indispensable theoretical basis”. 51 The learning of rudimentary
34 historical research was sluggish and slow to yield results. Meanwhile, the
“institutionalisation discourse”52 asserted that the university was (or should be) the
setting par excellence for developing ways to explain the reality and intervene in
it. As these explanatory forms had to be historically and scientifically based,
sociologists and economists – as well as others, from outside the universities –
gained a strong legitimacy as agents capable of linking science to public life
while producing studies that had great repercussions. 53

As final considerations of this analysis, we call attention to the recurrence of

a concept in the historiography produced between the 1930s and 1950s, since the
35
study of it can be useful for the purpose of comprehending the ways in which the
experience of time was conceived and narrated in that period. The concept is the
 term formação (formation), found in the titles of some of the fundamental works
published, for instance, the above-mentioned Casa-Grande & Senzala, by
Freyre; Formação do Brasil contemporâneo, by Prado Júnior; and Os donos do
poder: formação do patronato político brasileiro, by Faoro; and also Formação
da sociedade brasileira (The formation of Brazilian society) (1942), by Nelson
Werneck Sodré; Formação e problema da cultura brasileira (The formation and
problem of Brazilian culture) (1958), by Roland Corbisier; Formação econômica
do Brasil (The economic formation of Brazil) (1959), by Celso Furtado;
and Formação da literatura brasileira (The formation of Brazilian literature)
(1959), by Antônio Cândido.

Carlos Guilherme Mota defines the formation works by their most usual
connotation, that is, as works aimed at the “construction process of the nation, of
the national element, of our collective identity”.54 As a counterpoint, Abel Barros
Baptista points to a displacement of the definition of nationality as an implicit
assumption behind the idea of formation, in which “the final form” would
establish the grounds for pinpointing the origins in a line of continuity, thus
accentuating the teleological connotation of the term. Here, the use of the term
was bound to strengthen the efficacy of lines of reasoning that offered an answer
to the nationality problem, demarcating the necessary and inevitable character of
its construction.55 But as Berthold Zilly noted, the use of the formation concept
also suggests the idea that Brazil has not yet reached full maturity and is
developing towards a more well-finished form, aiming, therefore, at a telos, that
36
is, a more complete and superior reality. Thus, the concept could simultaneously
suggest both the process and its aim, both the dynamic and its result, even though
the works on the national formation may seem to emphasise the former
perspective in these pairs.56 Furthermore, both in the ancient sense (of the
Greek paideia) and in the modern sense (of the German Bildung), the concept
points to an ideal yet to be attained, in other words, to something that can be
indefinitely procrastinated. Beyond certainties, it evokes expectations, as the
process (in the sense of progression, but also of imitation or return to a previously
existing ideal) is continuous and infinite. This allows us to assume that formation
is a process marked by the anguish of improvement and change, because of its
inconclusiveness.57

In the many interpretations about the history of the formation of Brazilian

nationality, a highlight is the opposition between the archaic and rural (or even
feudal) Brazil, on the one hand, and the modern and industrial (or capitalist)
Brazil, on the other.58 Glaucia Villas Bôas linked this opposition to a lingering
“myth of national ambiguity”, which accompanied the reflections on modernity in
Brazil.59 Several intellectuals have taken up the task of accounting for the difficult
reconciliation of the country with its past, as the marks of its colonial and slavery-
37 based origins were still perceived as something present, which prevented the
arrival of modernity. These intellectuals wrote history from the standpoint of
distinct institutional, discursive and disciplinary places, seeking to grasp and to
explain an experience marked by the existence of structural obstacles or
resistances to change,60 while frequently employing a narrative form guided by the
formation concept. And even in contexts with a noticeable possibility of
transformation or rupture with the backwardness traits, there was a prevailing
sense that the past had not really passed but remained as a burden on the
 shoulders of the Brazilian people. Evidently, these intellectuals had an explicit
aim of intervening in the country’s destiny and a political commitment with the
national element, which, at least up to the 1950s, served as a parameter for their
approaches to collective issues. Here, we see the accuracy of Paulo Eduardo
Arantes’ remark that the emblematic word “formation” can be seen as “the key of
a basic intellectual experience” that is itself the mark of an accelerated time, in
which the future seems to become increasingly uncertain.61 Above all, the use of
the formation idea favoured the descriptive, synthetic and sometimes normative
accounts supposedly aimed at a reader in search of explanations and prognoses, if
not certainties.

NOTES

* Translated from the Portuguese original by Dermeval de Sena Aires Júnior.

1 François Hartog, Évidence de l’histoire: ce que voient les historiens (Paris: Editions EHESS, 2005),
133–214.
2 Reinhart Koselleck, Historia, Historia (Madrid: Trotta, 2004) and Elías Paltí, La nación como
problema: los historiadores y la “cuestión nacional” (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
2002), 44–45.
3 Daniel Woolf, “Of nations, nationalism and national identity: reflections on historiographic organization
of the past,” in The many faces of Clio: cultural approaches to historiography. Essays in honor of G.G.
Iggers, ed. Q. Edward Wang and Franz L. Fillafer (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007), 73–74.
4 Manoel Luiz Salgado Guimarães, Historiografia e nação no Brasil (1838–1857) (Rio de Janeiro:
EdUERJ, 2011); Lúcia Maria Paschoal Guimarães, “Debaixo da imediata proteção de Sua Majestade
Imperial: o Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 1838–1889,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e
Geográfico Brasileiro 156/388 (1995).
5 Manoel Luiz Salgado Guimarães, “Nação e Civilização nos Trópicos: o Instituto Histórico e Geográfico
Brasileiro e o Projeto de uma História Nacional,” Estudos Históricos 1/1 (1988): 8.
6 Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos, O tempo saquarema. A formação do estado imperial, 5th ed. (São Paulo:
Editora Hucitec, 2004), 296.
7 Carl Friedrich von Martius, “Como se deve escrever a história do Brasil,” Revista do IHGB 6 (1844):
389–411. The work became notorious after winning the 1840 contest for the best example of writing on
Brazil’s previous and modern history. See Temístocles Cezar, “Como deveria ser escrita a história do
Brasil no século XIX. Ensaio de história intelectual,” in História cultural. Experiências de pesquisa, ed.
Sandra J. Pesavento (Porto Alegre: UFRGS Editora, 2003), 173–208; Manoel Luiz Salgado Guimarães,
“História e natureza em von Martius: esquadrinhando o Brasil para construir a nação,” História,
Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 7/2 (2000): 391–413; and Rodrigo Turin, Tessituras do tempo: discurso
etnográfico e historicidade no Brasil oitocentista (Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ, 2013).
8 The expression “rhetoric of nationality” was proposed by Temístocles Cezar, “L’écriture de l’histoire au
Brésil au XIXe siècle. Essai sur une rhétorique de la nationalité. Le cas Varnhagen,” (PhD diss.,
EHESS, 2002).
9 João Capistrano de Abreu, “Necrológio de Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, Visconde de Porto Seguro,”
in Ensaios e Estudos: crítica e história, 1st ser. (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira; Brasília: INL,
1975), 81–91.
10 Machado de Assis, Obra complete, vol. 3 (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1997), 809.
11 Regarding the reception of European theories in the Brazilian intellectual context, see Angela
Alonso, Ideias em movimento. A geração 1870 na crise do Brasil-Império (São Paulo: Paz e Terra,
2002).
12 Carta a Mário Alencar, 18 Jan. 1911. In João Capistrano de Abreu, Correspondência de Capistrano de
Abreu, vol. 1, ed. and intro. J. H. Rodrigues (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira; Brasília: INL,
1977), 225–226.
13 Sevcenko used the expression “frustrated paladins” (“paladinos malogrados”) when referring to
intellectuals such as Euclides da Cunha and José Veríssimo, who expressed their disappointment with
the Republican regime. Nicolau Sevcenko, Literatura como missão. Tensões sociais e criação cultural
na Primeira República (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1999), 107–137.
14 Turin, Tessituras do tempo, 237–246. See also François Hartog, Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Paris:
Galaade, 2005).
15 Fernando Nicolazzi, Um estilo de História: a viagem, a memória, o ensaio. Sobre Casa Grande &
Senzala e a representação do passado (São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2011), 216. See Luis Costa
Lima, Terra ignota: a construção de Os Sertões (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1997) and
Glaucia Villas Bôas, “Casa grande e terra grande, sertões e senzala: duas interpretações do
Brasil,” Iberoamericana 4/13 (2004): 23–37.
16 Nicolazzi, Um estilo de História, 217.
17 Ibid., 223.
18 For an analysis of Os sertões as a spatialisation of time and an affirmation of coevalness, see Stefan
Helgesson, “Radicalizing temporal difference: anthropology, postcolonial theory, and literary
time,” History and Theory 53/4 (2014): 545–62.
19 Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões, ed. Alfredo Bosi, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Editora Cultrix; Brasília: INL,
1975), 29. See also the new English translation: Euclides da Cunha, Backlands: The Canudos
Campaign, transl. Elizabeth Lowe (New York: Penguin, 2010).
20 Revista do Brasil 1/1 (1916): 1–2.
21 Tania Regina de Luca, A Revista do Brasil: um diagnóstico para a (n)ação (São Paulo: UNESP, 2000),
35–84.
22 Alberto Torres, O problema nacional brasileiro: introdução a um programa de organização nacional,
3rd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1938), 28–29.
23 Tristão de Athayde, “Política e letras,” in À margem da história da república (ideaes, crenças e
affirmações). Inquerito por escriptores da geração nascida com a república, ed. Vicente Licínio
Cardoso (Rio de Janeiro: Laemmert, 1924), 48.
24 Athayde, “Política e letras,” 65.
25 Nicolazzi, Um estilo de História, 2.
26 Paulo Prado, Retrato do Brasil: ensaio sobre a tristeza brasileira, 9th ed. [1st ed., 1928] (São Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 1997), 199 and 210.
27 Prado, Retrato do Brasil, 208.
28 Ibid., 212.
29 With the proclamation of the republic in 1889, central power in Brazil was transferred from the
emperor’s throne to the hands of oligarchic groups linked to the agrarian sector, in particular, coffee
farmers. Due to their economic strength and to elections that were either manipulated or adulterated, the
states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais forged an alliance through which their representatives practically
took turns in the presidency, thus controlling the politics of the nation. However, in the course of the
1920s, increasing urbanisation and industrialisation, along with the – still timid – awakening of new
social agents and forces, and the disagreements among the oligarchies, exposed the wearing out of this
arrangement. By the end of the decade, this deterioration led to the rupture of the São Paulo–Minas
Gerais agreement and to new political alliances. The foremost alliance was the alliance between Minas
Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul, which was defeated in the presidential elections of March 1930 and
began to discuss the possibility of an armed movement to seize power. In spite of hesitations, the
increase in political animosities and the weakness of Washington Luis’ government led to the outbreak
of the October 3 uprising in the same year, which culminated in the inauguration of one of its main
leaders – Getúlio Vargas – as president, precisely one month later. A multifaceted and updated
introduction to this process – one of Brazilian historiography’s most studied themes – is found in
volumes 1 and 2 of the collection edited by Jorge Ferreira and Lucilia de Almeida Neves Delgado, O
Brasil republican, 4 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2003).
30 Revista do Brasil 2/5 (1939): 87–88.
31 Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande & Senzala, 29th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 1994), 4–54. See
also Ricardo Benzaquen de Araújo, Guerra e paz: Casa Grande & Senzala e a obra de Gilberto Freyre
nos anos 30 (São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2010). For the first English edition, see Gilberto Freyre, The Masters
and the Slaves: A study in the development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf), 1946.
32 Freyre, Casa Grande & Senzala, 52–53.
33 Nicolazzi, Um estilo de História, 322.
34 Caio Prado Júnior, Evolução política do Brasil (São Paulo: Empresa Gráfica da Revista dos Tribunais,
1933), 7. Even though this book written by Caio Prado is considered a pioneer in Brazilian
historiography, in its days it was but one among many other works of the Marxist literature that started
to emerge in the country – most of them dealing with the themes of their agitated present. Since then,
 Marxism in Brazil has followed many paths, both in political and academic terms. In the specific case of
historiography, the materialistic interpretation of history also developed several branches and became,
starting in the 1970s, one of the main and best consolidated lines of force, and the source of some
extremely important works for understanding Brazil. For a broad vision of Marxism’s dissemination and
penetration in the country, including historiography, see João Quartim de Moraes, Daniel Aarão Reis
Filho and Marcelo Ridenti, eds., História do marxismo no Brasil, 6 vols. (Campinas: Editora da
Unicamp, 2007). See also Leandro Konder, “História dos intelectuais nos anos 1950,” in Historiografia
brasileira em perspectiva, ed. Marcos Cezar de Freitas (São Paulo: Contexto, 1998), 355–74.
35 Luiz Bernardo Pericás and Maria Célia Wider, “Caio Prado Júnior,” in Intérpretes do Brasil: clássicos,
rebeldes e renegados, ed. Luiz Bernardo Pericás and Lincoln Secco (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014), 195–
196.
36 Caio Prado Júnior, Formação do Brasil contemporâneo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2011), 11.
37 Ibid., 7–8.
38 Ibid., 15.
39 Fernando Novais, “Entrevista,” in Prado Júnior, Formação do Brasil contemporâneo, 413–414. Our
emphasis.
40 Roberto Vecchi, “Atlas intersticial do tempo do fim: ‘Nossa Revolução’,” in Um historiador nas
fronteiras: o Brasil de Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, ed. Sandra Jatahy Pesavento (Belo Horizonte: Ed.
UFMG, 2005), 161–93.
41 Athayde, “Política e letras,” 65.
42 Thiago Lima Nicodemo, “Sergio Buarque de Holanda,” in Intérpretes do Brasil: clássicos, rebeldes e
renegados, ed. Luiz Bernardo Pericás and Lincoln de Abreu Secco (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014), 151.
43 Ibid., 148.
44 Social change theories have dealt with a recurrent theme in the field of social sciences and philosophy
since the nineteenth century. It can be said that the theme actually accompanied the establishment of the
social science disciplines. In a few words, linear theories and cyclical theories seek to account for social
becoming; the former adopt the evolutionary perspective of a linear purposefulness in historical
processes, while the latter emphasise the nonlinear and nondirective character of social change. See, for
instance, Piotr Sztompka, A sociologia da mudança social (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira,
1998).
45 Johannes Fabian, O Tempo e o Outro: como a Antropologia estabelece seu objeto (Petropolis: Vozes,
2013), 33 and 161.
46 The international seminar “Resistances to change: Factors that prevent or encumber development”, held
by the Latin American Centre for Social Science Research (CLACS) in 1959, is a landmark in the
construction of a sociology of development in Brazil. The proposal was to create alternatives to the
development projects of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC),
which was guided by general interests and did not consider the specificities of each country of the
continent. The reflections produced by these groups presents relevant themes on the political uses of
time and the historical representation of the country in the 1950s.
47 Although some authors before Faoro had already echoed Max Weber in the country, starting with
Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in Raízes do Brasil, the first major book in which the Weberian approach
effectively set the tone of the analysis is Faoro’s Os donos do poder. Yet, in spite of its historiographical
strength and of their interpretative reach, Brazilian historians have seldom followed the German thinker.
It is significant to point out, in this sense, that Raymundo Faoro himself was a jurist by training and
profession; to use Sérgio da Mata’s expression, in “tropical Weberianism” sociology has played and still
plays the leading role. Cf. Sérgio da Mata, “Weberianismo tropical: caminhos e fronteiras da recepção
de Max Weber no Brasil,” in A fascinação weberiana: As origens da obra de Max Weber (Belo
Horizonte: Fino Traço, 2013). See also Jessé Souza, “A ética protestante e a ideologia do atraso
brasileiro,” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 13/38 (1998), unpaginated; Luiz Werneck Vianna,
“Weber e a interpretação do Brasil,” in O malandro e o protestante: a tese weberiana e a singularidade
cultural brasileira, ed. Jessé Souza (Brasília: Ed. UnB, 1999).
48 See Faoro, quoted in Marcelo Jasmin, “A viagem redonda de Raymundo Faoro em Os donos do poder,”
in Nenhum Brasil existe: pequena enciclopédia, ed. João Cezar de Castro Rocha (Rio de Janeiro:
Topbooks; UniverCidade; UERJ, 2003), 363.
49 Ibid.
50 Raymundo Faoro, Os donos do poder: formação do patronato político brasileiro. Edição revista,
acrescida de índice remissivo [1st ed. 1958] 3rd ed. (São Paulo: Globo, 2001), 733.
51 The University of São Paulo school of geography and history only granted its first PhD 17 years after its
creation in 1934, to a thesis on the history of Brazil. The separation of geography and history only
 occurred in 1950. Furthermore, the basic curriculum for the history course, established in 1962, was
aimed at the training of teachers, and not of researchers. See José Roberto do Amaral Lapa, A história
em questão: historiografia brasileira contemporânea (Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 1976), 44 and 171;
Francisco Iglésias, “A pesquisa histórica no Brasil,” Revista de História 88/4 (1971): 373–415.
52 Francisco Falcon, “Historiografia e ensino de história em tempos de crise – 1959/1960 – 1968/1969,”
in Tempo negro, temperatura sufocante: Estado e sociedade no Brasil do AI-5, ed. Oswaldo Munteal
Filho, Adriano Freixo and Jacqueline Ventapane Freitas (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. PUC-Rio/Contraponto,
2008), 37–61.
53 Maria Alice Rezende de Carvalho, “Temas sobre a organização dos intelectuais no Brasil,” Revista
Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 22/65 (2007): 17–31.
54 Carlos Guilherme Mota, “Intérpretes do Brasil: Antônio Cândido e Raymundo Faoro,” in Intérpretes do
Brasil: cultura e identidade, ed. Gunther Axt and Fernando Schüler (Porto Alegre: Artes & Ofícios,
2004), 268.
55 Abel Barros Baptista, O livro agreste (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 2005), 60–67.
56 Berthold Zilly, “Minha formação (1898), de Joaquim Nabuco – a estilização do brasileiro ideal,”
in Pelas margens: outros caminhos da história e da literature, ed. Edgar Salvadori de Decca and Ria
Lemaire, (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp; Porto Alegre: Ed. UFRGS, 2000), 253–54.
57 In its Greek and Renaissance roots, the idea of formation is related to the conditions of possibility of
political life or of the virtuous man, and is linked to everything that results from the past and can be
capable of providing useful references and values for present life. In the late eighteenth century, the
German term Bildung referred to culture in general and could be used in relation to the formation level
of an individual, a people or a language, for instance. The word has a strong connotation in the sense of
a process, and a double nature as a term, thereby referring not only to the results of the process, but to
the learned contents and the educational process in itself. It also has a practical and dynamic character:
practical, as it presupposes that consciousness operates by forming things around itself; and dynamic,
because consciousness undergoes a movement that transforms it into something distinct from itself.
Hence the association of Bildung with work and travel and the latter’s use as a characterisation of
novels. See Fritz K. Ringer, O declínio dos mandarins alemães: a comunidade acadêmica alemã, 1880–
1933 (São Paulo: Edusp, 2000); Pedro Caldas, “O que restou da Bildung: uma análise da Ciência como
Vocação, de Max Weber,” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 4/2 (2006): 116–29; Antoine Berman,
“Bildung et bildungsroman,” Le temps de la reflexion 4 (1984): 141–59; Henrique Estrada Rodrigues,
“A ideia de formação na historiografia brasileira,” in Teoria e historiografia: debates contemporâneos,
ed. Bruno Franco Medeiros, et al. (Jundiaí: Paco Editorial, 2015), 253–76.
58 Several studies proliferated at University of São Paulo around sociologist Florestan Fernandes on the
development of capitalism in Brazil, with a prevailing interest in macrosociological issues in the light of
dependency theory, which emphasised the political dimension of economic processes. The authors of
these works include, for instance, Octavio Ianni, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Paul Singer.
Meanwhile, at the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (ISEB), another model was sought to explain the
development of Brazilian society, by affirming a close relation between science and politics. Scholars
such as Guerreiro Ramos, Álvaro Vieira Pinto, Roland Corbisier and Nelson Werneck Sodré
contributed in different ways to the reflection on the adequate development form for the country. They
also participated in the design of the “Plan of Goals” of Jucelino Kubitschek’s government (1955–
1960), which proposed to achieve “50 years in five” – thus evincing an expected acceleration of time,
capable of bringing the present and the future closer, while decisively breaking with the past.
59 Glaucia Villas Bôas, Mudança provocada: passado e futuro no pensamento sociológico brasileiro (Rio
de Janeiro: Ed. FGV, 2006).
60 For the theories of change as an individual chapter in the reflection on the uses of temporality, see
Florestan Fernandes, Mudanças sociais no Brasil(São Paulo: Difusão Europeia do Livro, 1974).
61 According to the author, this key would be “in general lines, approximately, the following: in the form
of wide interpretative frameworks recording real trends in the society – which, however, still suffered a
sort of congenial atrophy that stubbornly aborted such trends – that corpus of essays gathered above all
the collective purpose of providing the jelly-like environment with a modern set of bones capable of
sustaining its evolution. This notion was at once descriptive and normative, and it is also understood
that the horizon unveiled by the formation-idea should indicate a relatively integrated European ideal of
civilisation – the point of escape of every well-educated Brazilian spirit.” Paulo Eduardo Arantes,
“Providências de um crítico literário na periferia do capitalismo,” in Sentido da formação: Três estudos
sobre Antonio Candido, Gilda de Mello e Souza e Lúcio Costa, ed. Paulo Eduardo Arantes and Otília
Beatriz Fiori Arantes (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1997), 11–12.