CHANGING ROLES
OF NEW KNOWLEDGE(1) Simon Schwartzman
Published in Peter Wagner, Björn Wittrock, Carol
Weiss, and Hellmutt Wollman, eds., Social Sciences and Modern States,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 230-360. Published in Portuguese
as "A força do novo: por uma sociologia dos conhecimentos
modernos no Brasil," Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais,
5, 2, October, 1987, 47-66. Included in A
Redescoberta da Cultura, S. Paulo,
EDUSP, 1997.
Summary:
New Knowledge and Social Reform
Scientific enlightenment.
Engineering Enlightenment
Better to prevent than to remedy
Law and the legal professions
Social Sciences:
the legal vs. the real country
The Role of Ideology
Economics and Planning
Social sciences as professions
Conclusions
References
Notes
CHANGING ROLES OF NEW KNOWLEDGE
New Knowledge and Social
Reform
Intellectuals have always sought to influence their societies. Priests,
literati and lawyers disputed for centuries with war lords, princes and
noblemen for positions of prestige, authority and decision. They also
fought among themselves. The arrangements resulting from these disputes
describe, in broad terms, the value contents and orientations of past
and present civilizations(2). Modern times brought to this arena a new type
of intellectual, claiming to have the definite credential for his power
aspirations: the new knowledge, buttressed by the certitudes of science.
In Western Europe, the new intellectuals were part of broad social movements
which did away with much of the traditional order and brought about the
modern world. Because of this association, the values of empirical knowledge,
the use of reason, individual freedom, social justice and the conquest
of nature appeared to come together: they were all modern and progressive(3).
The proponents of the rationalist faith had to fight the intellectuals
of the old type for the supremacy of their own natural philosophy; and
to prove to power holders and emerging groups how valuable science could
be to them. The powers of science have been traditionally argued for in
two ways. The first belongs to the stream of thought of modern economic
and political liberalism. It argues for freedom of thinking and individual
research, and for the elimination of institutional and moral barriers
to individual free thinking. Individual scientific rationality is supposed
to add up to a rational and efficient society, the same as individual
economic rationality is supposed to add up to a rich and prosperous economy.
Classic economics is, in this context, the social science of choice. It
shows how individual rationality (and egotism) is the true foundation
for social bliss, and thus provides a rationale for the economic, social
and political values of liberalism.
The other view is most decidedly French. Liberté is nothing without
Egalité and, more to the point, Fraternité. Fraternal solidarity
and social justice cannot be expected to flow naturally from individual
self-interest, but requires an active and interventionist state, to be
run according to the tenets of modern science. August Comte's Positivism
carries this notion to its natural conclusion: that the powers of science
are not limited to the understanding and mastering of nature, but are
also to be extended to the organization of society. Its aim is to produce
a blueprint for the organization of society, to which the individuals
should comply. Sociology, the science of society, is thus destined to
be the science of sciences. In its Durkheimian version, social facts exist
on their own, and individuals are compelled by them in their behavior.
Positivists were evolutionists, and for them, society had still to be
brought to higher levels of rationality. This was to be obtained through
the discovery of laws, mechanisms and technical procedures that would
uncover a future which was pre-ordained by the evolutionary process. In
this special sense, positivist evolutionism incorporates history. Politics
appears in the positivist perspective as a conflict between light and
darkness, science and ignorance. Political life is not seen as an interplay
of different groups with their own legitimate values, preferences, and
rights. There is no place for commonly accepted "rules of the game".
There is no game to be played with fairness, only a war to be won.
The French tradition reserves a place for intellectuals in political life
the other tradition lacks. It is probably for this reason that this version
of scientific enlightenment spread out much more easily than the English
version, which required a much less visible State. And, in spite of Comte,
it was not sociology, but the first modern professions, engineering and
medicine, which first embodied the projects of scientific social reform
in many societies. This was certainly the case of Brazil, as we shall
see in some detail below. And it is quite likely that other countries
followed similar paths.
Historians, rightly so, have usually dealt with the introduction of modern,
scientific and technological ideals and values in Latin America as a chapter
of the worldwide expansion of European enlightenment. What is seldom perceived
is that, as the social contexts in Europe and elsewhere differ so much,
the meanings attached to the new ideas, above all their social implications,
are also different.
Expressions like "intellectuals", "modernization",
"conservatism", "ideology", and the like, are obviously
inappropriate to account for the complex processes we are dealing with
here. Well educated people play different social roles at different times
and places, and it is good to have adequate concepts to account for these
changes. Thus, the word "intellectual", in a broader sense,
refers to persons who have received a substantial amount of formal education;
more narrowly, however, it is identical with "intelligentsia",
and it refers to a special role played by these persons in some circumstances,
namely the one of trying to formulate and spread out broad interpretations,
Weltanschauungs of their times and societies. The intelligentsia
typically spreads its word throughout society, and their ideas are weapons
in political struggle. In other circumstances, however, they stay close
to the elites, try to influence the education of the powerful, and lend
their competence to the running of society. In modern times, they are
called "technocrats". They can also just keep to themselves,
trying to carve out a place in society where they work and live according
to their own values and standards, without necessarily leading the others.
This is typically the "professional" role, which very often
assumes the characteristics of the liberal professions - independent,
self-regulated and privately organized professional groups. Finally, the
educated can also be restricted to low paying, relatively non prestigious
salaried work; in these circumstances they may call themselves "intellectual
workers", or simply white-collars.
The different roles played by the educated can have at least two broad
implications for their societies, one political, the other more epistemological.
The political implications have been recently very present in the social
sciences, with a tendency to challenge the conventional wisdom that links
modern knowledge with social and political freedom and enlightenment.
Instead of being an instrument for human improvement, knowledge and its
related institutions - formal education, scientific thinking, modern technology
- are presented as just another weapon of human oppression and social
control. What the text below hopefully demonstrates, however, is that
knowledge can be used for very different, and often contradictory social
purposes. In the name of "progress", it can appear in extremely
technocratic and authoritarian political arrangements; by the same token,
democracy and popular participation can be sometimes linked with extremely
conservative political arrangements.
The value contents carried by the words "conservative", "authoritarian",
"progressive", and so forth, have a direct linkage with the
epistemological questions that tend to be pushed aside by some over-politicized
view of the roles of knowledge in society. It is of course impossible,
today, to attach an unequivocal positive sign to the development of science-based
knowledge and the political strengthening of their carriers. It is still
valid, however, to ask about the conditions which facilitate intellectual
competence and those in which knowledge is just a cover for power play.
In some conditions, for instance, engineers can play different social
roles, as intellectuals, technocrats, or professionals; and they can also
be competent or incompetent engineers. These are two independent questions,
which require different explanations, and can have profoundly different
social implications in their combined manifestations. We should keep these
distinctions in mind as we take a bird's eye view of the ways in which
modern knowledge arrived in a strange land, Brazil.
Scientific enlightenment
Technical and scientific knowledge emerged in Europe as part of the ideology
of new, emerging social groups; it was part of the general tendency towards
increasing political freedom and political participation, both in its
British and continental versions. In Latin America, the new ideas were
only accessible to a tiny group, which had to confront local elites trying
to gain access to power positions through the traditional channels of
legal and religious education. It is therefore not surprising that the
usual standards of "progressive" and "conservative"
orientations did not apply to the bearers of the modern ideals. A case
in point was José Bonifácio de Andrada, the central figure in the Brazilian
independence movement and fully conversant with the European pragmatic
outlook of his time. He was certainly progressive in his projects of organizing
a modern state, bringing an end to slavery and introducing a modern university
in Brazil. These goals, however, were incompatible with an open political
system which would consolidate the current state of affairs. Faced with
the realities of political life, he would end up working with groups which
did not share his social and economic outlook, being finally being forced
out of power and influence(4). Andrada's
plight anticipate the fate of a large succession of intellectuals who
could never put together their scientific enlightenment with the political
realities in which they lived.
When circumstances forced the Portuguese court to come to Brazil in early
nineteenth century and grant the old colony its de facto independence,
they were quick to create a military engineering school in Rio de Janeiro.
They created also two medical schools, one in Rio and the other in the old
colonial capital of Salvador, Bahia, and allowed for the beginning of two
law schools in the provincial capitals of Recife and São Paulo(5).
Little is known about the reasons for these choices of subject and places,
but there is some room for speculation. In the previous centuries of colonial
rule, the Portuguese had not allowed for the creation a Church controlled
University in the New World, which has been the pattern of the Spanish
colonies. The relationships between the Portuguese State and the Church
have been always symbiotic but conflictive, and in the 18th century the
Jesuits had been forced out from the control they held on Portugal's main
educational institution, the university of Coimbra. There was never an
open break with Catholic faith and orthodoxy like the Reform movements
in many other West European countries. Everybody was (and, in Brazil today,
still is) officially a Catholic, and the Church played a central and irreplaceable
role in the education of the young, in the rituals of passage and as the
sole source of valid (if hardly followed) moral code. A priestly life.
however, was hardly a career of choice for the elite; it was rather a
second-best alternative for bastards, those of mixed blood and other outcasts,
and this reinforced its relatively low status. The elite preferred to
send their sons to the law schools, and the extremely complex organization
of the Portuguese patrimonial bureaucracy seemed to guarantee employment
for all.
The distribution of the new educational institutions in the Brazilian
territory early in the 19th century tells something about how priorities
were changing. The transfer of the Portuguese Crown to Brazil under British
protection and French pursuit was the lowest point in Portugal's history
since the glorious years of the discoveries in the 15th and 16th centuries,
and this sheer military weakness certainly explains the priority given
to the military schools in Rio de Janeiro. The second priority was medicine
and surgery, both for military reasons and because of the usually appalling
health conditions prevailing in those times. Bahia was the country's largest
city and the most important after the capital, and it was befitting that
it would be the seat of the second medical school. A law education was
probably still seen as the best mobility channel for the children of the
local gentry in decadent Recife and stagnant S~ao Paulo, and they got
the law schools they longed for.
If these were the priorities in the minds of those surrounding the exiled
Portuguese King, the pattern did not remain unchanged or unquestioned
in the years to follow. The law schools in Recife and São Paulo moved
away from the dominance of canonic law and the traditional Portuguese
codes and started to receive the influx of different strains of European
liberal thinking; the military academies developed into engineering schools
which provided fertile grounds for the scientistic values of Positivism;
and the medical profession, stimulated by their newly discovered efficacy
against tropical diseases at the turn of the century, developed its own
messianic aspirations.
These developments were not exclusive to Portugal and Brazil. Spain had
also expelled the Jesuits from its Empire in the 18th century, and made
an effort of aggiornamento which would reach the colonies and remain
influential after the years of independence(6).
Engineering Enlightenment
The notion that society could be planned and ruled by engineers was well
within the French tradition, and would have a large impact in Brazil.
While in the British tradition engineering has always been a minor and
ungentlemanly occupation, the École Polytéchnique was since its inception
the place where the French elite was to be educated. There, military education
came together with the training of the mind in mathematics and physics,
and it was thought that this combination would prepare the best of Cartesian
minds, ready to build bridges, run armies and rule the economy.
The way the old Rio military school changed its names and goals during
the 19th century is a good indication of its perceived roles. When it
was established in 1810 as the Royal Military Academy, it was supposed
to provide "a complete course on Mathematical Sciences and the Sciences
of Observation, including Physics, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Metallurgy and
Natural History including the Plant and Animal Kingdoms and the Military
Sciences in all its extent, including both Tactics and Fortifications
and Artillery"(7). The military profession
never enjoyed too much prestige in Brazil except at the southern frontier,
and the civilian dimensions of the school always prevailed. In 1858 the
Military Academy changed its name to Escola Central, and finally in 1874
it adopted the French denomination of Escola Politécnica.
The fact that civilian engineering was dominant did not mean that the
School was particularly competent as a place for the development of mechanical
or construction skills, or the stimulation of competence in the physical
and natural sciences. Contemporary visitors were unanimous in criticizing
the way teaching was conducted: the adoption of outdated text books, the
absence of practical or experimental classes, the almost total absence
of independent research work. This was probably just as well for the limited
technological needs of Brazilian society at the time. The Escola de Minas
de Ouro Preto, a mining school created under French supervision in Minas
Gerais in 1875, did not fare much better on the long run in spite having
started under far stricter standards; Minas Gerais' soil was rich, but
there was never to be an economic basis for a mining industry requiring
the talents the Escola de Minas was supposed to train(8). Only in S~ao Paulo, where the local Escola Politécnica
was created in 1894 to follow closely the expansion of the railroad system
into the coffee country, was a more technical and specialized education
actually achieved.
What gave meaning to the Escola Politécnica in Rio de Janeiro (as well
as to the Escola de Minas and, to some extent, to the Politécnica in São
Paulo) was their role in the creation of a new breed of elite intellectuals,
who could challenge the established wisdom of priests and lawyers in name
of modern science. Positivist doctrine provided the engineers with the
assurance that they had the right and competence to rule society, which
would be better and more civilized under their rule. They campaigned against
the Monarchy, in favor of universal education and for better salaries
for the working class, they opposed the Church and all forms of corporatist
organization (and universities, with their values of self-regulation,
were perceived as one of them), opposed mandatory small-pox inoculation
and, above all, organized themselves in secret societies and conspired
for power. They were so successful that their slogan, Ordem e Progresso,
is still today engraved in the Brazilian flag.
Positivism was just the first and more obvious manifestation of the tendency
of those related to technology and the hard sciences to assume that they
had the right and the competence to lead society. The military, which
remained throughout the 20th century as a kind of second-class engineering
career, were the ones who held more strongly to this ideology; and they
did it predominantly in the less technically oriented Army, rather than
in the new and technically more sophisticated Navy or Air Force services.
The culmination of this perspective within the Brazilian military was
the development of the so-called "Doctrine of National Security",
which was taught at the Escola Superior de Guerra in Rio de Janeiro during
the Cold War, and provided the justification for the military seizure
of power in Brazil from 1964 to 1984. As a closed, comprehensive, and
largely formalistic interpretation of society, the Doutrina shows some
striking similarities with the Parsonian view of the social system, which
may not be a simple coincidence, given the number of Brazilian officers
who came to study in the United States after the Second World War (how
Parsonian sociology entered the military training institutions, if it
really did, is something well worth investigating). What was distinctively
non-Parsonian was the placement of the military organization as the irreplaceable
guardian of the "National Permanent Objectives", which were
supposed to exist, to be accessible to scientific understanding, and to
prevail over eventual preferences resulting from the vagaries of the political
process or the whims of elected authorities.
Marxism in Brazil was very much also an outgrowth of the engineering and
military traditions. Translated into French, away from the organized labor
movements and stripped from its Hegelian underpinnings, Marxism can easily
be taken as just another form of Positivist evolutionism. In the beginning
of the 20th century some Italian and Spanish immigrants brought to Brazil
the ideals of working-class organization. Anarchism prevailed among them,
and some adhered to tenets of Scientific Socialism and Communist Internationalism.
The Brazilian Communist old-guard would be completely overpowered, however,
by the military group headed by Captain Luis Carlos Prestes in the 1930's.
Prestes had been a famous military rebel in the 1920's who was recruited
to the Communist movement while in exile in Buenos Aires. In the early
thirties he was able to convince the Soviet Union, and the Comintern,
that a Communist take-over was imminent in Brazil under his leadership.
The Communist uprising of 1935 was mostly a military fiasco which is better
told as an episode of Latin American fantastic realism, were it not for
its aftermath of violent political repression and fascism(9).
One of its consequences, in any event, was that Prestes and the group
of young lieutenants surrounding him in 1935 remained in control of the
Communist party in Brazil until well into the seventies, in fact fending
off the emergence of an alternative Marxist trade-union or intellectual
leadership, some illustrious names notwithstanding.
Engineers have also tried to rule things more directly, through the management
of the human habitat, the cities. The creation of Belo Horizonte as a
new capital for the old state of Minas Gerais, which was to be reborn
with the advent of the Republic, remained as a symbol which was to reemerge
when an old mayor of Belo Horizonte, Juscelino Kubitschek, decided to
restart Brazilian history with the construction of Brasília. Early in
the century Brazil went through its most significant experience of urban
renewal, the transformation of Rio de Janeiro into a French-type city
under governor Pereira Passos. Historians are only now starting to examine
how these experiences proceeded, which were their assumptions, and how
people would fit, or not, into the drawings which came out of the engineers'
boards. The three experiences shared at least one characteristic, namely
the notion that there was a plan to be followed, straight lines to be
traced in the real world, and that people should be brought - convinced,
educated, or simply forced - to comply with them. In Belo Horizonte, built
in an empty region, the only obstacles were the hills, which did not adhere
too willingly to the squares and triangles of architect Aarão Reis, not
by chance a Positivist educated at the Rio de Janeiro Politécnica. The
Mineiros learned the lesson, and built Brasília on a plateau. In Rio de
Janeiro the old, dirty and crowded Portuguese city was torn apart, people
forced out of their houses and expelled to the far-away suburbs. There
as elsewhere, modernization became a synonym with authoritarianism and
violence(10)
Brasília is a reminder that in no area was the paradoxical links between
engineering enlightenment and political authoritarianism more striking
than in Brazilian modern architecture. Brazil entered the world of modern
architecture in the darkest years of the Estado Novo, when the country
was experimenting with ideas of totalitarian power that seemed to prevail
in Europe. For the young military who shared power with Vargas after 1930,
both the Soviet, the German and the Italian regimes seemed equally fascinating,
and not too different from each other. After the Communist uprising of
1935 only the Fascist examples became accepted, with Franco in Spain and
Salazar in Portugal providing models that were followed with interest
and curiosity. A powerful, modern country on the make needed big constructions,
and Le Corbusier disputed with Italian Marcello Piacentini the privilege
of building the University City in Rio de Janeiro(11).
Le Corbusier and his Brazilian associates, headed by Lúcio Costa, were
defeated, but had later the opportunity to build the seat of the Ministry
of Education in downtown Rio de Janeiro, while the plans for the University
City never materialized. This dispute, which could be seen a simple confrontation
between professional groups and architectural styles, was carried on much
broader grounds. The conflict between Le Corbusier's suspended gardens
and highways and Piacentini's Roman columns is presented as the very conflict
between fascism and socialism.
The construction of the Ministry of Education building by the Lúcio Costa
team (of which Oscar Niemeyer as a member), based on Le Corbusier's sketch
and with its Picasso-like panels by Cândido Portinari, gave to the Vargas
regime and his Minister of Education, Gustavo Capanema, an aura of progressivism
and even leftist liberalism they never had or intended. Writing in 1945
about this building, Lúcio Costa would call it "a beautiful and pure
flower - a spiritual flower, foretelling the future to which we are going
with certitude (. . .) - and which will be not only more human and socially
more just, but also more beautiful(12). While the big projects were being discussed
in Rio the mayor of Belo Horizonte had Niemeyer and Portinari projecting
and decorating the buildings around the Pampulha lake. Later, Lúcio Costa
was to write the master plan for Brasília, Niemeyer was to project its
buildings, and they all promised that the modern architecture in the new
city would be the beginning of a new era for Brazil (Portinari, unfortunately,
had died some years before of lead poisoning).
The Politécnica also generated entrepreneurs. Brazilian capitalism in
São Paulo grew mostly from a combination between coffee plantation money
and the drive of European immigrants. The Engineer coming from Rio Politécnica
was a different breed. He had enough competence to know where the country's
mineral riches could be found, or which kinds of big projects the government
could be interested in undertaking. He would know French, sometimes German
and English, and could deal with foreign capitalists and governments.
He had also the proper family names and contacts to get the licenses,
authorizations and concessions needed for their projects. This kind of
entrepreneur was very much a supporter of free enterprise, but could only
thrive in the shadow of the State. This "neo-mercantilist" association
between the State and private interests was not, of course, anything new
in the Brazilian-Portuguese tradition of patrimonial administration. But
it certainly brings to the common image of a capitalist entrepreneur some
unusual connotations.
A final outgrowth of the Politécnica tradition were the physical sciences.
Mathematics, physics and astronomy all started together in Brazil within
the Rio Politécnica, thanks to a few talented individuals who benefitted
from their close contacts with France. They first tried to open an intellectual
and institutional space for pure research, free both from the practicalities
of engineering and from the political and intellectual constraints of
positivism. They argued against the shortsightedness of professional education,
wrote complex papers showing the scientific errors of Positivism, and
became involved in the organization of the country's first universities
in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Modern science and mathematics was for
them a necessary ingredient of modern culture, and they wanted to add
this element to Brazil(13).
The Second World War would change all that. The new generation of young
physicists formed by the foreign professors at the University of São Paulo
in the thirties and early forties assumed they had a much more important
role to play. They followed the developments of nuclear energy, read about
Féderic Juliot-Curie in France, the role of socio-economic planning in
transforming the Soviet Union in a world power, and saw their role as
bringing to Brazil the powers of nuclear energy and the benefits of socio-economic
planning. For some, this led directly to political militancy in Communist
or socialist political parties; for others, it led to participation in
ambitious, and often frustrated government projects in the field of advanced
technology. They became also involved in efforts to transform the Brazilian
universities into science-based institutions, open for all, democratically
ruled, and highly involved in the solution of the country's pressing problems(14).
Because of their identification with the left, several of the best-known
of these scientists clashed with the military government in Brazil after
1964, and had to go into exile. They would share, however, the nationalist
orientation that the military also embodied, and saw the creation of a
Ministry of Science and Technology by the civilian government in 1985
as their vindication.
Better to prevent than to
remedy
The notion that the medical sciences should move from its healing role
to a more social, preventive one, became well established in the Brazilian
medical circles in the 19th century(15). Previously, the doctor or healer dealt mostly
with individuals who sought their help, and could afford to pay for their
services. Global epidemics - the plagues, leprosy, the pox, venereal diseases
- were to be handled by the public and religious authorities, isolating
the carriers, comforting the dying and exhorting the healthy not to live
in promiscuity. At the turn of the century, probably for the first time
in Brazil, doctors were asked to explain the causes of the illnesses of
Rio de Janeiro as a city, and to suggest measures to cure them. They found
problems with the air, the architecture, the supply of foods to the population,
the social morality. Their recommendations were mostly urbanistic, legal
and moral, rather than strictly medical, and required the approval of
higher authorities. In the next decades, however, they would try to play
a larger role.
In 1839 a dissertation called "Medicine contributes to the improvement
of morals and the maintenance of good customs" already spelled it
out in all its details. The idea was, in short, that "for the health
of a population to be preserved, a society should be created where passions
are not aroused, where chaos has been undone, where order dominates, where
everything works, where there are no monsters, where customs are gentle.
Medicine, which knows men and the disturbances that disorder create in
his organism, should lead the organization and functioning of this society,
showing the causes of perturbation and interfering to redress them. It
offers the knowledge of the body, which should be spread out throughout
society, so that each person can avoid passions and disorder, and this
should be the basis for the work of the social body. This is the dream
of doctor's republic, where everything is order, calmness, light; where
equilibrium prevails. Temperance, continence, moderation of behavior,
tranquility of the soul - they are virtues which oppose turbulence and
disorder in behalf of life; and these virtues require a society which
makes them possible. Medicine studies the impact of society, government,
freedom, slavery, religious beliefs on men - and, according to the functional
alterations they can create, it makes the appropriate recommendations
for equilibrium".(16) The Sociedade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro,
established in 1829, would work persistently to bring society under the
scientific supervision of the medical profession and, at the same time,
would fight with all its powers against all non-established forms of medical
work, from homeopathy to traditional medicine.
It is probably fair to say that the medical profession never had, in Brazil,
the same power as the engineers to put forward their ambitious propositions.
One explanation is that the market for medical private practice was always
better than for engineers, and the doctors could adhere more closely to
the canons of a liberal profession. Only those doctors more related to
general hospitals, sanitary medicine and the military would attempt a
broader role. Their highest achievements occurred in the beginning of
the 20th century, when specialists in sanitary medicine joined hands with
the engineers for the reorganization and sanitization of the urban space,
more specifically in Rio de Janeiro. As the city was torn apart by the
large avenues, the houses were invaded in search for stagnant waters and
the population was forcefully brought in for smallpox shots. The riots
that ensued, which became known as the "Revolta da Vacina",
bear witness to the violence to which the population was submitted(17).
If doctors as an organized group never held too much power, they came
much closer to the social sciences than the engineers, and had an important
role in shaping the country's dominant social ideologies. Physical anthropology
appeared in Brazil as a branch of legal medicine. Nina Rodrigues, from
the Bahia School of Medicine, worked at the turn of the century with biological
theories that looked for links between physical shapes and criminal behavior.
This literature led directly to questions of racial qualities of the Brazilian
population, the problems of racial miscegenation and degeneration. Explanations
for the troubles with Brazilians - laziness, luxury, lack of discipline
- moved from the old environmental explanations to the new, biological
and presumably more scientific theories(18).
The diagnosis for the causes of the Brazilian's troubles had to be followed
by treatment. Eugenics became an important issue in Brazilian medical
circles, and in 1929 the first Brazilian Congress of Eugenics was held
in Rio de Janeiro, with participants from several Latin American countries,
it was followed by the establishment of a Brazilian Commission of Eugenics
in 1931(19). Interventions were called
in many areas, from pre-nuptial examinations for the control of venereal
diseases to the sterilization of the alcoholic, syphilitic and schizophrenic.
For some, the Brazilian racial stock was expected to improve on the long
range thanks to the superiority of the white race. Others, less "optimistic",
claimed for strict limitations on racial intermarriage. All required the
screening out of immigrants from Asia and other inferior races, and favorable
migration laws for Western Europeans(20).
Eugenics and race ceased to be legitimate subjects for the Brazilian intelligentsia
after the Second World War. The extraordinary advances of curative medicine
during and after the war years, combined with the very success of the
sanitary and epidemiological campaigns of the previous decades, left the
medical profession without a specific social and ideological platform.
This situation started to change in the seventies, with two simultaneous
developments. The first was the progressive erosion of medicine as a liberal
profession, as the number of doctors increased, the costs of medicine
went up, and a large system of curative medicine was created by the government
social security system. The second was the return, in the urban centers,
of contagious diseases that seemed to have been eliminated in the previous
years. The new generation of Brazilian medical doctors is very different
from the old one. They work as employees in public health services or
large health companies; they are strongly unionized, and go often on strike
for higher wages; they are probably less well trained, on average, than
before; and have an acute notion that the health problems they face in
everyday life are not basically biological, but social and economic. In
spite of their renewed politicization, it is not likely that they would
try, as they did at the turn of the century, to carry the flag of social
reforms. They see themselves mostly as intellectual workers, part of an
growing intellectual proletariat, and act accordingly.
Law and the legal professions
In the beginning, social sciences were indistinguishable from Law. In
the Portuguese administrative tradition, there was never a clear distinction
between the executive and the judiciary branches, and legislative bodies,
when they existed, tended to be
weak and subordinated to the central government. To go to a Law school
and get a degree did not mean to get a specialized profession in a differentiated
labor market. For those who could, it meant mostly to be socialized into
the country's political elite, and be prepared to occupy the positions
in government which could be secured through political and family ties.
This does not mean, of course, that there were no jobs requiring specialized
legal training and credentials, nor careers based on strict legal competence
and professionalism. But Brazilian lawyers moved fairly easily between
public and private offices, and would rather stay with the former if they
could.
One consequence of this close proximity between Law and government was
the development of Administrative Law as one of the most significant fields
of study in the Brazilian law schools. Administrative Law was, in one
sense, a kind of legalistic approach to public administration, in which
the formalities of written rules were the only elements or reality which
counted. In a more doctrinal sense, administrative law dealt with that
peculiar situation in which one part in a legal contract, the government
- had not only more rights than the other - the private person - but also
controlled substantial parts of the legal system which was supposed to
settle eventual conflicts of interest. Given the disproportionate size
of the Brazilian state and its involvement in so many aspects of the citizens'
life, administrative law was a good specialization for a lawyer to work
on; and gave also an easy access to the other side of the fence, when
legal devices had to be devised on the State's behalf.
The second speciality developed by a small group of Brazilian elite legal
scholars was the General Theory of State, a more traditional version of
modern Political Science. Specialists in State Theory became also known
in Brazil as "Constitutionalists", by their ability to propose
legislation affecting the basic legal foundations of the country's political
organization. Brazil had enough constitutional changes to keep a handful
of competent constitutionalists busy (1824, 1891, 1934, 1937, 1945, 1967,
1987, and several constitutional amendments in between). They would also
function as advisers to influential political groups in periods of political
crisis, and come up with legal formulas to adjust for eventual transitions.
A deep study of the constitutionalists and their role in Brazilian politics
is still to be made. It is worth mentioning, however, the name of Francisco
Campos, strongly influenced by German legal thinking and fascist sociology,
who wrote the Brazilian authoritarian constitution of 1937 and was present
again when the military needed a military formula for the coup d''État
in 1964; or Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco, who participated in the Brazilian
Constitutional assemblies of 1934, 1946 and was elected as a Senator for
the Constitutional Assembly of 1987, after presiding over a National Commission
responsible for making a first proposal for the country's new constitutional
chart.
Lawyers were therefore politicians, professionals or high-level technocrats,
but seldom intellectuals. Law schools, however, have also been famous
as centers for student political activism, an old Latin American phenomenon
which far predates similar processes in Europe and the United States.
In some Latin American countries, these movements were able to bring profound
changes to their higher education institutions already in the 1910's,
through the establishment of university autonomy and the power sharing
of students, alumni and faculty in their government. In Brazil law students
were extremely active in campaigning for Brazil's entrance in Second World
War against the Axis, and during the 1964-1984 military regime the lawyers'
association were very involved in the defense of legal human rights.
One of the significant aspects of this involvement, from our perspective,
is that it engaged mostly the law professionals, rather than law students.
What happened with the Law profession is not altogether different from
what happened with the Brazilian higher education faculty and students
as a whole. Student mobilization in Brazil was at its highest in the sixties,
and has declined consistently since then, after a few years of extremely
militant, insurgent activities of student groups in the early seventies.
The new phenomenon in the Brazilian higher education institutions is the
mobilization of faculty. The new students in the seventies entered a much
expanded higher education system, with much more room for people trying
to move up from lower social strata, and under the surveillance of an
authoritarian state. They were mostly concerned with their individual
mobility or short-range group privileges, and never developed the same
levels of political participation which were typical of the young counter
elites of the previous years. The professionals of the late seventies
and eighties, however, are the students of the sixties. They knew about
politics, how to get organized, how to express themselves politically.
They were also caught in a difficult position from a professional and
intellectual point of view, which helps to explain some of their newly
found political activism.
Law is still a prestigious profession in Brazil, but it has suffered important
transformations in recent times. A law degree ceased to be a precondition,
and certainly not a sure ticket, for a political career. It is still true
that, if you have the right connections and social origin, a law degree
could be useful; but, as the number of degree holders increased, the social
value of the title in itself tended to be reduced. Moreover, law as an
intellectual discipline was not able to keep up with modern times. There
were some attempts to modernize the teaching and contents of law schools
in the direction of linking it more with the needs of large private corporations,
but it has been so far impossible to develop a field of legal graduate
studies and research, as has happened with many other fields(21).
One possible reason for that is the sheer weight of the traditional elites
still running the country's most prestigious Law Schools, and who are
not open to contributions of modern legal thinking. The social composition
of the Law schools have also changed. Now that Latin is not a prerequisite,
as it was twenty years ago, it is much easier to get into a Law school
than into other professions where previous competence on mathematics or
biology is required. And a law degree can make a big difference for a
white collar worker in the public service trying to be promoted. This
public is obviously not very concerned with the academic quality of their
courses. Finally, the traditional law schools could not benefit from modern
social sciences, because these sciences develop in Brazil in opposition
to the traditional law schools and its legalistic mentality.
At the end, one could say that lawyers, as a group, moved from a highly
prestigious position to one of relative marginality, and it reflected
in the thinking of their more articulate representatives: they moved from
administrative law to human rights, and from constitutional tinkering
to political organization and militancy.
Social
Sciences: the legal vs. the real country
Social sciences emerged in Brazil as an effort to show the contrast between
the country as defined by its legislation and its hard empirical realities.
Paradigmatic in this regard was the opposition between two leading figures,
Rui Barbosa and Oliveira Viana. Rui Barbosa was a prolific writer and
politician from the turn of the century. His legal competence seemed to
be endless, and in 1910 he ran for President against a military officer,
Hermes da Fonseca, as a representative of civilian and liberal values.
Elections in those years were completely rigged and he lost, but remained
as a national symbol of the best the legal thinking could produce.
Oliveira Viana was his nemesis. He refused to look to Brazil and the Brazilians
through the glasses of normative law, and tried instead to look at the
sociological reality underlying it. He would compare the texture of Brazilian
society with the European ones, and conclude that Brazilians lacked the
essential ingredients upon which to build a democratic order. His explanations
would mostly racial and untenable on modern social sciences grounds; his
analysis of how the Brazilian society was organized around family and
political clans, and how the country's social organization was based on
this reality, are still a classic of Brazilian social sciences. In the
thirties, Viana would support the centralizing and modernizing tendencies
of the Vargas regime against the liberal thinking of the previous years,
which he regarded as part of the legalistic tradition of which Rui Barbosa
was the symbol. As an adviser to the Vargas government, he was responsible
for many innovations introduced in those years in the fields of social
welfare, and opposed the extreme forms of right-wing conservatism which
were also present.
Oliveira Viana was just one among a group of intellectuals who were extremely
active in the thirties but were more or less reduced to silence with the
fall of the Vargas regime in 1945. Besides the books they wrote, they
also tried to influence directly the course of events, and were attracted
by the areas where society could be reached more directly, like education.
In the twenties and thirties education was Brazil's ideological battleground.
Brazilian intellectuals, as in the past, continued to come to France,
and brought back the ideals of universal, public and laic education. Some,
like Anísio Teixeira, came to the United States, got in touch with a view
of education which did not square with the Catholic schools which traditionally
took care of the children of the Brazilian elite. The Church reacted,
and it could rely on a new element it did not have before: the existence
of a small group of Catholic intellectuals who read De Maistre, and could
mobilize ideas and arguments against what they saw as the threat of liberal,
pragmatist, statist, protestant - in any event, non Catholic - educational
ideologies.
Mobilization around educational issues led to the formation of a new group
of social scientists who became known as "the educators" - Anísio
Teixeira, Lourenço Filho and Fernando de Azevedo being the best known.
In the early thirties they published a "Manifesto of the Pioneers
of the New School", which drew strong reaction from Catholic intellectuals,
and the following years they became involved with a series of educational
projects carried on by the federal and state governments in São Paulo,
Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Bahia. The ideological issues, in the
meantime, started to fade away when the Vargas regime decided to place
public education under the Church supervision and allow for religious
teaching in public schools. As the educators took up jobs in the expanding
educational bureaucracy, they moved from the previously intellectual to
more technocratic roles, trying to do in practice what they have been
preaching before in public(22).
The Brazilian education system never fulfilled the educators' expectations,
for a combination of social, cultural and institutional factors which
are still not completely understood. In the fifties, again under the leadership
of Teixeira, a Brazilian Center for Educational Studies was organized
in Rio de Janeiro. Its members had already lost the illusion that they
could reform the country through education, and engaged in a large program
of social studies which could, in fact, help to understand the general
conditions of Brazilian society(23)
. This was good for social sciences but not so good for education, which
lost its legitimacy as a field for intellectual concern. As the Brazilian
educational system expanded throughout the sixties and seventies, schools
and graduate programs of education were created, and the professional
educators, from a handful in the thirties, became a legion. They are well
organized, ill-paid, they fight hard but not very successfully for their
working conditions, and tend to believe that nothing much can be done
for Brazilian education before the country's general social and economic
conditions are radically changed.
In those years two new types of social sciences started to develop, both
around the new University of São Paulo. This University, or more precisely
its Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters, was a creation of that
state's elite in a time of intense competition with the Federal government
for the country's leadership. It was an ambitious undertaking, to endow
that state with a University where the country's future elite would be
educated, and which could, on the long run, recover the leadership the
state was deemed to have by its economic and entrepreneurial resources.
Seen from half a century of hindsight, that project seems to have been
fairly successful.
Another project which emerged at the same time, and more or less by same
people, was the creation of an independent school of sociology and political
science. Its founder was Roberto Simonsen, a combination of successful
entrepreneur, business leader and economic historian. The Escola de Sociologia
e Política de São Paulo was meant to form entrepreneurs, political leaders,
statesmen. It brought a stream of American specialists who started, for
the first time in Brazilian history, to talk about quantitative methods,
empirical surveys, physical ecology, community studies(24).
From an intellectual point of view, the Escola de Sociologia was a failure.
A large number of sons of the São Paulo elite went through the School,
and, were probably influenced by it. A fairly large number of studies
on community organization, race relations, immigrant groups, education,
and so forth, were carried on. And the studies and research practices
brought by its professors became incorporated as standard wisdom in many
governmental research and social service agencies, where the utilization
of some easy-to-grasp sociological notions were supposedly needed. However,
there was never a second generation of intellectuals coming out of that
school, and after a few years it drifted towards a condition of seemingly
irrecoverable institutional and academic deterioration. American-type
sociology, as a discipline or as a profession, never had a future in Brazil.
As a discipline, it could not compete with the intellectual charm carried
on by the French tradition; professionally, neither the Brazilian state
nor its private sector were prepared to accept and make use of the claims
of technical prowess the American sociologists were starting to claim
for themselves.
In the meantime the University of São Paulo was building its own social
sciences program, which was to be much more successful than the one at
the Escola de Sociologia e Política. A stream of more or less prestigious
French professors were brought in after 1935 - from well known names like
Ferdinand Braudel and Claude Lévy Strauss and François Pérroux to lesser
known like Roger Bastide, Pierre Daffontaines and George Dumas. The presence
of this large group coming from Paris created quite a sensation in São
Paulo's intellectual circles, and the permanence and research of a few
names, like Roger Bastide, would have a lasting impact.
If the French did not bring a coherent sociological perspective, they
brought very clear academic standards and implicit assumptions about the
nature of intellectual work which were to be followed. They did not hope
to prepare business and political leaders, nor did they expect their work
to generate socio-political ideologies. Their work tended to be monographic,
based on extensive field work, and incorporating intellectual elements
of Durkheimian sociology, anthropological functionalism and the new contributions
of psychoanalysis. Their Brazilian disciples incorporated these norms,
and prepared themselves, perhaps for the first time in Brazilian history,
to an academic life.
Florestan Fernandes is certainly the best known heir of the French tradition
in São Paulo, as witnessed by his earlier works on the Tupinambá tribe,
followed by a treatise on functionalist methods. His best known disciples,
however, Octávio Ianni and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, took a different
path, to be followed years later by their master. In the late fifties,
they were active in a group of young sociologists, economists, philosophers
and historians who met regularly to read Marx's Capital - José Arthur
Giannotti, Paulo Singer, Joseph Lowi, Juarez Brandão Lopes, Procópio Cardoso,
and several others - and tried to develop a new type of social sciences
which would combine academic scholarship with social and political relevance.
As Brazil's higher education system expanded, particularly in São Paulo,
this group and the work they developed - on the nature of Brazilian society,
the characteristics of the slave system, the interpretation of the country's
history and, of course, the theory of dependency - became paradigmatic.
The São Paulo group certainly shared and helped to diffuse the Marxist
notion that social sciences were destined to produce a blueprint for social
redemption, and that it was the social scientist's duty to carry on with
this project. How they did it was a question of personal biography. Political
involvement on the left was a natural element for these intellectuals,
without ever overshadowing their academic and elite roles: With the notable
exception of Florestan Fernandes, who had a humble social origin, most
of them were socially much closer to the elite than their French intellectual
counterparts. When the military came to power, they were easy targets
for repression. Deprived of their university chairs, forced sometimes
into political or intellectual exile, they kept nevertheless their social
prestige and intellectual influence. As democratic rule returned to the
country in the mid-eighties, there was no going back to traditional university
roles for many in this group. Some had already moved too far and too deep
into politics, like Senator Fernando Henrique Cardoso or the Laborer's
Party intellectual Francisco Weffort. For others, politicization of academic
life, a classic feature of Latin American universities, took precedence:
the roles of teacher, writer and political activist blended in one, and
the universities were perceived above all as a political battleground.
The Role of Ideology
The mountain town of Itatiaia, between Rio and São Paulo, was for some
time in the early fifties the meeting place for intellectuals of both
cities. The Itatiaia group included economists, lawyers, social scientists
of different extractions and perceptions about their understanding of
Brazil's problems and needs. They all agreed, however, that they had a
role to play. They published a few issues of a journal, Cadernos de
Nosso Tempo, and a few years later, under President Juscelino Kubitschek,
were able to organize a governmental institute, the Brazilian Institute
for Higher Studies (Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros - ISEB)
which was destined to have a large impact in Brazilian intellectual circles.
They were not predominantly academic or university people, but intellectuals
without a firm institutional attachment. In spite of its growing economic
importance, São Paulo was a provincial city which was able to create a
fairly strong university environment; by contrast, Rio de Janeiro was
the country's capital, the focus of national attention, and was never
able to develop an academic social science similar to the one in São Paulo.
Most of the members of the Itatiaia group were from Rio (Hélio Jaguaribe,
Guerreiro Ramos, Nelson Werneck Sodré, Evaldo Correia Lima, Cândido Mendes
de Almeida and several others) and for them, their social role as intellectuals
far outweighed their eventual institutional affiliations. Their role models
were not the French professors, but rather intellectuals like Oliveira
Viana who, in the thirties, saw as their task to think and make proposals
for the future of the country.
Not surprisingly, a notion most of the group shared was that intellectuals
would play a central role in any transformation Brazil was supposed to
undergo in the future. They were certainly familiar with Marxism, but
their understanding of the role of ideas in society was not the same.
For Marxists, ideology as "the knowledge of necessity" was an
important element in the development of working-class consciousness, and
the intellectuals who decided to join the working class could have a significant,
but ultimately secondary role in this process of political awakening.
The ISEB group did not talk about the working class as much as they talked
about the Brazilian "masses", or "people", and for
them ideology, now in a different sense, was indispensable in raising
national consciousness in behalf of the country's future. In this new
sense, ideology was to be an intellectual construct, a combination of
social interpretation, social values and political myth, to be formulated
and spread out by intellectuals. If they succeeded, they would certainly
be at center stage in guiding the country to its new destiny.
What ideology was that? A key notion was nationalism. In the socialist
tradition, nationalism is usually identified with conservative, anti-internationalist
values. The ISEB group worked to strip nationalism from its right-wing
connotations, and to link Brazil with the emerging and apparently successful
third world movement which was bringing together former imperial colonies
of Asia and Africa. A nationalist ideology would build an alliance cutting
across class divides and unifying the country against those who resisted
progress. Progress, or rather "development", was almost the
same as industrialization, which was to be achieved by a modernized and
interventionist state. The enemies of progress were the supporters of
the status quo: the agrarian interests, who did not want the country to
industrialize; the traditional politician, who did not want the state
to modernize; the multinational corporations and their local allies, who
did not want Brazil to develop an independent and competitive industry;
and some sectors of the military and other right wing groups, who did
not want Brazil to move away from its strategic alignment with the United
States.
The ISEB did not survive as a group to the political polarization which
prevailed in Brazil in the early sixties. Some of its members decided
to try their luck in electoral politics; others moved further and further
to the left, approaching the traditional roles of marxist intellectuals;
others still retreated to private jobs, or to work in some government
agency. When the military government decided to close the ISEB in 1964,
very little of the old Itatiaia group, and nothing of their ambitions
of intellectual hegemony, remained.
Economics and Planning
Brazil did not develop a significant tradition of economic studies, but
the notion that the economy should and could be planned was a familiar
one. One of the basic assumptions of the Itatiaia group, and not only
of them, was that economic development could be achieved by rational planning.
The Soviet example of five-year development plans was in the minds of
everybody, and by that time the United Nations was helping to spread this
notion through its technical assistance programs.
Not surprisingly, discussions about economic planning in Brazil, as elsewhere,
has always been clouded by the traditional opposition between economic
intervention and capitalist laissez-faire. More specifically, it relates
to the question of whether the the State should intervene to promote industrialization
or, on the contrary, should refrain itself from doing so. These issues,
and some of their broader implications, appeared very clearly in the debate
that pitted two outstanding Brazilian economists in the mid-forties, Roberto
Simonsen (1889-1948) and Eug^enio Gudin (1886-1986). The actors are as
important as what they had to say(25).
Roberto Simonsen had an engineering education and was a highly successful
entrepreneur in São Paulo. He is the author of a classic economic history
of Brazil and many other books, the founder of the Escola de Sociologia
de São Paulo, and the organizer, in the late twenties, of the first industrialists'
organization in the country. He was also the founder of the highly successful
National Center for Industrial Training (SENAI), still the most important
Brazilian institution for the development of skilled industrial manpower.
In 1944 he prepared, for a governmental agency, a document supporting
the need for state planning to promote industrialization in Brazil. His
suggestions are an obvious reflection of his previous experience as a
capitalist whose fortune had grown thanks to close associations with an
interventionist state. One looks in vain for an inkling on his part about
who should take the responsibility for this undertaking.
Gudin was also an engineer from the Rio de Janeiro Politécnica, and published
in 1943 the first Brazilian textbook in modern economics, "The Principles
of Monetary Economy". He was the Brazilian representative at the
Bretton Woods Conference, and the founder of the Rio de Janeiro first
School of Economics. Before this career as an economist, he had worked
with foreign railways companies in Brazil, and throughout his long life
he remained a staunch supporter of free trade and economic liberalism.
Gudin was offered the chance of commenting on Simonsen's proposal of economic
planning, and his criticism was threefold. First he criticized the proposal
from a technical point of view, pointing out errors on the way data was
used and interpreted. Second, he presented a strong criticism against
Simonsen's protectionist ideology, arguing with the standard reasoning
of economic liberalism. Thirdly, and more significantly, he presented
a blueprint of what should be the organization of the Brazilian government
for the management of its economy.
What comes out of Gudin's proposals is that to be a liberal and against
planning did not mean to be against the state's intervention in economic
matters. For the Brazilian economy to grow, he argued, the country required
a monetary authority to control inflation, the exchange rate and to establish
the appropriate fiscal policies. Institutional mechanisms which could
stimulate capital formation within the country and to attract foreign
investments should be devised. Foreign trade and increases in productivity
were to be implemented. Systematic collections of economic data were needed
to follow the behavior of the national income and the balance of payments.
On the long run, a Central Bank should be created to handle the country's
monetary policies.
There were no losers in this debate. In the years to follow, Brazil continued
to be an interventionist and protectionist state. Several economic plans
were devised and approved at the highest possible levels, but comprehensive
planning never really took hold. State intervention and protectionism
was always sectorial, ad hoc and subject to short term pragmatic
considerations. The people who did the planning were the businessmen themselves,
or, in state-controlled fields like energy, transportation, and communications,
the specialized engineers, very often with the participation of military
people.
At the same time, Gudin and his group were organizing a center for economics
research and teaching at the semi-autonomous Getúlio Vargas Foundation
in Rio, and helping to establish the monetary authorities they deemed
necessary, which eventually developed into a full-fledged Central Bank.
Modern economics was also arriving in Brazil through a different channel,
namely the United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America and its
periodical short-term courses for economic planning specialists it provided
in Rio de Janeiro and other cities. The ECLAC group shared with Simonsen
the notion that Brazil's, and in general Latin America's economic problems
were structural in nature, and required not only the control of monetary
instruments, but the actual intervention of the state in the promotion
of economic development(26). The ideological
debate between monetarists and structuralists would mark Brazilian intellectual
life from the fifties on, and helped to place economics, rather than sociology
or political science, as the social science of choice. With national and
international support, fellowships were provided for the more qualified
students to go abroad, and graduate and research programs were instituted.
Economists of liberal, or conservative persuasion, were responsible for
the modernization of the Brazilian monetary and fiscal institutions in
the late sixties, and this helped to provide the basis for the most significant
attempt at economic "dirigisme" in Brazilian history, during
the Geisel government in the early seventies. It was a combination that
did not fit very well into the expected cleavages between left and right
in economic and political thought.
The economic achievements of the seventies turned into disaster in the
eighties, with an uncontrolled external debt, economic depression, inflation,
mounting social inequality and deterioration of urban centers. The military
regime and its economic advisers fell into disrepute, and a new civilian
regime was instituted in 1985. Now was the time to move away from traditional,
liberal economics, and to give new priority to social problems - nutrition,
health, education, housing. No professional group, however, was qualified
to do the job.
Social sciences as
professions
It would be unfair to blame the inherent limitations of the social sciences
for the failure of the new civilian government to address properly the
country's economic and social problems. A sophisticated, non-orthodox
and widely praised monetary reform was carried on in early 1986, and its
failure a year later can be attributed to the excess of political expediency
on the government's part, rather than to technical flaws in the plan.
The absence of long term and efficient social policies can also be attributed
to the government's inability to straighten out its outdated, overgrown
and patronage- driven bureaucracy, rather than to the lack of knowledge
about how to do things right.
There are, however, grounds to doubt whether the appropriate knowledge
would be available if the political and institutional conditions for their
implementation could be achieved. This is partially due to the fact that,
at its best, non-economic social sciences developed in Brazil as a combination
of academic scholarship and social criticism, rather than as a social
technology amenable to implementation. Scattered, applied knowledge certainly
exists throughout the social sciences community, or could be eventually
be brought from abroad. But there is no consensus, no agreed upon notions
and procedures about what this knowledge would be, or about its legitimacy.
This is a trait of social sciences in general, rather than a peculiar
feature of the Brazilian context. In one sense, however, social sciences
in Brazil is peculiar, even if not unique: it is the extent to which they
got transformed, from a product of the intelligentsia, into the largest
sector of the country's post-secondary education.
Economics is an example. Schools of commerce and accounting had existed
in Brazil for many years as vocational schools side by side with the more
traditional secondary schools, and appealing to people coming from lower
social strata who did not expect to get into a university. The creation
of the Faculties of Economics in the thirties was seen by the accountants
as an upgrade of their profession, and in fact many of Brazil's contemporary
economics courses are outgrowths of old accounting courses. A large social
and intellectual gap exists therefore between the large number of undergraduate
economics courses leading to professional degrees and the few, highly
qualified and modern graduate programs. The situation for business administration
and other "applied social sciences" is similar.
Undergraduate higher education in Brazil is patterned on the French model,
and all courses are supposed to lead to a professional degree, which creates
a difficult position for disciplines like sociology, anthropology or political
science. The curriculum created for the São Paulo Escola de Sociologia
e Política was adopted as a model for a few other institutions, like the
University of Minas Gerais and the Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro,
and for some time these courses joined São Paulo as the places where promising
social science careers could be started. The students could usually get
an administration degree at the same time, and the expectation was that
this "new profession" would eventually get as institutionalized
and regulated as law or medicine. The courses provided by the School of
Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of the University of São Paulo, with
their emphasis on research and academic scholarship, could not fit into
this pattern, an ambiguity which was solved when this school, and all
others patterned on its model, were defined as teachers' schools. As the
country's higher education system expanded, "Faculdades de Filosofia",
or teachers' schools, spread out as a kind of second or third choice for
students who did not make to the most prestigious and established careers,
or for those - mostly women - for whom a professional career was not a
central concern. Graduates from these courses would eventually end up
in actual teaching, and some would organize in attempts to provide their
disciplines with the trappings of well established professions. Mostly,
however, these courses would provide some kind of liberal arts education,
without really leading to organized professional or academic communities.
A final example are the courses of "communication", which are
required in Brazil today for the legal practice of journalism. They share
with a host of other similar degrees - administration, library sciences,
statistics, architecture, economics, social sciences - the lack of consistent
cognitive content and a clear professional profile, and, among the ranks
of their poorly educated degree holders, the battle for the conquest and
preservation of a legally defined niche in the labor market takes precedent
over any other consideration.
From another point of view, however, professionals in communication are
disputing with the more conventional social scientists for their intellectual
roles. In the congressional elections held in Brazil in 1986, journalists
and TV professionals got elected in great numbers, while social scientists
who ventured into open politics were systematically defeated. These results
confirm that, in societies where mass communications prevail, competence
with the media, rather than the message, is the key to public recognition.
What the media specialists are doing in Brazil today is a continuation
of what literary, music and theater people have done for a long time:
to use their well established public images to spread political and ideological
values(27). If this tendency remains,
it will have a definite impact in the redefinition of some of the social
scientists' social roles.
Conclusions
A fairly generalized pattern can be inferred from this quick and admittedly
incomplete overview. In contrast with societies where modern knowledge
and professions grow together with new and rising social groups, in societies
like Brazil they tend to begin close to the top of the social pyramid.
The consequence is the development of modernizing counter-elites which
face the opposition, not only of established power holders, but also from
other social groups with vested interests in the more traditional social
order and its values.
Sometimes the sheer prestige of the new forms of knowledge, or what they
can actually achieve, is enough to place their carriers in the positions
of power and authority they assume they are entitled to. When this does
not happen, the new knowledge may change into ideology, and be used as
a political weapon.
The next stage is institutionalization. Schools are created, professions
are established, legal rights and privileges are sometimes attached to
them. The number of people with access to new knowledge increases, and
there is an effort to give it a more defined place in the social division
of labor.
The final stage may be called "entrenchment". As new professions
grow and include disproportionally larger social groups, or as they fail
in their attempt at firm professionalization, their market value diminishes,
and their collective behavior becomes defensive. Ideology takes the lead
again, but now mostly as collective self-protection, rather than as alternative
world visions or proposals for social change. It may be difficult to distinguish
among the two at first glance, since both are politically minded and ideological.
But social reformers come usually in small groups, like the educators
in the thirties, and their intellectual production is always directed
outwards, in an effort to convince society of the value of their ideas
and contributions; ideological entrenchment happens in much larger communities,
and is directly mostly inwards, in an effort to rally the ranks and protect
the group against outside aggression. On the long run, entrenchment can
be self-defeating, and lead to loss of social standing and de-institutionalization
for the group.
Not all types of knowledge follow these stages in the same way, and in
many situations there are conflicts between groups located at different
stages of this sequence. Stratification occurs not only among professions,
but also within them, and the cleavage between a "high" and
a "low clergy" is one of the main features of Brazilian higher
education today. An overview of the Brazilian social sciences today from
the standpoint of its best graduate programs and research groups would
provide picture which is very different from the one which derives from
the view of social sciences and humanities as professions, with its almost
800 thousand students in almost two thousand undergraduate courses(28)
One can assume that these external conditions have significant implications
for the knowledge contents of different disciplines. One could expect
that, as new knowledge becomes institutionalized as a profession, its
technical content increases; if what prevails is academic institutionalization,
scholarship contents are stressed; if it works as ideology, intellectual
simplicity, comprehensiveness and easiness to grasp tend to dominate.
The political sign attached to the carriers of the new knowledge vary
according these conditions, and are subject to unexpected reversals.
Finally, one could speculate about the conditions which favor the "French"
vs. the more "British" versions of new knowledge, and their
political and epistemological implications. It is fairly clear that the
"French" tradition favors its political and ideological utilization,
and may sometimes hinder the development of autonomous and self-regulated
intellectual communities, without which knowledge contents can be at risk.
There are, however, enough experiences which do not fit easily into this
kind of generalization - Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Japan -
to warn us not to carry this conclusion too far.
In short, new knowledge and the new professions are used in ways often
quite unrelated with their actual knowledge content. Because of this,
there is sometimes a tendency to say that only their social roles and
political implications are significant, while knowledge content is sheer
ideological self-justification. I believe, however, that this tendency
is basically a consequence of the stage of entrenchment which dominates
modern social sciences in many countries. More to the point, I believe
that the development of appropriate knowledge contents is an important
social need, which can grow quite differently in different soils, and
can be fostered if we can understand the ways in which modern knowledge
spreads out on social space and time.
Notes
1. This paper was written while the author was a fellow
at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California,
Berkeley. I am grateful to its director, Martin S. Trow, and to Robert A.
Packenham for their comments and criticism, which I tried to take into account.
Published in Peter Wagner, Björn Wittrock, Carol Weiss, and Hellmutt Wollman,
eds., Social Sciences and Modern States, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991, 230-360. Published in Portuguese as "A
força do novo: por uma sociologia dos conhecimentos modernos no Brasil,"Revista
Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, 5, 2, October, 1987, 47-66. Included
in A Redescoberta da Cultura, S. Paulo, EDUSP, 1997.
2. Max Weber's Economy and Society (Weber, 1968)
is, in great part, an attempt to look at civilizations from this standpoint
.
3. For the links between modern science and rising social
sectors, see Ben-David, 1971.
4. Cf. Costa, 1985, specially chapter 2
5. For a history of Brazilian educational and scientific
institutions see Schwartzman, 1979 and 1982.
6. Safford, 1976.
7. "Carta de Lei" of April 4, 1810. Quoted
in T. G. Franken, 1979.
8. Carvalho, 1978.
9. Morais, 1986.
10. The forced modernization of Rio de Janeiro was directly
inspired in the renewal of Paris by Haussman, and had in many ways similar
implications. For a broad discussion on urban modernization and its meaning,
see M. Berman, 1982. For Rio, see Needell, 1983 and 1984.
11. The University of Rio de Janeiro, under the name
of Universidade do Brasil, was to be the model which would pattern all higher
education institutions in the country. Almost all the energy, however, went
into the physical planning of its buildings, with very little in terms of
its substantive contents. Cf. Schwartzman, Bomeny and Costa, 1984.
12. Letter to Minister of Education Gustavo Capanema,
quoted by Schwartzman and others, 1984, p.94.
13. Costa, 1971.
14. Schwartzman, 1985.
15. The following is based on Machado and others, 1978
16. Machado and others, 1978, 197-198.
17. Carvalho, 1987.
18. Rodrigues was a prolific writer, and left a large
group of followers, the best known being probably Artur Ramos (Ramos, 1939).
The gist of Rodrigues' concerns is given by the title of a book he never
concluded, "La Degenerescence Pshychique et Mentale chez les Peuples
Métis des Pays Chauds". One of his best known books is The Africans
in Brazil (Rodrigues, 1945).
19. Stepan, 1984.
20. Nancy Stepan observes that Eugenics in Brazil tended
to have a strong Lamarckian component, allowing for "optimistic"
theories on long range racial improvement for the Brazilian population.
21. The only, and relatively frustrated experience of
modernization of Law studies in Brazil happened in the late sixties in Rio
de Janeiro with the cooperation of American specialists, and was directed
towards preparing lawyers able to work with the legal questions typical
of an advanced capitalist marketplace. Cf. Trubeck, 1971. See also Falcão,
1984. For the education of Brazilian political elites in the 19th century,
see Carvalho, 1979.
22. For details, see Schwartzman and others, 1984. The
best-known work by Oliveira Viana is Viana, 1949
23. Cf. Mariani, 1982.
24. Two names stand out among the Americans who came
to the Escola de Sociologia and left a significant influence, Emilio Willems
and Donald Pierson. Cf. Willems, 1947, and the still valuable survey of
the Brazilian sociological literature by Pierson, 1945.
25. Simonsen and Gudin, 1977.
26. The Brazilian name best associated with ECLA is
Celso Furtado, who the Minister of Planning in Jo~ao Goulart short-lived
Presidency in the early 1960's. For his views, see Furtado, 1985.
27.
28. On Brazilian higher education, cf. S. Schwartzman,
1987; on the social sciences, cf. Packenham, 1986.
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