Terms of Exchange

Brazilian Intellectuals and the French Social Sciences

Ian Merkel

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226819372
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A collective intellectual biography that sheds new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy. Would the most recognizable ideas in the French social sciences have developed without the influence of Brazilian intellectuals? While any study of Brazilian social sciences acknowledges the influence of French scholars, Ian Merkel argues the reverse is also true: the "French" social sciences were profoundly marked by Brazilian intellectual thought, particularly through the University of São Paulo. Through the idea of the "cluster, " Merkel traces the intertwined networks of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Roger Bastide, and Pierre Monbeig as they overlapped at USP and engaged with Brazilian scholars such as Mário de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, and Caio Prado Jr..Through this collective intellectual biography of Brazilian and French social sciences, Terms of Exchange reveals connections that shed new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy, even as it prompts us to revisit established thinking on the process of knowledge formation through fieldwork and intellectual exchange. At a time when canons are being rewritten, this book reframes the history of modern social scientific thought.

Chapter One

São Paulo: The New Metropolis with a French University

The city of São Paulo is so curiously French in some of its aspects that not once during a whole week did I have the sensation of being in a foreign country.

Georges Clemenceau, 1911

On January 25, 1934, the University of São Paulo (USP) was created with a new Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences, and Letters.1 The first director of the new Faculty, the mathematician Teodoro Ramos, proceeded on behalf of the state of São Paulo to Europe, where “he had meetings with the French, Italian, and German governments so as to obtain, in the important university centers of Europe, professors of renown for the chairs of the new Faculty.”2 Germans and Italians were hired for mathematics and the hard sciences. Meanwhile, the French were given entire responsibility for the social sciences and an important stake in the university’s conception.3 Long-standing Francophilia among the liberal intelligentsia and the fact that France had yet to succumb to fascism decisively shaped these intellectual geopolitics at a time of internal political struggle in Brazil.

The Paulistas had just been defeated after rising up against the federal government in the prior two years (1932–34).4 Dominant during the First, or Old, Republic (1889–1930), with six of its nine presidents coming out of the São Paulo law school, the Paulistas’ role in national politics was significantly reduced under Getúlio Vargas.5 As a consequence, they became increasingly frustrated with the centralized, anti-democratic, and corporatist governments of the 1930s. The newspaper with the largest national circulation, O Estado de S. Paulo, and the group surrounding it tied to the Partido Democrático (PD), decided to advocate for culture and education as a form of resistance.6 Although supporting Vargas in 1930, the PD changed sides by 1932, advancing the cause of the middle classes who saw the new Vargas government as excessively populist and even fascist.

When armed resistance failed, the O Estado group adopted a new strategy: instead of engaging in politics as such, they invested in the idea of elite formation. Unable to control electoral politics at the national level, they could at least provide the new cadres and professionals that influence government and other related fields—or so they thought. As Irene Cardoso has argued, USP promised to advance liberalism and an anti-populist form of democracy through the training and reproduction of governing elites.7 According to one of USP’s founders, Armando de Salles Oliveira, an expansive “doctrine of equality” threatened to bring about “equality in servitude and misery.” Opposing such doctrine, the Paulista elites sought instead a more abstract form of equality that would allow “any man to climb to the highest levels of social life and that permits the free extension of all creative forces.”8

The journalist and public intellectual Júlio de Mesquita Filho, owner of O Estado de S. Paulo, and others had plans for a university at least since 1925. Nonetheless, the project only materialized after the conflict between São Paulo and the federal government.9 Mesquita participated in the revolt, as did three other principal founders of USP: Salles Oliveira, brother-in-law of Mesquita and interventor of São Paulo from 1933–1935; educational reformer Fernando de Azevedo; and Paulo Duarte.10 Duarte and Mesquita would return to Brazil under amnesty in 1934 after being exiled in Portugal.11

In 1933, in the midst of the conflict between São Paulo and the federal government, the industrialist Roberto Simonsen wrote:

A considerable pleiad of intellectuals . . . grasped the urgent necessity to create schools of elite training that disseminated notions of politics, sociology, and economy, awaking and creating a national consciousness capable of orienting public administration. [This was] in accordance with the reality of our milieu and working, in this way, to stop the reigning incomprehension inside Brazil, of which São Paulo was and is the principal victim.12

For Simonsen, this meant the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política (Free School of Sociology and Politics), a school he founded explicitly to train public administrators.13 For others, it meant USP, which literary critic Sérgio Milliet remembered as bringing an end to anarchic civil wars and inaugurating “an intellectual and scientific revolution capable of changing Brazilians’ social and economic conceptions.”14 All these men would have agreed with the American L. D. Coffman, then president of the University of Minnesota, who said that universities might teach politics, but “never advocate for, nor could advocate for, fascism, nor communism.”15

This chapter examines how the social sciences in São Paulo came to be imagined in the years leading up to USP’s founding. Whether for the modernists of the 1920s or the leaders of the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, French thinkers such as Émile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl proved an important point of reference. In what follows, I explore some of the personal, political, and ideological reasons for why this was the case and how it affected the institutionalization of university life and the social sciences in São Paulo, as well as in Brazil more broadly. I argue that Paulista elites drew upon the social sciences—and more particularly the French social sciences—as a means to nationalize aesthetic culture in the 1920s and as a way of creating cadres that could understand and overcome the political upheavals of the early 1930s.

The second section of the chapter considers some of the salient differences between the French scholars who went to USP and those who went to the University of the Federal District (UDF), in Rio de Janeiro, founded just two years later. Whereas UDF brought in senior French scholars as distinguished lecturers who disseminated French academic life à la lettre, the younger professors who began their university careers at USP were more inclined to incorporate Brazil into their research. This generational difference is crucial for understanding the dynamics within each faculty.

Paulista Uses of the Social Sciences

São Paulo grew vertiginously in the first third of the twentieth century, both in population and height. In 1900, the city had 239,820 inhabitants; in 1920, it had grown to 579,033; and by 1940 it reached 1,318,539.16 In forty years, the population had more than quintupled. São Paulo rapidly became Brazil’s second-most-populous city (and third in Latin America), eventually overtaking the capital, Rio de Janeiro, in the 1950s.17 For a country whose urban development had been almost entirely coastal, the major exception being Minas Gerais, São Paulo’s emergence also had important geographical consequences, allowing Brazil to expand ever farther into the interior.18

Despite its Jesuit Seminary (Colégio) and the São Francisco Law School, the oldest in Brazil (est. 1827), São Paulo was largely a backwater town during the colonial period and the early nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, this changed rapidly. By the time USP was founded, São Paulo was not only Brazil’s largest industrial economy but also, in many ways, its cultural avant-garde.

With the fertile land of the state of Rio de Janeiro largely exhausted by the end of the nineteenth century, Brazil’s coffee production shifted west, and São Paulo’s widely famed terra roxa (purple earth) allowed for the production of coffee at a scale never before seen in Brazil or in the world. As the state of São Paulo emerged as the principal producer of coffee in Brazil, exporting over eight hundred thousand tons annually as of 1935, its capital witnessed growth in just about every sector, industry included.19 Paulista sociologist and literary scholar Antonio Candido still remembered São Paulo as a malograda província (unsuccessful province) prior to the 1920s, and really only qualitatively different after 1930.20 But as Richard Morse has demonstrated, the transition “from community to metropolis” was already thoroughly underway by the early 1900s.21 As just one indicator, by 1912 São Paulo had more circulating periodicals than any other state in the nation.22

The cultural sphere in São Paulo may have been incipient and not entirely “autonomous” during this period. As Sergio Miceli has argued, it depended heavily on the state and important patronage networks.23 Nonetheless, few would deny the seismic changes that had taken place by the 1920s. The growth of the middle classes and the liberal professions brought about an emerging consumer base for print materials, and consequently, a demand for a new class of journalists, writers, and publishers. In the nineteenth century, Brazilian publishers printed their books in Europe, mostly in Portugal and France, and books were often sold in the same elite boutiques where one could find perfumes, clothing, and other imported goods.24 Only in the early twentieth century did Brazilian publishers begin to actually print books—whether of national or international authorship—on Brazilian soil.25

São Paulo saw a proliferation of new bookstores, journals, and cultural movements. There was a veritable editorial “boom” in the 1930s, which in turn brought about an increasing specialization in production. The newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, for example, expanded its number of editions and produced a separate review, the Revista do Brasil, creating “new forms of erudite production counterbalancing previously dominant literary and worldly materials.”26 This boom in production entailed professional diversification, and not just in cultural industries. It required everything from “the acquisition of press rotaries, the diversification of investments and editorial programs, the recruitment of specialists in different sectors of production and finishing, market-oriented innovations and sales strategies”27 With such noteworthy diversification in the liberal professions, publishing being just one example, it is not surprising that new educational institutions emerged in order to train them.

São Paulo’s expanding economy and its corresponding growth in the liberal professions and cultural sectors meant that it could support writers and intellectuals to an unprecedented extent. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital since 1763, continued to claim a monopoly on the national institutions of intellectual recognition (Academia Brasileira de Letras, Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, and Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, to name just three), as well as Brazil’s principal publishing market. Paulista intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s nonetheless challenged Rio’s centrality in the arts, literature, and, ultimately, the social sciences.

The Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art), held in São Paulo in 1922, is by all accounts a watershed in Brazil’s intellectual and cultural production.28 Paulistas exhibited their paintings, performed prose, and distributed their writings in the Theatro Municipal and elsewhere. They proposed a new kind of art, supposedly free from Europe and its imitators in Rio de Janeiro. Convinced of their ability to revolutionize and Brazilianize the arts in Brazil, the modernists sought to transform the capital of Rio de Janeiro into a province and inaugurate São Paulo as the nation’s new metropolis. Mário de Andrade, arguably the most emblematic of them all, wrote to his friend Manuel Bandeira: “My God, what vanity! These people of Rio will never forgive São Paulo for having rung the bell. I am not speaking of you. You are not from Rio. You are like me: from Brazil.”29

Manuel Bandeira, originally from Recife, may not have been from São Paulo, but, according to Mário, he, too, was from Brazil. This distinguished him from intellectuals from Rio who had refused to recognize the seismic shift that he and his fellow modernists had inaugurated and who continued to look to Europe. According to Mário, intellectuals from Rio, unlike those from Brazil’s interior and the Northeast, could make no claim to authentic Brazilianness.30

Mário, on the other hand, had never been to Europe. Traveling extensively in his own country instead, especially to the Northeast and the Amazon, he consciously sought to immerse himself in Brazilian culture, however far it may h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1  São Paulo: The New Metropolis with a French University
• 2  Atlantic Crossings and Disciplinary Reformulation
• 3  Getting to Know Brazil: The New Country behind the Methodology
• 4  Four Approaches to Global and Social-Scientific Crisis
• 5  Brazil and the Reconstruction of the French Social Sciences
• 6  Racial Democracy, Métissage, and Decolonization between Brazil and France
• En Guise de Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Archives
• Notes
• Index