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More Order Than Progress? The Politics of Brazilian Positivism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

J. G. Merquior
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IN BRAZIL, THE RISE OF SCIENTISM AS AN IDEOLOGY IN THE 1870s was part and parcel of a changing social setting. The great war with Lόpez's Paraguay, a big financial burden and no easy victory, laid bare several bottlenecks in economy and society. By the end of the conflict, comprehensive claims for modernization had entered the agenda of new political parties, reformist, liberal and republican. In the huge post-bellum tropical Empire (1870–89) a protracted poIitical struggle for the abolition of slavery, mounting pressures from urban groups claiming a number of liberal reforms, and the growth of umilitarynrest (the ‘Military Question’, 1883–86) tended to dovetail, thereby threatening the monarchy. Intellectually as well as politically the halcyon days of peaceful monarchic rule (1845–68) were gone. The liberal-conservative compromise was doomed. Its would-be philosophical expression – the pious eclecticism of Cousin's Brazilian disciples – began to falter under the combined assault of readers of Darwin and Renan, Spencer and Haeckel – and, last but not least, Comte.

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Government and Opposition , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , 01 October 1982 , pp. 454 - 468
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Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1982

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References

1 Cruz Costa, J., Contribuiçäo à História das Idéias no Brasil, Rio, 1956, pp. 165–8;Google Scholar Paim, Antonio, ‘Como se caracteriza a ascensao do positivismo’, Revista Brasileira de Filosofia, vol. XXX, 119, pp. 250–1;Google Scholar see also Costa, Cruz, A History of Ideas in Brazil, tr. Suzette Macedo, Berkeley, 1964.Google Scholar

2 Cruz Costa, Contribuiçäo…, cit., pp. 138–45.

3 For the phrase ‘intellectual proletariat’, within an analogous context, see Clarke, Peter, Liberals and Social Democrats, Cambridge, 1978, p. 34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See George Boehrer, C. A., ‘The Church in the Second Reign, 1840–1889’, in Keith, Henry and Edwards, S. F., eds, Conflict and Continuity in Brazilian Society, Columbia, S. C., 1969, pp. 113–40,Google Scholar and also Lloyd Mecham, J., Church and State in Latin America, rev. ed., Chapel Hill, N. C., 1966, ch. XII.Google Scholar

5 cf. Stepan, Nancy, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, N. York, 1976 Google Scholar, passim.

6 See the fine exposé by Arnaud, Pierre, La pensée d'Auguste Comte, Paris, 1969, pp. 232–51.Google Scholar

7 Zeldin, Theodore, France 1848–1945, vol. II Google Scholar, Oxford, 1977, pp. 599–600.

8 Cruz Costa, Contribuiçäo… cit., ch. III, 3. The short chs. of his O Positivismo na República, S. Paulo, 1956, are extremely informative on the positivist ‘interventions’. Other works on the politics of Brazilian positivism include Leonidas de Rezende, O Capital e seu Desenvolvimento, Rio, 1932, book XI (a Marxist approach), Joäo Camilo de Oliveira Torres, O Positivismo no Brasil, Petropolis, 1943; 2nd ed. Rio, 1957 (a Catholic and monarchist viewpoint) and Lins, Ivan, História do Positivismo no Brasil, S. Paulo, 1964; 2nd ed., 1967.Google Scholar

9 Comte, , Système de Politique Positive, Paris, 1929, vol. IV, pp. 488–9Google Scholar.

10 cf. Martins, Wilson, História da Inteligěncia Brasileira, vol. IV: 1877–96, S. Paulo, 1978, p. 264.Google Scholar

11 Paulo Mercadante, Militares e Civis: a ética e o compromisso, Rio, 1978, chs. V and VII. On the younger officers' mood, see also ch. II of Edmundo Campos Coelho's Em Busca de Identidade: o Exército e a Política na Sociedade Brasileira, Rio, 1976.

12 Sergio da Costa Franco, Júlio de Castilhos e sua Época, Porto Alegre, 1967, pp. 155–6, 203.

13 See Love, Joseph L., Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882–1930, Stanford, 1971, pp. 75, 79–82.Google Scholar

14 Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez's Castilhismo, uma filosofia da República, Porto Alegre/Caxias do Sul, 1980, runs counter to our ‘progressive’ interpretation. Vélez thinks that Castilhismo meant Comtism minus corporatism plus statism. Therefore he ventures to depict Castilhismo as vocationally a totalitarianism, which ultimately fell short of achieving a totalitarian order just because at the time it lacked the necessary modern technology. However, as he is the first to admit, there was no explicit statement of statism as a political or economic philosophy on the part of Castilhista leaders ‐ and certainly no consistent statist practice. As soon as Castilhismo is seen as an ideology, that is, a body of thought operating within a given social context ‐ Rio Grande as a largely peculiar part of nineteenth‐century Brazil ‐ progressive colours appear. Not surprisingly, Vélez has nothing to say either on the social views of Castilhismo or on its own social background in class and regional terms.

15 Freyre, Gilberto, Order and Progress. Brazil from Monarchy to Republic, N. York, 1970;Google Scholar London, 1973, ch. IV.

16 Skidmore, Thomas E., Black into White ‐ Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, N. York, 1974, p. 13.Google Scholar Same reasoning in J. Love, op. cit., pp. 34–5.

17 See Paim, Antonio, História das Idéias Filosóficas no Brasil, 2nd ed., S. Paulo, 1974 Google Scholar and A Querela do Estatismo, Rio, 1978, ch. I, 3. Paim has also edited the two vol. anthology A Filosofia Política Positivista, Rio, 1979. The Iberian authoritarianism theme has been greatly reinforced by the study of the Brazilian patrimonial state undertaken by Raimundo Faoro, Os Donos do Poder, 3rd ed., P. Alegre, 1976; Simon Schwartzman, ‘Back to Weber: corporatism and patrimonialism in the seventies’, in James Mallony (ed.), Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America, Pittsburgh, 1977, pp. 89–106 and Riordan Roett, Brazil: Politics in a Patrimonial Society, rev. ed., N. York, 1978. All these authors stress the elitism/patrimonialism link.

18 The Positive Philosophy of A. Comte, ed. Harriet Martineau, 2nd ed., London, 1975, vol. II, p. 388.

19 Leopoldo Zea, El Positivismo en México, Mexico, 1943.

20 cf. Ardao, Arturo, ‘Assimilation and transformation of positivism in Latin America’, Journal of History of Ideas, vol. XXIV, 4, p. 521.Google Scholar

21 cf. Soler, Ricaurte, El Positivismo Argentino, Panama, 1959, pp. 262–8.Google Scholar

22 S. Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil, 3rd ed., Rio, 1956, p. 231.

23 R. Aron, 18 Lectures on Industrial Society, London, 1969, ch. II.

24 This is aptly commented upon in Frank E. Manuel's Shapes of Philosophical History, Stanford, 1965, p. 113. The anti‐individualist trend was already strong in Saint‐Simonism immediately after Saint‐Simon's death (1825). Mill made a classic criticism of it in ch. VI of his Autobiography (1873).

25 Boris Fausto, in Pequenos Ensaios da História da Repüblica, 1889–1945, S. Paulo, Cebrap, n. d., ch. I., stresses that of the S. Paulo landowners, the military and the positivists (including those in uniform), who together formed the three most important groups in the making of 1889, the positivists had the widest modernizing scope.