
AN ALTERNATIVE ROAD TO MODERNITY
Simon Schwartzman
Prepared for presentation at the Swedish Collegium for
the Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (SCASSS), February, 1988.
Contents
1. Modernization and modernity
2. Modernity and the State
3. Feudalism, patrimonialism and
the modern state
4. Patrimonialism and state
dominance
5. Whither society?
6. Regional cleavages and
differentiation
7. Conservative modernization
8. Social ethics and values
9. Post-war developments
10. Towards Convergence?
Notes
AN ALTERNATIVE ROAD TO MODERNITY
1. Modernization and modernity.
Political theory does not seem to have quite
assimilated the fact that there are not only different roads, but
also different outcomes in the path to what used to be called
"modernization", but tends to be called today
"modernity". "Political theory" is of course
far from a well identified corpus of theoretical
knowledge, and this opening statement could be falsified but a
host of counter-examples. Nevertheless, I would contend that
scholars tend still to work under the notion that,
notwithstanding national variations and local setbacks, societies
modernize through the incorporation modern industry, scientific
and technological knowledge, the organization of a bureaucratized
state and the substitution of contractual links for those based
on tradition or charisma - all, in short, that falls into Max
Weber called "rationalization". The word
"modernization", which pervaded the social sciences
until the sixties, expressed the belief that all societies were
going through the same processes (political scientists talked
about ("nation building" and "political
development"), and that there was something pathological and
wrong in those who did not quite managed it.
"Modernity", a much more general term, has now replaced
modernization. It does not carry the evolutionist and systemic
connotations of the latter, but still conveys the meaning that
all societies, today, share a common destiny and condition,
described as state of uncertainty, instability and disenchantment
in a world where "all that is solid melts into air"(1).
I would contend that there is at least a second
central ingredient in the notion of "modernity" besides
the transient nature of its institutions, which is the
generalized use of modern technologies. The creation of
institutions able to produce scientific knowledge and
technological products, and the spreading of this competence
through society, is certainly a privilege of those societies
which were able to rationalize in the broader, Weberian sense of
the term. However, the use of highly technological consumer goods
such as video-recorders and automobiles; the adoption of some
types of modern industry based on sophisticated equipment with a
high content of "embodied" knowledge, manned by an
unskilled or deskilled labor force; the use modern and
sophisticated weapon systems; and the adoption of administrative
structures able to handle with a minimum of efficiency the modern
equipments of mass communication, information gathering, economic
production and political control seem to be completely
generalized in the world of today.
There is, at last, a set of normative questions
that are central to the concept of modernity. Modern societies
are supposed to be democratic, equitable, economically efficient,
and to provide their citizens with economic stability, personal
security, education and welfare. These values inform, among other
things, the social scientists' enquiries about how these
societies were formed, and whether there are something in their
history which could help to explain why they succeed or not in
achieving these values, or why they detract from them(2).
2. Modernity and the
State
The development of the state, out of the ashes of
medieval order, is a central element in the interpretation of the
way modern societies, and modern democracies, were formed(3) . We have learned that, in
Europe, the modern state emerged as the product of a protracted
conflict between raising absolutist powers, in alliance with
merchant and urban sectors, against the rural nobility and the
Catholic Church, which represented the fundamental elements of
the feudal order. One consequence of this process was the
creation of ever larger political units, with the waning of the
power both from the old rural lords and from the more recent city
states. Power centralization, however, did not come unchecked.
The emerging absolutist states had to fight not only against the
remnants of the traditional order, but also against the
representatives of the new one, the urban bourgeoisie, new and
independent religious movements, an emerging intelligentsia, an
easily mobilized displaced population in the large cities and the
first manifestations of an organized working class -- all that
the French once lumped together as the "troisième
état", and which is often called today the "civil
society".
The central theoretical point I wish to make is
that, in Europe, the contractual component, which was such a
basic element in the political organization of medieval society,
did not disappear with the emergence of the absolutist state, but
was replaced by other types of contractual arrangements, not only
with the raising modern sectors in the cities, but also with the
old professional guilds and, often, with a transformed and
"modernized" landed aristocracy. This is certainly what
Max Weber had in mind with his conceptualization of modern forms
of political domination as "rational-legal". The
"rational" component of the new order was the creation
of government bureaucracies which disregarded traditional
procedures and organizational arrangements in the benefit of
those which maximized efficiency in goal attainment (what, still
in Weberian terms, could be called "substantive
rationality"); the "legal" component, however, did
not refer, as it sometimes understood, to empirical or scientific
laws, but to the legal order which gave legitimacy to political
domination - in other words, contract.
The notion, put forward by Weber, that modern
bureaucracies are the most efficient form of social organization
ever to exist, helped to hide the inherent tensions between its
two central components, rationality and legality, or contract. It
is obvious today that bureaucracies in the Weberian sense are
particularly ill-suited to perform the complex tasks involved in
the running of a modern and complex welfare state. As the tasks
of the modern bureaucrat get more complex, formalism and written
procedures are replaced by "expert" or professional
competence, and the explicit rules that once allowed for
political control of public bureaucracies cease to exist.
Bureaucrats, as Weber predicted, tend to assume control of their
work and subtract them from external oversight, and the problems
of social and political control of public bureaucracies are not
handled as easily by parliaments and political parties as it was
usually thought to be possible(4).
Once we perceive that the link between
rationality and legality is historical, rather than conceptual or
empirically necessary, several new questions open up. How
different societies arrived at their current stage of
"modernity"? What difference does it make if this
process had or not a strong component of "legality", or
contract? How do the tensions between rationality and contract
(or, in Weberian terms, between substantive and formal
rationality) occur in different societies, and what are their
consequences for the present and the future?
3. Feudalism,
patrimonialism and the modern state.
The contractual nature of the feudal order seems
to be a powerful explanation for the correlation that exists
between past feudal experiences and contemporary modern
capitalist and democratic societies. Machiavelli is known for the
deep difference he said to exist between two main forms of
political organization of states, "the Prince and his
barons" and "the Prince and his subjects", that
is, feudal and patrimonial arrangements. With the growth of the
cities and the development of the crafts in feudal societies,
contractualism was also adopted to regulate the relations between
these new social actors and the Prince, or the Church. This was
certainly one important road to modernization, but what happened
with societies which did not have a feudal past? Have they failed
in the constitution of their nation-states? Have they failed to
modernize? Or, if they succeeded, in what sense did they do it?
Did they have somehow to incorporate in their societies the
contractual component that did not exist in their historical
heritage?
From the perspective of five centuries ago, the
old patrimonial empires were certainly much more
"modern" and developed than the feudal societies which
existed throughout Western Europe. From China to Turkey and the
Iberian countries, they had the largest cities, the strongest
armies, the most sophisticated scholars, the best fleets, the
more advanced technologies and the most complex administrative
organizations. The expression "patrimonial bureaucracy"
was used by Weber to characterize these old administrative
systems, but this expression seems to refer to at least two
different realities. In one sense, patrimonial bureaucracies were
"traditional" organizations in which work was seldom
professionalized, and tended to be carried on by honoratiores
as liturgical services to the Prince. These were shallow, almost
intermittent organizations, in which no development of
differentiated professional skills, competence or ethic was
possible among civil servants. In another sense, however,
patrimonial bureaucracies were seen as quite professionalized
institutions, characterized, however, by the private
appropriation of public posts by their holders, and their
eventual selling or transmission along hereditary lines. The
blurring of dividing lines between the public and the private
sector was not limited to traditional administrative tasks (tax
collection, administration of justice, military service), but
included the whole economic sector, from trading to mining and
industries. This type of arrangement was certainly not
incompatible with the setting up of huge bureaucracies and of
extremely detailed regulations for their work (as witnessed, for
instance, by the old Spanish and Portuguese
"ordenações", or codes) and the establishment of
elaborated systems of surveillance of their work by the Crown. It
is by no means clear that these patrimonial bureaucracies of the
past were actually less efficient than the rational-legal
administrations which emerged in Europe in the 19th century. The
expression "neopatrimonialism" can be used to describe
modern versions of the latter type of patrimonial administration.
It is also true, however, that the old
patrimonial empires did not quit resist the historical onslaught
the emerging European nations, endowed with two fundamental
components of modernism, capitalism and empirical knowledge. They
were not, however, destroyed or forced to adapt the Western
European patterns of social, political and economic organization.
The old patrimonial empires, or their inheritors - China, Russia,
the Arab countries, Latin America - carried on in their own ways.
They are certainly part of the modern world today; but, in many
ways, they are probably as different from the Western European
type states now as they have ever been in the past.
4. Patrimonialism and
state dominance.
In the following, we shall spell out in some
detail a few central characteristics of state formation in
Brazil, and try to see how they relate to the country's current
predicaments and dilemmas. The main reason for this choice is, of
course, the author's familiarity with the subject(5);
but Brazil could also be taken as an example of the broader
phenomenon under discussion, the alternative road to modernity.
If modern nations have been formed through the
interplay between political power and society, Brazil is a clear
case in which society seems to have been almost nonexistent
except as a state creation. The early strength of the Portuguese
crown, given its success as a mercantilist power and the absence
of a feudal nobility, seems to be related by the country's
resistance to the penetration of religious reform and the whole
set of institutions and ideas related with early capitalism. The
nature of the Portuguese society at the time of the discoveries,
and the type of colonial administration they organized in Brazil,
has led to the notion that this was a clear case of a patrimonial
bureaucracy being implanted on a new territory, leading to a
pattern of colonization which differed sharply from the kind of
settlements that the British were carrying on at the North. This
pattern was consolidated even further when, in 1808, the whole
Portuguese court moved to Rio de Janeiro under the protection of
the English fleet, fleeing from the Napoleonic troops. The
Portuguese court's ability to reach and control the whole
extension of its colony was, of course, quite limited; but the
principle of political and administrative centralization was
established from the onset, and continued when, after 1822, the
Portuguese royal family continued to hold the crown of an
independent Brazilian empire.
This is the historical background which justifies
the thesis that Brazil inherited from its colonial past a
political system which does not operate as a
"representative" or an "agent" of specific
classes or groups, but which has a logic of its own, which can
only be properly understood if we take into account the way the
Brazilian state was formed. This thesis is difficult to
understand from a traditional marxist of economicist perspective
which tries to explain everything that happens in a society in
terms of its class cleavages; but is not really surprising when
considered from a Weberian point of view, which stresses the
historical differentiation and complex interplays between
classes, political domination and systems of social privilege and
status in any given society(6).
The Weberian approach help us to understand how the Brazilian
state developed a strong neopatrimonial component, which
resulted from a pattern of political dominance generated
in a process of modernization characterized by a heavy colonial
administration and a weak and loosely articulated "civil
society" (social classes, religious, ethnic and linguist
movements, nobility, and so forth). Brazil never had a nobility
worth of this designation, the Catholic Church has been almost
always submissive to the civilian authorities, the rich have
always depended on the favors of the government, and the poor, of
its eventual magnanimity. The point is not that, in Brazil, the
state has been everything, and society, nothing. What is
important is to understand the patterns of interplay between
state and society, which has been almost always characterized by
a heavy, powerful but usually inefficient and incompetent
bureaucracy, and a weak, scared, and often rebellious and
treacherous civil society.
5. Whither society?
Most of the debate around these ideas hinge
around the question of whether, in fact, society was so weak and
passive regarding the State as it is asserted. Which kind of
society, after all, could have been formed in such a context?
In Spanish America, the presence of large native
populations organized around agricultural activities led to a
kind of colonial experience, the "encomienda" system,
which Brazil never knew. Brazilian indians were usually enslaved
or, more often than not, decimated, and the Jesuits' attempts to
organize them into stable agricultural settlement were violently
suppressed by the Portuguese. The Church's opposition to indian
enslavement, in any case, is one of the explanations for the
importation of African slaves (the other explanation, difficult
to substantiate, is that the Brazilian indians did not adjust to
enslavement as well as the Africans, for cultural or
psychological reasons)(7).
Portuguese settlers would only come to Brazil to
make fortunes, or because they were forced to it. Colonial
history is told through a succession of economic cycles - brazil
wood, sugar, gold - which attracted adventurers to organize
production and exports, bureaucrats to tax them, and military
people to defend the colony against the British and French
pirates, or the encroachment of the Spanish empire. Other
newcomers included exiled criminals of all kinds, Jews fleeing
from the Inquisition, sailors stranded in the beaches. The
newcomers were mostly men, who mingled with Indian and African
women and generated a large number of socially misplaced people
who spent their lives hanging around the administrative centers
or the large rural settlements.
As one economic cycle gave way to the next, they
left behind decaying elites which had no choice but to withdraw
into some form of economic self-sufficiency, or to develop new
products for an internal market which started slowly to grow.
Brazilian rural oligarchies are mostly that - the survivals of
closed cycles of economy expansion, who, more often than not,
were able to keep political and family ties with the political
authorities in the cities, and use this access as a resource
which compensated for their economic decadence. Adaptation to
decadence and isolation, rather than the continuous link to the
dynamics of international markets, is what explains some of the
main features of Brazilian society since the colonial times(8).
On time, these decadent and isolated segments
came to think of themselves as a kind of Brazilian, or
"criollo" elite (to use the Spanish expression), and to
oppose the Portuguese "foreigners" in different ways.
Cleavages between "Brazilian" and
"Portuguese" parties existed throughout the 19th
century, and were exacerbated by the Brazilian crown's obvious
links with Portugal(9). These
cleavages turned later into a pattern of opposition between
central and peripheral elites, which led sometimes to regional
revolts and outbursts of private power in the provinces, but
normally ended with the assertion of the central authorities. To
send their sons to study law in Lisbon or in São Paulo, to enter
national politics, to be accepted in the court in Rio de Janeiro,
to become a member of the national political elite, this was the
highest aspiration a local Brazilian landlord would usually have.
In contrast with the Spanish empire, which broke down in dozens
of independent states run by local "caudillos", Brazil
remained united by a complex and fairly homogeneous political
elite which preempted with competence the space left open by the
Portuguese Crown(10).
6. Regional cleavages
and differentiation.
This pattern of a "strong state, weak
society", although correct in general terms, has to be
examined in terms of its regional and spatial implications(11). It is a fairly good
characterization of the system of power sharing that had
developed between the country's capital, Rio de Janeiro, and the
decadent elites of the Northeast, Bahia and Minas Gerais. It
excludes, however, two very dynamic and influential regions in
the country's history, Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo.
Rio Grande do Sul is the closest Brazil ever had
of a Spanish American type of "caudillo" state. In
part, this is due to the historical proximity with the Spanish
empire, and more particularly to the "pampa" culture
which developed around the Rio de la Plata. More to the point,
however, is that it was only in this region that the Spanish and
the Portuguese empires in America actually met, and the Rio
Grande region became a kind of frontier garrison, raged by an
almost continuous state of warfare carried on by cattlemen in
horseback. Once the conflicts with Argentina and Uruguay were
settled, the "gaucho" fighters took their weapons
against the Brazilian authorities in Rio de Janeiro. In the
1870's they furnished probably the largest number of soldiers to
the war with Paraguay, and after that period continued to supply
the Brazilian army with the largest number of officers. For a son
of a "gaucho", a military career was an option as good
as any other, and the Rio Grande leadership moved quite easily
between military assignments in the national army, positions in
the well-organized state militia, and positions of prestige and
authority in the state administration. In the early 1900's
frontier and townspeople in Rio Grande do Sul clashed one of the
bloodiest and longest civil wars in Brazilian history. When they
finally settled, they moved in earnest to the national scenario
with Getúlio Vargas, president and dictator between 1930 and
1945 and from 1950 to 1954, and a host of generals-politicians
and political operators who followed him.
Rio Grande do Sul is also a region of Portuguese
immigrants from the Azores islands and Italian and German
colonies established at the turn of the century. Because of this
type of migration and the patterns of land tenure they
established, based on small properties manned by families and
supported by cooperative networks, Rio Grande can boast today one
of the highest levels of income, education and social equity in
the country. The immigrants and their descendants, however,
remained isolated from the state's caudillo politics. At the end,
instead of becoming a counterweight for the centralizing and
often authoritarian tendencies of the political center in Rio de
Janeiro, the caudillo elite in Rio Grande contributed in fact to
its reinforcement.
The old province, now state of São Paulo, is the
most striking and significant deviation of the national pattern.
It started, in the 16th century, as a "republic of
bandits", too far away from the Portuguese administration in
Salvador to be bothered by it, and developed to become the
country's economic and demographic center of today. Brazilian
history can be told in large part as a tale of São Paulo's
expansion and the way it disputed power and space with the
central administration, without having it fully within its grasp.
In the early years, caravans of explorers departed from São
Paulo to the South, to fight the Jesuits and enslave the indians,
and to the North and center, in the search of gold and diamonds.
Frontiers were expanded, settlements were created, and in the
18th century the Paulistas fought with the colonial
administration, and lost, for the control of the gold region in
Minas Gerais. While the colonial administration moved to Rio de
Janeiro to better control the gold trade, São Paulo remained in
isolation, only to pick up speed again with the introduction of
coffee plantations in the mid 19th century. After 1850 slavery
became a doomed institution, and the São Paulo planters started
to bring immigrants from Italy, Germany, and eventually Japan(12). With capital generated by the
plantations, and the entrepreneurial and working skills brought
by the immigrants, São Paulo started to develop its industries.
São Paulo political leadership played a central role in the
overthrow of the centralized Imperial regime in 1889, and its
replacement by a Republican federation controlled, for the first
time in the country's history, by arrangements and negotiations
among the regional oligarchies in São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio
Grande do Sul, and an increasingly strong and politicized army.
This oligarchical arrangement was probably the
closest Brazil ever had of a contractual political regime. In
1930 centralization was reinstated, opening the way for
ideologies of modernization, positivism, industrialization,
nationalism, which developed amidst a realignment of the regional
oligarchies which brought the civilian and military leadership in
the South to Rio de Janeiro, and left São Paulo again in
isolation. In 1932 São Paulo raised in arms against the central
government - the last time the country had anything approaching
an internal civil war - and lost. The implications of São
Paulo's defeat in 1932 has been compared with what would happen
in the United States if the South had won the Civil War. In
Brazil it did.
7. Conservative
modernization
Historical details should not detract us from the
main conceptual point in this analysis, which the split between
politics and the economy. Political and economic modernization in
Brazil, which started in earnest in the 1930's, was carried on
against and in opposition to the country's most dynamic economic
center, São Paulo. This generalization can be qualified in many
ways. Armed confrontation in 1932 gave way to reconciliation in
1934, and again to hostility when Vargas assumed full
authoritarian powers in 1937. There were, of course, different
people and groups in São Paulo - coffee barons, small farmers,
merchants, industrialists, bankers, urban workers, intellectuals
- with their own interests and conflicts, and they all reacted
somehow differently to the events. World depression in the 1930's
reduced the value of coffee exports, but also intensified a drive
towards import substitution which benefited mostly the São Paulo
region. A series of governmental agencies were created to handle
the economy, and here again the Paulista elite was often called
to participate. Since industrialization and political
centralization occurred at the same time, the 1930's have been
considered by some authors as the years of the "Brazilian
bourgeois revolution", a notion that concealed, more than it
explained, the true meaning of what was actually going on.
In fact, the 1930's can be better understood as
the period when Brazil intensified its pattern of conservative
modernization. Modernization was present in the
incorporation of modern administrative procedures, the
modernization of the armed forces, the establishment of
institutions for economic policy and planning, the creation of
the beginnings of a welfare system for urban workers, the concern
with industrialization, and the pervasiveness of positivist
ideologies among political and military leaders, and in the
elimination of the political power of the traditional state
oligarchies. Conservatism was obvious in the repression to all
kinds of autonomous social movements, in the creation of a
trade-union system linked to government and based on corporatist
notions, in the maintenance of the property rights of rural
landowners, in the exclusion of the rural population from the
benefits of social security, in the repression against leftist
and liberal ideas and intellectuals, and in the clear ideological
affinities between Brazilian political elites and the fascist
ideologies in Europe; it was also manifest on the way an
authoritarian educational system was imposed from above,
education of the children of immigrants in their mother tongue
forbidden, and attempts to create institutions of higher learning
outside the government's control resisted and suppressed(13).
The political backbone of conservative
modernization was neopatrimonialism and its political component,
cooptation. Neopatrimonialism was present along two distinct but
complementary aspects. As the federal system increased its size
and ability to reach all aspects of the country's life, and in
the absence of a truly system of political representation,
political life (meaning the appointment to a public office)
became a goal in itself, not only as a source of social prestige
and employment, but also, or perhaps mainly, because of the
opportunities it provided to increase one's personal fortunes and
to carry public funds and employment opportunities to one's
friends, relatives and towns. From an economic point of view, the
distinctive trait of neopatrimonialism is neomercantilism. Like
in classic mercantilism, the State gets involved in all kinds of
economic activities, creates its own banks, industries, trade
companies, and so forth. Sometimes this is done directly through
public companies; very often, however, these protected activities
are carried on through privileged national and international
groups, which establish alliances based on shared interests with
bureaucrats and politicians. In this way, opportunities were
created for a new type of economic entrepreneur, involved in the
setting up of all kinds of business and industrial enterprises,
from foreign trade to mining, from the production of weapons to
the production of sugar, all of them deeply dependent on public
favor, concessions, authorizations, exemptions and monopolies to
survive and prosper. There was of course a continuum, without
clearly dividing lines, going from a Paulista entrepreneur who
looked eventually for financial help or a special favor for his
company to a politician who established a private company to sell
services or products to his own, or his friend's, office; but
neomercantilist arrangements certainly prevailed.
Political and administrative cooptation was not
limited to businessmen and politicians. It reached intellectuals,
seduced by a modernizing state that contracted for large projects
of architecture, tried to develop a nationwide education system
and opened a space for sociological studies on the true nature of
the Brazilian population, away from the fantasies and formalities
of juridical abstractions.
The main point to be stressed in this analysis is
the tension between the different modes, or "languages"
of doing politics which coexisted in such a context(14). The combination of a strong
neopatrimonialist state and economically depressed regions led to
a pattern of political interaction dominated by a continuous
bargaining between the state and all kinds of social groups for
their relative access to the privileges and benefits controlled
by the state. It was not a bargaining among equals. More active
leadership would be coopted by the state with concessions and
privileges, and placed at its service. If this was impossible,
repression ensued. The Brazilian state was usually permissive,
and open to the incorporation of intellectuals, entrepreneurs,
religious and labor leaders, if they were willing to compromise.
Institutionalized cooptation tends to lead to corporatist
arrangements, through which interest groups are organized in
institutions under the scrutiny and supervision of the state
bureaucracy. The corporatist model was actually used extensively
used in Brazil after 1930, in an effort to control and coopt all
the emerging sectors in a modernizing country -- union leaders,
businessmen, the liberal professions, the universities and other
educational institutions. When, after 1945, elections had to be
held in a relatively open democratic regime, cooptation and
corporatism provided the basis of an extensive system of
political clientelism and patronage, which was able to maintain
some kind of political stability for a fairly long period.
The competing language is that of political
representation. It assumes a much stronger role for "civil
society" -- bourgeois groups, trade unions, interest groups,
religious and regional entities, linguistic and national
minorities -- and a correspondingly weaker and dependent role for
parties and governmental institutions. These different
"languages" are not just alternative ways of saying the
same things, and the differences can be seen when we consider how
political parties are organized and behave under either of them.
When political cooptation prevails, political parties are
entities controlled and managed by the state as a power
instrument among others. In extreme cases -- like in the Soviet
Union or Mexico -- there is hardly any boundaries between the
parties and the state bureaucracy. Elections, in such a system,
are little more than periodical rituals of political
legitimation. On the other extreme, when representation prevails,
it is fairly easy to translate the different political parties
into their constitute groups. In this case, parties will tend to
have a more or less clear ideological or social identity, and
will perform more closely, as it was expected in functional (and
also Marxist) theory, the functions of interest representation
and aggregation.
Real life lies usually between these two
extremes. No state lasts only through repression or cooptation,
and no political representation gets established without creating
a relatively independent sphere of autonomy and
self-determination for power holders. Political parties not only
create their own oligarchies, a la Michels, but also their
own ladders of social prestige and mobility, independent, in many
ways, both from the class systems and from the State. The
consequence is the development of a specifically political space
(a space for "politics" as such), open in varying
degrees to different kinds of political entrepreneurship(15). Sometimes the political man
finds his space as a broker between the State and civil society,
whose services are particularly appreciated in periods of
electoral politics. Sometimes -- as it seem to have happened in
São Paulo -- the better organized interest groups are able to
relate directly to the state agencies and institutions, and lose
interest in the formalities of political life and their
corresponding institutions -- legislative bodies, local
government agencies, and so forth. Once emptied of its
representational function, and regarded by elite groups as an
undignified and not very rewarding kind of activity, politics
becomes the natural breeding ground for populism. As the
Brazilian electoral system started to function in earnest after
1945, populism increased its weight, first in São Paulo, then in
Rio de Janeiro, and finally overshadowed both the traditional
system of political cooptation set up by the State and the
traditional oligarchies, and the meager attempts at political
representation in São Paulo and other urban and industrialized
areas. The landslide in the presidential election of 1960 by
populist leader Jânio Quadros was its peak, and also the
beginning of the end for the democratic experience started
fifteen years earlier.
8. Social ethics and
values.
The discussion so far should suffice to dispel
the notion that the state is everything, and society nothing.
When the weight is strongly tilted towards the State, however,
there are some clearly observable effects on the way society
works. In the Brazilian experience, it is quite clear many
significant changes in society since the early 19th Century were
not determined and cannot be properly understood through what
went on at the State, or at the political level. The country w
ent from slavery to free labor, suffered a dramatic process of
demographic dislocation and immigration, developed a sizeable
industrial sector in the center-south. None of these major
transformations could be explained by intentional policy
decisions, although they all had, of course, political
implications and consequences. We can say, nevertheless, that
Brazilian society is usually very dependent on the State for all
kinds of authorizations. benefits, sinecures, employments,
regulations, subsidies, exemptions and so forth. The other side
of dependency is clandestinity. Since the State wants to control
everything (without, however, being able to do it), non-regulated
behavior come to be perceived as illegitimate, but at the same
time accepted in a tacit and consensual form. Examples are all
manifestations of "informal" economy, popular forms of
illegal gambling, popular religions, tax evasion, smuggling,
white collar delinquency different manifestations of private
power and vendettas, and family systems established outside the
conventional norms and established morality. The consequence is
that daily life becomes often emptied of ethical and normative
contents, a condition of social anomie which was still not been
fully understood by sociologists or anthropologists.
The Catholic Church is a good illustration of
these interactions between State and society. What is the Church,
State or society? In the Portuguese tradition, which was carried
out to Brazil, the Church is part of the State, performing the
basic rituals of social life (baptism, marriage, burials, public
festivities, education) and instilling norms of social
conformity, without mingling too much in questions of political
power and public administration. The Brazilian political elite
has always been rationalist, freemason and positivist, rather
than Catholic, and whenever the Church tried to extend its power
and influence beyond its assigned roles -- like during the
so-called "Religious Question" in the late 19th Century
-- the civilian authorities reacted with energy(16).
After 1920 the Brazilian Catholic Church tried,
for the first time, to organize itself as an autonomous social
and intellectual movement, and to have a political influence
based on its social strength, rather than the other way round. In
1934, however, a political pact between the Church hierarchy and
the Vargas regime actually reestablished the formal links between
State and Church which had been severed in the Republican
constitution of 1889, and the Church was for all purposes coopted
again at the State's service(17).
One of Church's main political banners, private education, was
taken away when the government granted it the control of the
Ministry of Education, and allowed for religious teaching in
public schools. The semi-official, but subordinate role of the
Catholic Church in Brazilian society is one the main reasons for
the ritualism and lack of conviction which characterizes
traditional Catholicism in Brazil, in contrast with the intensity
of more spontaneous and "clandestine" forms of popular
religiosity. The rediscovery of society gives new breath to
Brazilian militant Catholicism in the 1960's, which continues
with the Church's involvement with the issues of human rights
during the military regime, and is strengthened with the growing
commitment of large sectors of the Brazilian Catholic hierarchy
with grass-roots organizations and movements in the peripheries
of large cities and in the countryside. One of the main aspects
of this rediscovery of society is the effort to provide social
and community life with an ethical and moral content of its own,
which was impossible to convey when the Church was identified
with the established political order. The achievements,
difficulties and internal conflicts experienced by the Church
through this process reflect, in a large extent, the broader
problems of overcoming an authoritarian and hierarchical
political order and establishing new forms of social organization
and participation.
9. Post-war
developments.
We have so far described, in very broad terms,
the concepts that help us to visualize the Brazilian alternative
road to modernity until the War years. Speed increases
dramatically after 1945, as witnessed by the demographic changes
(from about 40 million in 1940 to 140 million today),
urbanization (about 70% of the population in urban centers today)
and the creation of large metropolitan areas in São Paulo, Rio
de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Recife, Salvador. The
more traditional and decadent forms of economic organization,
with its vicious combination of large, unproductive land
properties and an impoverished peasantry loses weight towards
extensively mechanized cash crops, sugar cane and alcohol
agro-industries, large, unpopulated land extensions set apart for
cattle raising and other forms of modern agriculture geared to
the internal or international markets. The old system of
sharecropping and absentee landlords is in large part replaced by
rural entrepreneurs and a rural proletariat, and excessive
manpower is expelled to the urban peripheries. This is a intense
and violent transformation, accompanied by the destruction of
traditional ways of life and conflicts for access to the land,
which is still going on. However, it is possible to say that the
problems Brazil faces today are much less related to what happens
in the countryside than with what happens in the cities. The
demographic emptying of the countryside and its rapid
modernization allows for the creation of rural unions and the
introduction of social welfare in the countryside, and gradually
the sharp differences between country and town which have always
prevailed in Brazil begin to disappear.
The other side to the emptying of the countryside
is the swelling of the cities. The presence of "dangerous
classes", large sectors of the urban population living with
extremely high levels of daily violence and threatening the
physical security of the high and middle sectors, is not a
novelty in Brazil. In fact, these "dangerous classes"
have always existed in Rio de Janeiro and other urban centers,
and are a permanent feature of a society based on the dominance
of administrative and political centers devoid of an adequate
structure of industrial employment. The demographic movements of
the post-war period, however, make this reality much more
evident, and stimulate the emergence of a host of
"clandestine" organizations in the cities, going from
"political machines" to samba schools, from football
clubs to the organized crime, with very blurred frontiers among
each other.
The middle classes also grow, looking for income
and social security in public employment or in the liberal
professions, or in the commercial and industrial opportunities
that emerge in the large urban centers. They force the expansion
of middle and higher education, is provided first by the public
sector, and later by the private initiative, while basic
education lags behind. While the administrative and political
centers growth through middle-class employment, the expansion of
services and the swelling of their impoverished peripheries, São
Paulo growths mostly through industrialization, and is therefore
better able to absorb its growing population into productive
activities. An image of "two Brazils" has been
traditionally used to describe the contrasts between the modern
cities and the traditional and impoverished countryside; today,
it is a better description of the two types of industrialization
and modernization that places São Paulo and its surrounding
region against most of the rest.
10. Towards
Convergence?
Social transformations of such an intensity could
not fail to shake the bonds of symbiosis and dependency which
have been established through the years between the Brazilian
state and most of its civil society. Brazil's history in the last
twenty or thirty years can be broadly described as a strong, and
so far unsuccessful, effort to cope with the problems and
tensions derived from its drive to modernity, sometimes trying to
incorporate features which are typical of Western democracies,
sometimes falling back into the patterns of conservative
modernization and political authoritarianism which are more keen
to its past experiences. One should ask, at this point, whether
societies which started from so different pasts are bound to
converge at the same place. Is there a tendency for modern
societies to develop similar institutions? Are the problems of
modernity such that require a similar set of institutional
arrangements to cope with them, or, on the contrary, can we
expect a tendency towards divergent roads and an increase, rather
than decrease, of international differentiation?
The answer to this question depends on how much
similarity one would expect to confirm the hypothesis of
convergence, and on whether we are trying to be predictive or
normative. There are enough differences among the advanced
industrial societies of today - the United States, Japan, West
Europe, the Soviet Union, East Europe - to warn us that
convergence has its limits. And yet, all these societies not only
share some features like an educated population and similar
patterns of industrial and administrative organization, but there
are also signs of convergence in the way the economic system is
organized, and in the establishment of pluralist political
systems(18). One could say, in
short (and risking all the sins of sweeping generalizations),
that no society can cope with the problems and tensions of
modernity without institutional arrangements allowing for mass
education, technical competence, the development of individual
creativity and initiative, the coexistence of dissent and the
global management of the environment, scarce resources and public
goods. This does not mean, of course, that all societies will
develop these institutions, nor that they will be equally able to
confront the problems of modernity, and post-modernity, with
equal success.
We can conclude by examining, very briefly, how
Brazil had tried to cope with the problems of transition. When
the military took power in 1964 they brought with them the
theories of economic liberalism, and the notion that the state
had to reduce its weight and its attempts to control the economy.
Economic liberalism, however, did not last more than a few years(19), and the patrimonial nature of
the state bureaucracy was barely touched except in a few sectors
like tax collection or internal security. In the seventies, the
drive for economic and industrial development through state
intervention and central planning was in full swing; in the
meantime, the government's efforts to assure some basis of
political support in the population were carried on through the
use of the more traditional mechanisms of political cooptation
and clientelism. As the economic expansion of the 1970's came to
its limits, and a civilian regime was reinstated, the public
sector was much bigger, more inefficient and unable to control
its expenses than ever before. This combination of an inflated
and expensive public sector, which still polarizes all the
attention and pressures of all sides, but which is, however
unable to articulate long-term policies in a context of economic
duress, is certainly the main predicament Brazil faces today.
In politics, the country is now in its second
attempt since 1945 to establish a modern party system based on
the classic assumptions of political representation. The first
attempt, which lasted from 1945 to 1964, was in fact sustained by
political parties which inherited the clientelistic mechanisms
established by the authoritarian "Estado Novo" until
1945, and collapsed with the uncontrolled expansion of populism
after 1960. The second experience, started in 1985 after twenty
years of military regime, has been characterized by the
resurgence of political clientelism as the dominant factor in the
electoral process, without, however, the command of any kind of
well identified political center. The consequence has been the
political weakness of the Executive, the constant deadlock in the
legislative, and the resurgence of populism, on one side, and the
ghost of military intervention, on the other, as real threats to
the new democratic regime. The political problem in Brazil today
is how to provide the country with a party system which can be
perceived as minimally representative of stable political
majorities, and which could provide support for a relatively
stable and active civilian authority. The introduction of a
parliamentary system, with the end of American-type
presidentialism, and eventual changes in the mechanisms of
electoral representation and party formation and electoral
practices, are now being discussed as possible means to these
ends. It is not clear, however, that these measures will actually
be adopted, and even less so that they will bring the expected
results.
One could argue that these efforts towards
political democracy are doomed to failure, given the country's
past institutions, culture and traditions. The fact, however, is
that the last twenty years of military regime have convinced most
people that there are problems of ungovernability that affect not
only weak democratic regimes, but also authoritarians systems
closed to the influence of public opinion, the free press and
organized political parties. Governability is not assured,
however, through the simple formalities of representative
democracy. To take up an old Tocquevillean thesis, the
establishment of higher degrees of governability in a context of
political legitimacy requires the development of a series of
stable and self-centered institutions which can mediate between,
on one hand, a volatile and shapeless public opinion and the
groups and sectors geared to its manipulation, and, on the other,
the State. These "intermediate institutions" are not
likely to be formed, like they were long before in Europe, by the
combination of regional, religious and class cleavages in
society; they are more likely to emerge from a host of entities
like professional and trade associations and unions, economic
interest groups, political parties and movements, local
associations, political parties; and also by professionalized,
institutionalized and technically competent sectors of the State
itself, in the judiciary, in different branches of the executive
and even, perhaps, in the legislative bodies. One could expect
these intermediate bodies to develop not from the good intentions
of some people, but out of the sheer impossibility of a
continuing pattern of dependency and subordination of all sectors
towards a crisis-ridden neopatrimonial state. The final outcome
of such a process is not likely to be a State controlled by
"civil society", but a condition in which the
traditional frontiers between "public" and
"private", "state" and "society"
will be altered, together with the concepts we use to describe
them.
Notes
1. The expression is taken
from Marx's Communist Manifesto. See Marshall Berman, All
That is Solid Melts Into Air - The Experience of Modernity.
New York, Simon and Schuster, 1982.
2. These normative questions,
incidentally, are what provide some kind of thematic unification
to the modern social sciences, and place a limit to the
relativistic notion that each society is unique (which of course
they are) and therefore cannot be examined from a stable point of
view and compared among themselves.
3. Björn Wittrock, "Rise
and Development of Modern State: Democracy in Context",
forthcoming.
4. It is curious how the
Weberian notion of bureaucracy was influenced, in its conception,
by the industrial system of mass production, in which all tasks
are clearly defined in advance, leaving very little space for the
workers to control their work through their professional skills
and the strength of their professional guilds and unions. The
prediction that the Ford model of mass production would prevail
in all forms of modern organization did not come through in the
civil service, and there are signs that it may also be in crisis
in the industrial sector itself. Cf. Michael J. Piore and Charles
F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide -- Possibilities for
Prosperity. New York, Basic Books, 1984.
5. No effort will be made, in
the following, to cover the expanding literature related with the
subject. For the authors' previous texts, see S. Schwartzman,
"Twenty Years of Representative Democracy in Brazil",
in H. Alker, K. Deutsch and A. H. Stoetzel, Mathematical
Approaches to Politics. Amsterdam, Elsevier Scientific
Publishing Co., 137-164, 1973; "Regional Contrasts Within a
Continental-Scale Nation: Brazil", in S. N. Eisenstadt and
S. Rokkan, Building States and Nations, Beverly Hills,
Sage Publications, vol. II, 209-232, 1973; São Paulo e o
Estado Nacional, Sao Paulo, Difel, 1975; "Back to
Weber: Corporatism and Patrimonialism in the Seventies", in
James M. Malloy (ed), Authoritarianism and Corporatism in
Latin America, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press,
1976; "The Process of Spatial Dislocation and Social
Identity Building: Brazil" (with Elisa P. Reis), International
Social Sciences Journal, 30, 1, 1978; Bases do
Autoritarismo Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, Ed.
Campus / Ed. Universidade de Brasilia, 1983 (3rd. edition, Ed.
Campus, 1987).
6. Current approaches to the
analysis of political systems, even if not confessedly Weberian,
tend to share at least two elements. First, the State reappears
as a social entity on its own right, rather than as a simple
function of the interplay of interest groups. It follows that,
second, States have to be understood through their history, the
way they were formed, rather than just in terms of the functions
they perform today. Resistance to look at States as realities in
their own right came not only from conventional Marxism, but also
from mainstream academic political science. See, on the latter,
S. Schwartzman, "Quem tem medo do Estado?", in Bolivar
Lamounier, editor, A Ciência Política nos Anos 80,
Brasilia, Editora da Universidade de Brasilia. 1984. See also
Peter B. Evans, ed, Bringing the State Back In,
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
7. For an overview, see James
Lang, Portuguese Brazil: The King's Plantation, New
York, Academic Press, 1979.
8. Roberto Martins and
Amílcar Martins Filho, "Slavery in a Nonexport Economy -
Nineteenth Century Minas Gerais Revisited", Hispanic
American Historical Review 63, 3, 537-568; Robert W. Slenes,
Warren E. Dean, Stanley L. Engerman, and Eugene D. Genovese,
"Comments on 'Slavery in a nonexport economy', Hispanic
American Historical Review, 63, 3, 1983, 569-590; and
Roberto Martins and Amílcar Martins Filho, "Slavery in a
Nonexport Economy: a Reply", Hispanic American
Historical Review, 64, 1, 135-146.
9. Pedro I, who proclaimed
Brazilian independence and became the country's fist Emperor in
1822, was later to become the king of Portugal under the name of
Pedro IV. He was succeeded in Brazil by his son, Pedro II.
10. J. M. Carvalho,
"Political Elites and State Building: The Case of Nineteenth
Century Brazil", Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 24, July, 1982, 378-399.
11. It is curious how
sociologists and political scientists have resisted the inclusion
of considerations of space and region in their analyses, and
usually talk about nation-states as spatially homogeneous
entities. Antony Giddens has recently called attention to this
point, stressing that "nation-states, as the term suggests,
are largely constituted politically, and they have territorial
formations, gaining their identity not only by what goes on
within them but with their involvement in a nation-state system.
(...) Sociologists will surely have to become more sensitive to
geopolitical influences affecting modes of social organization
and social change in which they are interested". A. Giddens,
Social Theory and Modern Sociology, Stanford University
Press, 1987, pp. 35-36.
12. See, for the way the
manpower problem was handled by the paulista elite, and its
long-term political implications, Elisa P. Reis, The Agrarian
Roots of Authoritarian Modernization in Brazil, Ph.D.
Dissertation, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1979.
13. See, on ideologies and
education, S. Schwartzman, Helena M. Bomeny and Vanda M. Costa, Tempos
de Capanema, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Paz e Terra, e
Sao Paulo, Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1984.
14. For the concept of
"political languages", and a broader typology, cf.
Edson O. Nunes, Clientelism and Bureaucratic Insulation:
Uneven State Building and the Taming of Modernity in Contemporary
Brazil, University of California, Department of Political
Science, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1984.
15. This differentiated role
of political parties was spelled out long ago by Max Weber in his
text on "Class, Status and Power", published in the
United States by H. Gerth and C. W. Mills. However, it does not
seem to have penetrated the American thinking on the matter,
probably because it run against the conventional
"representation" language current in Western political
science. Cf.H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, From Max Weber: Essays
in Sociology, 1967.
16. The question, which
pitted the Imperial government against two bishops, was about the
bishops' right to expel members of religious brotherhoods known
to be freemasons. The government's stand was the brotherhoods
were not purely religious, and the Church should therefore bow to
the civilian government in the matter. The Bishops resisted, and
were jailed for refusing to accept the civilian authority.
17. This notion of the Church
as a relatively subordinate force in Brazilian society, and this
interpretation of the political pact between State and Church
during the Vargas period, are at deviance with the traditional
views on these questions in Brazilian historiography. See S.
Schwartzman, Helena M. Bomeny and Vanda M. Costa, op. cit.; and
S. Schwartzman, Simon, "A Política da Igreja e a
Educação: o Sentido de um Pacto", Religião e
Sociedade (Rio de Janeiro) 13, 1 (March), 108-127.
18. A thesis of convergence
in the industrial systems of Western capitalist societies
(without, however, using this term) can be found in Michael J.
Piore and Charles F. Sabel, op. cit. For an earlier emphasis on
the contrasts, cf. Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in
Industry, 1956. Perestroika and transformations in China
have helped to bring back the thesis of economic and even
political convergence between East and West, which became
fashionable for some years after Stalin, and then seemed to have
waned away.
19. In Latin America, economic liberalism
came always accompanied by political authoritarianism, among other things because
it required the forced elimination of "artificial" privileges and
"obsolete" economic organizations, with the consequent effects of
unemployment and social unrest. This program was carried on to its utmost consequence
in Chile, as witnessed both by the highly repressive nature of the Pinochet
regime and by its apparent economic achievements in the recent years. By comparison,
political repression in Brazil was less extended and short-lived, and economic
liberalism lasted even less.
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