BRAZILIAN
STATE AND SOCIETY: TOWARDS A GLOBAL INTERPRETATION Simon
Schwartzman and Fernando Uricoechea
Paper prepared for presentation in the symposium
on "The Comparative Analysis of the Whole Society, " World Congress of the
International Sociological Association, Uppsala, Sweden, August 1978.
Abstract
Presented is a historical synthesis of the development of the modern Brazilian
state since its patrimonial origin. The peculiarity of its patrimonialism
is examined against the historical background of Spanish-American patterns
of state building. The process of bureaucratization & the institutionalization
of a legal-rational pattern of authority during the nineteenth century is
examined through the role of the Guarda Nacional, a corporation of freemen
& honoratiores in care of administrative tasks. The dynamics of the
modern state are interpreted by examining the trends toward increasing centralization
& bureaucratic authoritarianism as well as the collective demands for
social & political participation. The role of the positivist ideology,
well adjusted to the centralized character of the new bureaucratic administration,
is examined. Dynamics are also illustrated by examining two approaches to
education in the second quarter of this century: the liberal & scientific
strategy sponsored by the U system in Sao Paulo vs the technical & positivist
one sponsored by the federal administration. Original, historical sources
are interpreted. (Copyright 1978, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights
reserved.).
I (1)
The history of the modern state is the history of the bureaucratization
of its administrative apparatus. Whether a given state is categorized as
capitalist or socialist, developed or underdeveloped, industrial or agrarian,
there is no question but that the progress of this political structure has
been in the direction of bureaucracy. We have, moreover, gone so far in
that process that it is no longer relevant to classify the plurality of
existing states according to their degree of bureaucratization. This does
not mean, of course, that all types of bureaucratized states are alike.
On the contrary, the intellectual and political traditions of modern states
embody two opposite meanings of bureaucracy: one is the Weberian sense of
a responsible, efficient, rational and impersonal organization; the other
is the more popular sense of an autocratic, insensitive, inefficient and
self-centered body of functionaries.
From a Weberian perspective of ideal types, the second meaning represents
a perversion of the first. Yet, modern bureaucracy actually has these two
faces which tend to appear at different times and places according to specific
conditions. The present analysis of the development of modern Brazil is,
essentially, an essay on how these two faces of the country's modern bureaucracy
have played their deadly game throughout history.
Whereas today bureaucracy is a political a priori, historically, bureaucratic
rule did not necessarily follow as a matter of course. A considerable portion
of Max Weber's work has been devoted precisely to this general question
and to a specification of the devices that the state resorts to in order
to look after its administrative interests. Patrimonialism has been identified
as one of the most pervasive and generalized forms of pre-bureaucratic administration.
Evolving out of the administrative differentiation of the patriarchal household,
that is, with the emergence of a patriarchal staff, Patrimonialism became
a basic form of traditional domination. In contrast with the feudal forms
of domination, where the patriarchal lord rules with the assistance of free
vassals under Patrimonialism, he rules with the assistance of a staff
of patrimonially dependent officers.
Thus, the type of traditional domination that, in the long run, is to prevail
historically is to a large degree dependent on the existence of a stratum
of independent, allodial landlords. Where historical accidents encourage
the transformation of that stratum into a corporate and conscious
status group of landlords, and its development into a political
corporation, feudal forms of domination are institutionalized. Where, on
the other hand, historical accidents stifle the emergence of a corporate
status group of landlords with an independent base and where, therefore,
the lord paramount is not a primus inter pares but an unquestioned
ruler, the community's political development is thwarted and perverted.
Public life, that is, remains a domestic concern of the lord paramount:
no differentiation is established between household and res publica.
Where feudal forms prevail, a political pact between freemen is in the offing.
As opposed to the patrimonial contract which remains a domestic one, the
feudal contract is the first political contract, that is to say,
it is the first truly genuine public contract. This is the basic
reason for the importance attached by Montesquieu, Marx, Wittfogel and contemporary
students like Barrington Moore, to the association between feudalism and
democracy.
Ordinarily, however, this political difference between feudalism
and Patrimonialism has been ignored. In its stead, we have been offered
an administrative difference which does not withstand serious criticism.
We have been repeatedly told that Patrimonialism is administration by patrimonial
retainers whereas feudalism is administration by independent lords. Although
this is formally correct, it is also true, as Weber remarked, that both
forms of administration are patrimonial. Both, that is, are conducted without
an institutional differentiation between the officer"s private patrimony
and the community's public resources; both partake of particularism, diffuseness
and ascription. The normative system which determines the officer's actions
is in both cases the same, insofar as in both cases the distinction between
private and public has not yet been institutionalized. It is only later,
with the arrival of a distinctly public domain, that an impersonal, universalistic
and functionally specific and performance oriented normative system of action
for the officer can obtain. Only then, in other words, do rational legal
principles of legitimacy obtain and allow for bureaucratic rule.
From this standpoint, the mere presence of administrative officers is a
poor index of the degree of bureaucratization, feudalization or patrimonialization
of office. What counts is ultimately the kind of principle that legitimates
the administration's system of action: whether traditional, as in the case
of patrimonial and feudal domination, or legal rational, as in the case
of bureaucratic rule.
Thus approached, the distinction between Patrimonialism and feudalism is
much more political than administrative. Although they stem from a common
administrative pattern, the two systems differ in the kind of solidarity
that binds the officer to the ruler. Under Patrimonialism, administration
is entrusted to administratively and economically dependent retainers;
in the case of feudalism, administration is shared with politically
independent vassals. In the former case, the patrimonial prebend,
the right to personally appropriate the values and utilities derived from
the exercise of office, is a right that inheres in the office; in the latter
case, the feudal benefice, the right of appropriation inheres into the officer.
Thus, the patrimonial prebend, by remaining associated with the office,
contributes to the stereotyping of a set of official procedures and also
contributes, paradoxically and unexpectedly, to the subsequent institutionalization
of an impersonal, bureaucratic rule. It is here that we must look for the
patrimonial origins of the modern bureaucratic state. The prebendalization
of office, the patrimonial state, is thus clearly significant in the subsequent
development of bureaucratic forms of political domination.
Modern, rational-legal type of political domination shares with traditional
Patrimonialism the administrative officer's dependence on the political
rule. It shares with traditional feudalism the existence of a political
pact which binds the administrative officer and limits the scope of what
he can do. Ultimately, it tends to replace the prebendalization of public
offices with patterns of administrative efficiency and political responsiveness.
This means that the transition from traditional Patrimonialism to modern
rational-legal rule is never a matter of course: it depends, as was the
case with the industrial revolution in Western Europe, on the historical
combination of increasing administrative expansion with the development
of independent political forces which can reproduce, in a modern context,
the political pact that was the basis of traditional, feudal domination.
Bureaucratic administration may develop even in the absence of such a combination.
The resulting type of domination will share with the ideal-typical bureaucracy
the officer's dependence on the political ruler and the government's use
of rational means to attain its goals. But it will lack the mechanisms of
political control of the public administration by organized sectors of society,
which are typical of rational legal domination in the Western democracies(2).
One of the reasons why authoritarian bureaucracies still abide by the rules
of rationality is that the use of rational thinking and the exercise of
political power 'on behalf of the people" appear to be the best way to legitimize
the exercise of public authority in the modern world. However, authoritarian
bureaucracy tends to avoid and limit the development of independent political
actors in society, and tries, instead, to legitimize itself through direct
appeals to '"the people" as a whole (referred to as Bonapartism, plebiscitarianism
or populism by different authors). This type of bureaucracy tends to maximize
substantive rationality, at the expense of formal rationality; in other
words, it tends to seek its goals irrespective of rules and procedures.
However, the continuous appeal to substantive rationality tends to create
insecurity and unpredictability within the bureaucracy itself. As a result
a double standard develops: strict formal rationality applies in the bureaucracy
5 own ranks and substantive rationality in its dealings with the rest of
society. In the long run, substantive rationality is alternately or fully
replaced by sheer coercion. This is, typically, what happens when political
power is controlled by the military as a corporation.
As all bureaucratic administrations, but more so, authoritarian bureaucracies
are afflicted by the tendency of the office-holders to appropriate their
offices for private benefit and to become a status group on its own right.
In the long run, this process lowers administrative efficiency in meeting
the goals set by the political rulers. The conflict between political rulers
and public officers is the typical problem of bureaucratic rule without
a political pact, i.e., of bureaucratic authoritarianism. In contrast, the
conflict between legal constraints and the public bureaucracy's demands
for substantive rationality can be considered the typical political problem
of modern, rational-legal, democratic societies.
The distinction between these two types of bureaucratic rule, authoritarian
or democratic - how and why they evolve and the consequences to be expected
from each type - is one of the crucial questions of modern political analysis.
Traditional domination in its two main variants, Patrimonialism and feudalism,
is a thing of the past. But the basic political concept that differentiates
these two systems, i.e., the presence or absence of a political pact controlling
the powers of the rulers and the way public administration is performed
- is as present and as important as ever. This is why it is worth inquiring
how political power and public administration were established in a country
like Brazil and how the process led to the country's present political configuration.
II (3)
As a purely rational concept, the notion of patrimonial state is merely
an expedient way to create a theoretical synthesis from an empirical variety
of historically significant elements. As a matter of fact, the historical
- as opposed to the ideal - forms of patrimonialism have been associated
with varying types of bureaucratic administration. Typical of the actual,
historical pattern is the concept of patrimonial bureaucracy. Characteristically,
the center of the administrative apparatus is organized according to bureaucratic
norms executed by a salaried officialdom, whereas the political periphery
of the community exhibits an administrative organization according to bureaucratic
and traditional norms executed by some salaried officials along with a group
of prebendaries or local honoratiores.
What characterizes this administrative organization at the periphery as
patrimonial is the fact that public office is attributed to local notables
as a prebend, or a concession, from the central political power, which also
controls an independent, professional bureaucratic administration. Were
the principle of legitimization different - that is, were the source of
administrative authority the social status of the officeholder - we would
be facing a political component which is more typical of feudal authority
systems. This difference in principle is obviously related, among other
things, to the actual monopoly the central administration has on the military,
economic and administrative resources necessary for the exercise of public
authority.
The predominance of patrimonialism means the maintenance of the dependency
of peripheral groups on the central power, and the privatization of some
areas of public administration. The presence of the feudal principle means
that the local status groups see themselves as independent and entitled
to a share of political power, and thus the presence of a public administration
based on a political pact. The side to which a given political system leans
depends on several historical circumstances, among them the relative amount
of resources available to the central government and to the local administrative
authorities.
The development of the Brazilian political state is probably the best illustration
of this pattern of patrimonial bureaucracy in Latin America. In fact, the
more bureaucratic sectors of the royal administration during the colonial
period were those associated with the Exchequer and the administration of
justice. Given the paucity of officials and the scarcity of fiscal resources,
the state had to trust the local administration of government, for the vast
periphery of the political community, to military prebendaries who would
receive large tracts of land -- sesmarias - as patrimonial beneficiaries
By and large, the Spanish bureaucratic state in America resorted to a similar
patrimonial arrangement for the political organization of the state. The
typical form of benefice in that case was the encomienda, a rent-producing
right based on exploitation of the indigenous labor force. In contrast with
the sesmaria, the encomienda did not formally grant property rights over
the land but only over its native inhabitants.
In both empires, the more bureaucratic sectors of the royal administration
were the same: exchequer and justice. In both cases, moreover, the administrative
enterprise developed along two movements: through the institutionalization
of bureaucratic forms of government in the central and urban areas: and
through the prebendalization of the local functions of government in the
polity's peripheral and rural areas.
Two major accidents, however, influenced the differential development of
bureaucracy in the Portuguese and the Spanish territories. These two accidents
speeded the process of bureaucratization in the Spanish territories and
slowed down the same process in Brazil, insofar as it contributed to maintain
the existence of a dilettante administration in the periphery of the state.
Both these accidents had to do with the availability of alternative forms
of office prebendalism besides the one based on land grants. While the Spanish
territories had such alternatives, the Portuguese territories did not.
The first was the demographic density of the indigenous populations. The
existence of large groups f sedentary cultures in Spanish America gave the
central state the opportunity to grant its administrative officials the
right to exact tributes from the Indian. The official's pressure for the
appropriation of land was, thus, reduced and this eventuated in milder forms
of land prebendalism. That manorial context of labor exploitation was lacking
in Brazil. There, the semi-sedentary character and the sparse density of
the indigenous population inhibited the possibility of deriving benefices
for the administrative official through the exploitation of the Indian.
Land prebendalism was, thus, reinforced as a typically Brazilian pattern
of patrimonial benefice.
The second accident was the discovery of mineral resources. The most cursory
glance at the comparative production figures of the two Empires would readily
show a marked contrast: whereas the mining period in Brazil did not last
for more than two generations -- basically the second half of the 18th century
-- the Spanish Crown enjoyed a permanent flow of metals from the mining
areas of Mexico, Colombia and Peru throughout the entire period of monarchical
rule over its territory. As a result, the relative abundance of fiscal resources
led to the creation of a salaried officialdom and further stifled land prebendalism
in the Spanish empire. Added to the scarcity of a tributary population,
the meagerness of fiscal resources encumbered the trans formation of the
patrimonial officials into salaried bureaucrats. Without Indians and gold,
land was the only available resource the state had at its disposal to pay
for the services of its officials. It could hardly transform the patromonial
prebend into the bureaucratic salary.
Thus, during the second half of the 18th century, while the Latin American
states were intensifying the process of bureaucratization, the Portuguese
state in America launched a new administrative policy whereby local groups
were actively encouraged to participate in the construction of the state's
administrative apparatus. In other words, while Hispanic America was gradually
moving toward a more bureaucratic pattern of government, Portuguese America
continued to encourage the development of a patrimonial bureaucracy.
Needless to say, despite the intensification of bureaucratic traits in the
Hispanic American states, traces of patrimonialism remained in the administrative
structure. Thus, both the Hispanic American states and the Brazilian states
continued in the first decades of the 19th century to display administrative
patterns of organization that were typical of their patromonial heritage.
Characteristically, for instance, the functional diffuseness of office and
the simplified and schematic form of the structure of public expenditure
apparatus continued during the first three or four decades. Three or four
secretaries were enough to cover the administration's basic needs. Exchequer,
war and culto gave total coverage to those fiscal needs. Any other
need was met through the patrimonial assistance of local groups of honoratiores.
Even in the 1840s, the Colombian state coped with all its administrative
requirements by means of a schematic structure that consisted of just four
secretaries: interior and foreign relations, hacienda,
war, and navy. The Brazilian state similarly consisted of império,
justice, fazenda, war, and navy.
All the same, administrative differentiation proceeded at a higher speed
in the Spanish American countries. The 1840s mark the beginning of this
difference in administrative reaction. In Brazil the only modification in
terms of more administrative specialization took place in 1860 with the
creation of a new office of agriculture and commerce; in contrast, Colombia
had, as far back as the 1850s, created a differentiated structure made up
of twelve secretaries.
There is another area in which the different styles of state building reproduce
the difference in patrimonial heritage, namely, the process of administrative
centralization. It is reasonable to assume that the process of bureaucratization
implies the relative spreading of bureaucratic offices to the periphery
of the political community, whereas the patrimonial pattern somehow maintains
the periphery relatively intractable to the institutionalization of public
office. More bureaucratic politics will, consequently, have a relatively
less centralized distribution of fiscal expenditures. In contrast, less
bureaucratic politics tend to concentrate the fiscal resources of the state
at the center. A rapid look at the pattern of regional distribution of public
expenditure in Brazil and Colombia will illustrate that proposition. The
contrasts could not be more remarkable; whereas the first three Brazilian
provinces account for three-quarters of public expenditures, the first three
Colombian provinces just spend one-quarter, and only thirteen manage to
spend what in Brazil is spent by the first three. Equally remarkable is
that the Court in Brazil spends the aggregate expenditure of the top six
Colombian provinces.
The continued presence of a patrimonial-bureaucracy in Brazil well into
the 19th century, at a time when the neighboring countries had more or less
fully bureaucratized their state apparatuses, is partly attributed to the
so-called Guarda Nacional, a corporate association of Brazilian
freemen entrusted by the state with patrimonial functions of local government.
As mentioned earlier the Brazilian state had not been immune t the idea
of patrimonial administration during the colonial period. Yet, the state
had never devised a systematic policy of patrimonial assistance from private
groups. It had, of course, resorted to those groups when ever the needs
of the administration and the scarcity of bureaucratic officials and fiscal
resources so demanded. Patrimonialism, that is, had not been a conscious
and systematic political strategy. The creation of the Guarda Nacional,
however, modified that general picture. For the first time private groups
were legally enlisted as freemen and not as public officials for
the organization of local government.
As extemporaneous and anachronistic as such a measure may appear when seen
from the historical perspective of comparative state building, the creation
of a liturgical corporation of freemen to meet administrative needs was
a direct response to the practical demands of government created by the
recent autonomy of the new independent Brazilian state.(4)
Created by law in 1831 ostensibly as an instrument for military defense
against possible royalist attempts to restore the Portuguese dynasty, the
new state authorities nonetheless attributed to the liturgical corporation
of freemen functions of local justice, police and internal defense. The
manifest functions of the corporation were thus not limited to those of
attacks from foreign enemies but included a variety of internal tasks ranging
from the stifling of internal rebellions, the repression of slave insurrections
(and, later, of the slave trade), the collection of taxes, the transportation
of convicts, the execution of judicial errands, the protection of local
inhabitants against marauders and bandits, the policing of towns and cities
and a variety of chores otherwise ascribed to police and administrative
agencies of the state.
The whole collective enterprise behind the organization of the Guarda
Nacional was no simple or adjective matter. It implied the militarization
of the national community to an unprecedented level and, what was even a
more formidable task, the collective acceptance by the freemen of the polity
of their liturgical obligations as institutional duties that could not be
legitimately waived. The smooth functioning of the corporation was, in other
words, predicated to a large extent on the existence of a status order that
would sanction those obligations as a matter of course.
Although the colonial and institutional history of Brazil was suffused with
a considerable dose of militarization, the institutionalization of a status
order, that is, the existence of status groups with peculiar social honor,
a transparent consciousness of genteel and culturally privileged forms of
action setting the group apart and at a distance from a surrounding community
which, in turn, has some kind of service obligation, traditionally defined,
toward the former - - was a problematic fact. There were unquestionably
incipient attempts in the direction of institutionalization of such a status
order. But the objective conditions obtaining in colonial Brazil did not
favor the development of such a formidable status project.
For all that, the Guarda Nacional managed to establish a relatively
successful record of liturgical assistance for the patrimonial discharge
of administrative duties during two generations of Brazilian political life.
The role of the Guarda Nacional as a militia organization was a
complex one in terms of its effects upon the social and political organization
of the Brazilian state. They were instrumental in the integration of the
periphery to a national system of political institutions; moreover, as the
retainers of a substantial amount of autonomous power, they were responsible
for the development of a political stratum of rural origin which led to
the progressive institutionalization of a new, legal rational legitimacy
through which the political power was to be exercised. This process was
not, of course, smooth and uneventful. The 19th century in Brazil is characterized
by protracted conflicts between the central government and its administrative
and military bureaucracy, on the one hand, and local militia, organized
by local notables, on the other. In the end, however, the central administration
prevails, after the military build-up brought on by the Paraguayan war of
the late sixties, which coincides with the time when the Guarda Nacional
is stripped of its liturgical functions.
The Guarda Nacional established a continuity with the past that
makes its modernizing effects still more remarkable. This continuity was
clearly visible in two areas. One was a pattern of government that was heavily
predicated upon the active cooperation of local groups and classes in the
daily administration of the state. In this respect, there are two differences
worth mentioning between the patrimonialism of Colonial Brazil and the patrimonial
variety of Imperial Brazil. As mentioned earlier, the colonial pattern of
patrimonialism was not so much a deliberate and designed administrative
policy of the metropolitan state but simply the result of convenience and
opportunity. In addition, the colonial variety of patrimonialism was largely
based on an official policy of land prebendalism that gave a rather restricted
character to the patrimonial cooperation of civilian groups. On the other
hand, in the imperial variety of patrimonialism, land prebendalism was not
used as a means to enlist the private cooperation of individuals for state
functions; second, the creation of a corporation especially designed for
that purpose gave 19th century patrimonialism a much more collective character
and it implied a more thorough mobilization of the agrarian society for
the execution of administrative tasks.
It is in this difference in the pattern of patrimonial interaction between
the state and the local groups where it is possible to find one interpretation
for the rationalizing influence of imperial patrimonialism in comparison
with the colonial type. This latter type, as described, maintained a relative
distance between the prebendary official and the central bureaucracy without
corporative mediations between the two. Consequently, the official's exposure
to a bureaucratic, legal rational practice was rather weak. Similarly, given
the lack of a corporate mediation, whatever rationalizing effects the official's
administrative behavior might have had, these effects could not seriously
affect the administrative patterns of the royal bureaucracy. As a result,
the bureaucratization of the state could in all probability proceed without
affecting - - and unaffected by - - the patrimonial structure of local government.
The imperial type of patrimonialism was another story. The corporate mediation
established by the Guarda Nacional between the state bureaucrats
and the local patromonial officers significantly reduced the distance between
them and allowed the reciprocal influencing of traditional and rational
patterns of administrative orientation. The very existence of a legal code
(i.e. , the organic laws of the Guarda Nacional) prescribing the
official obligations of corporate officials with regard to the state apparatus,
made it possible for them to demand, whenever needed, a rational, bureaucratic
behavior from a state apparatus whose discretion and particularism had not
been previously challenged. Ironically, then, the patrimonial organization
unwillingly contributed to the institutionalization of a bureaucratic order.
It was the gradual institutionalization of that new administrative order
that transformed the liturgical corporation into a merely vicarious association
of agrarian notables. It is this vicarious "club" of landed patricians,
the so-called coronéis, that retains some hold over the nation's
collective memory. For unknown reasons, the historiographic representation
of the Guarda Nacional has neglected the first sixty years of corporate
life, when the association was responsible for the patrimonial organization
of local government. The last organic law of the Guarda Nacional,
passed in 1873, in fact struck a very severe blow against the liturgical
mission of the corporation. Stripped from its patrimonial functions in the
daily organization of public life, now limited to tasks of extraordinary
political contingency - - rebellions, revolutions and the like -- in a progressively
pacified Empire; allowed to meet just one day every year - - as opposed
to the daily regimentation of earlier times; deprived of its rank and file
organization, the corporation could not but become a merely vicarious association
of would-be commanders.
That change was, of course, a direct response to the progressive bureaucratization
of police and judiciary functions by the central state. In that sense, it
went hand in hand with an also progressive depatrimonialization of the Brazilian
administrative order and with the erection of a normative and institutional
boundary between the public order and the civilian, private order.
The second area in which the Guarda Nacional helped create a continuity
with the past was the militarization of the local society of agrarian Brazil.
It was, after all, thanks to the maintenance of this militarized character
of the agrarian community that the central state managed to institutionalize
a patrimonial administration predicated upon the discretionary employment
of freemen.
The militarization of pre-industrial Brazil"s social structure has received
very little attention so far. That pattern can be traced back to the first
century of colonization when the central state helped foster it by creating
military prebends for territorial administration and creating corpos
de ordenanças that would complement the military services of the regular,
professional army. During the second half of the 17th century,
moreover, the militias were called upon to contribute more decisively to
the daily organization of local government. The dissolution of the militias
in the first quarter of the 19th century did not put an end to
a pattern of militarization that had somehow accompanied the organization
of the state for over four hundred years. In fact, the old militias, loosely
attached to the state were replaced by the Guarda Nacional, closely
bound to the project of state-building. The militarization of the agrarian
society did not proceed during the Empire as merely an inertial residue
of the colonial past, but actually intensified as an after-effect
of the patrimonial program. In fact, the lack of a status order in the agrarian
society of the time was a formidable obstacle for the institutionalization
of collective liturgies on the part of the poor freemen. As a consequence,
the need for regimentation of the local classes for the fulfillment
of their administrative obligations was immediately felt. The sixty years
of patrimonial experiment also represent sixty years of regimentation of
the local community.
III
The transitions mentioned above cannot be considered a simple, smooth process
of development, but rather the result of a complex pattern of conflicts
and contradictory developments which had to be spelled out. It is a significant
feature of this pattern that it was unevenly distributed throughout Brazilian
territory and thus led to quite different political subcultures that the
country still witnesses today.
While the militarization of Brazilian traditional society was taking place
as a means to impose patrimonial control over vast territories, a rather
different pattern of military activities was taking place in the country's
southern borders, where the Portuguese and Spanish Empires met. There, the
constant fight against the Spaniards gave rise to a fully militarized society,
where the open pampa provided grazing grounds for wild herds which fed an
essentially nomadic population. As the population increased and the military
conflicts intensified, formal military bands headed by local caudillos gave
rise to a modern, bureaucratized military group, which became a full fledged
army during the war with Paraguay. Back from the war, the professional army
could not accept the continuation of traditional civilian militarization
as represented by the National Guard, even in its more symbolic forms. In
the following decades, the military never lost its strong gaucho imprinting;
but, at the same time, it became a major factor in the creation of a progressively
strong and differentiated state administration at the local and national
level.(5)
Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost region, was later to receive a
significant number of Portuguese, German and Italian migrants who would
eventually become wheat, fruit and wine growers, and jerked beef producers.
However, the new Europeans and the new economic activities were not enough
to change the state's political climate, closely controlled by a tight-knit,
civilian-military elite. For a long time, this was the region that contributed
most to the cadres of the Brazilian Army, and played a correspondingly central
role in the country"s politics, since, at least, the creation of the Republican
Party of Rio Grande in 1882. In 1930, after almost forty years of an active
presence in the country's political life, Getúlio Vargas comes to power,
in a direct line of succession with the Rio Grande state oligarchy. With
Vargas again in 1950, with the ill-fated government of Joao Goulart from
1961 to 1964, and, after 1964, with the presidents Costa e Silva, Medici
and Geisel, the gaucho tradition of militarization and authoritarian
control of public matters was to make its presence felt.
An important component of the Rio Grande tradition is the positivist ideology.
Brazil is probably the only country in the world where Auguste Comte's ideas
for the creation of modern, scientifically-run societies were taken quite
literally. In their search for an orderly, bureaucratized and centralized
public administration, the Brazilian military at the end of the last century,
and their civilian counterparts found in Comte their perfect ideologue.
Positivism talks about science, against theology and metaphysics, in favor
of popular education, and, politically, in favor of enlightened despotism
of those who know the truth. At the same time, positivism dismissed the
need to search for truth, to foster the development of knowledge, and the
free exercise of reason. You just have to believe in science - - as interpreted,
of course, by those that know best - - and then act accordingly. Benjamin
Constant, a military and civilian leader of the turn of the century, is
probably responsible for introducing, in the Brazilian flag, Comte's motto,
"'Ordem e Progresso. " Writing to his wife from the front during the Paraguayan
Campaign, he talks about positivism, "a new religion, but the most rational,
the most philosophical, and the only one that follows from the laws that
preside over human nature. It could not be the first, because its rise depended
on knowledge of all laws of nature. This religion could not have emerged
in the childhood of mankind, and not even when the various sciences were
still in their beginnings; and it would still not have emerged were it not
for the admirable spirit of Auguste Comte, to whom it was given, by the
vastness of his intelligence, to bridge the centuries which are still to
come, capturing by his wisdom the sciences at their culmination and giving
us his scientific religion, the only and final religion of man kind.(6)
This closed ideology of order and progress was not a simple and chancy bit
of 19th century scientism. It fit with the search for a centralized,
bureaucratized political system which could at the same time incorporate
the contributions of modern rationality to the growth of power and wealth,
without their counterparts of free-thinking and political liberalism. It
also corresponded to a century-old Portuguese tradition, which started when
Pombal, the prime minister of Portugal, decided to free his country from
Jesuit control by transforming Coimbra into a modern, professional school.
Throughout the 19th century, the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia and Sao
Paulo were to be the seats of a few professional schools - - of law, engineering,
medicine - - which were expected to produce administrators, officers, technicians
and doctors needed to serve the country's elite. There was no interest in
a university nor in scientific or cultural societies except as a hobby of
His Imperial Highness, the Emperor of Brazil.
However, His Majesty was able to combine this tendency to autocracy with
a liberal attitude toward the country's political life. This liberalism
was, of course, relative: politics was fair game for the political leadership
which was trained and groomed in the exercise of liturgical administration
in the National Guard. They could choose to be Conservative, Liberal and,
even, in a later period, Republicana Conservative and Liberal cabinets would
replace each other as the Emperor, using his powers as poder moderador,
saw fit. The cabinets were responsible to the Congress, but the Congress,
of course, was elected as the government wanted. Less than 4 per cent of
the country's population voted.
This combination of a strong, bureaucratized central administration and
a relatively weak and dependent local landlord class in the countryside
was to be shaken at the end of the 19th century by some fundamental changes
that swept the country in its last decades. One of these changes was already
mentioned, namely the creation of a large scale, bureaucratized army which
became increasingly impatient with the tributes the central government had
to pay to the political, civilian elite. Second, since 1850 Britain was
able to put an effective end to the traffic of African slaves to Brazil,
and with that the old economic order based on slave labor started to crumble.
At the same time, coffee emerged as a new source of wealth for the country,
starting in the slave-operated plantations in Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais,
but soon moving to Sao Paulo, where a plantation economy based on immigrant,
European labor was to develop.
Historically, the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo has been an area of independent
settlement and exploration of the Brazilian countryside which often conflicted
with the colonization effort conducted by the Portuguese crown. This conflict
reached its peak in 1700, when Paulista explorers finally discovered the
gold-rich areas of Minas Gerais, and had to surrender control to the Portuguese
administration, which, for that purpose, changed the capital of the colony
from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro From that period until a century and a half
later, Sao Paulo was to play a relatively marginal and obscure role in the
country's life, until its emergence as the basis for the coffee economy
at the end of the nineteenth century.
With the new military and the more modern forms of economic activities came
a new political ideology, Republicanism. The Brazilian republican movement
had, quite predictably, two - - or perhaps three - very different versions.
One was authoritarian, positivistic, modernizing. It was based on the more
modern sectors of the national bureaucracy, the army, which blended with
the political elite of Rio Grande do Sul, and had a strong plebiscitarian
appeal to an emerging middle class who wanted "the people, " and not the
traditional politicians, to run the country. The second type of republicanism
was, essentially, a liberalism which aimed to free the country's emerging
capitalist sectors from their cumbersome dependency on the Imperial administration.
It meant, essentially, political decentralization, freedom of movement for
the state leaderships, free and direct trade relationships between the emerging
economic sectors and the centers of world capitalism.
The political system that emerged was the least centralized political organization
Brazil ever had. There was a political contract between the central administration
and the state oligarchies, regular elections and succession of presidents.
It was still a democracy of the few, and it actually meant that the military
and political leaderships of the three biggest states in the country shared
the political power, to the exclusion of urban groups as well as the rural
poor.
This political arrangement was too feeble to withstand the pressures for
social and political participation in Rio and Sao Paulo, the unrest of a
new generation of young officers, and the contemporary requirements of a
more effective government on the post-depression economy. The result was
another political shift, which in 1930 reestablished the political centralization
which had been the landmark of the 19th century.
The nature of the 1930 revolution is one of the crucial questions in the
interpretation of Brazilian social and political history. After 1930 the
country started its process of industrialization, which led many to consider
that this was the first Brazilian bourgeois government. But there were no
bourgeois leaderships in sight, which led others to consider it as a middle-class
revolution. In fact, most of the "middle class" leaders where military,
although the regime itself did not assume a military character. Actually,
the new regime combined the support of some sectors of the traditional state
oligarchies, the unrest of the military groups in the South of the country,
and the dissatisfaction of the urban sectors in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo
in its establishment. Getlio Vargas, the new leader, was a direct heir of
the civilian-military oligarchy which had ruled Rio Grande do Sul for several
decades. The tendency towards increasing centralization and authoritarianism,
helped by the winds that blew from Europe, were unmistakable.
Nowhere was the resistance to the new regime stronger than in the state
of Sao Paulo. In 1932 Sao Paulo rose in arms, the population was organized
in militias, and people died in what became known as the "constitutionalist
revolution. " The movement was defeated, its leader ship had to go into
exile for some time. But Sao Paulo was already the country's economic center,
and some compromise had to be worked out. The refugees of 1932 were back
to run the state in 1934, with a clear notion of what they lost and a definite
intention to gain a political power which could be commensurate with their
economic strength.
Again - - does history repeat itself? -- Sao Paulo was to be the center
of a new liberalism, which opposed the centralizing tendencies of the national
bureaucracy with the demand for a social contract which could check the
expansion of unrestricted power on the part of an ever-growing and self-supporting
autocratic bureaucracy. It is possible to say that nowhere was this new
liberalism more evident than in the creation of the first Brazilian university,
in 1934, the University of Sao Paulo.
Referring to this university, one of its pioneers, Julio de Mesquita Filho,
had a vivid recollection of its social and political meaning: "Defeated
in the revolution (of 1932), we knew perfectly well that only through science
and persistence could we return to the hegemony we had enjoyed for so many
decades in the Federation. Paulistas to the bone, we had inherited
from our elders the endurance that was necessary for great undertakings.
And what higher monument could we raise to those who had sacrificed themselves
for the preservation of our inheritance, from the Bandeiras through the
Regency and the Republic, than a University?" (Inaugural speech at the School
of Medicine of Ribeirao Preto, 1958.)
The new University was to bring science, education, reason, and, in the
process, build a political elite which, through intellectual power, could
recover what the state had lost in the political and military confrontations
of naked power. The new University shared with its European counterparts
of one or two centuries earlier a belief in the power of knowledge, research
and culture to change and shape the future - - and it has to be said, in
behalf of those ideas, that, in spite of all its shortcomings, this is still
the most important and far-reaching experience in higher education Brazil
has ever had.
This does not mean that the federal administration lacked an educational
project of its own. This educational project was built up during the thirties,
and in the early forties a complete educational system was established for
the whole country. This system aimed to impart literacy, national values
and technical training to the masses, humanistic training for the middle
and higher strata, and professional and university degrees for the elite.
The whole system was to be organized and controlled from above, the teaching
of Portuguese was mandatory and primary education in foreign languages was
forbidden. All was set for the establishment of a homogeneous, well- stratified,
well-supervised and trained population, which could embody the ideals of
an emerging nation-state. Within this system, a University could never be
more than a place for the professional training of a technical elite, and
for the diffusion of scientific knowledge which, according to the Positivistic
outlook, was not a matter of research and inquiry, but of teaching and indoctrination.
It is possible to recognize in these two approaches to education and the
role of the university two quite different ways to foster rationality and
modernization. One nourishes itself in the European liberal tradition, and
views education and scientific development as a means of increasing social
consciousness, social participation, and, in the end, results in a political
system which is centered and organized in behalf of a self-aware and alert
citizenry. The other is essentially technocratic in spirit, and views education
and professional training as a means of mass regimentation for the building
of a homogeneous and centralized nation.
It would be easy, and easily misleading, to attach a plus sign to the first
and a minus sign to the second, and to understand this cleavage in Brazilian
culture, ideology and politics as a well-defined conflict between good and
evil. In fact, it is necessary to ask why the liberal ideals were so limited
and weak even in those parts of the country where some kind of bourgeois
revolution took place.
In Europe, the ideals of political liberalism, general education, scientific
development and rationalization of public administration were all aspects
of the social mobility of a new class which was able, for some time, to
capture the imagination of an entire society in a challenge to values of
the aristocratic past. As we know, this was not an easy process, and the
rising bourgeoisie had to fight and, in the end, share a significant part
of its newly-gained status and wealth with an increasingly organized and
demanding working sector. In contrast, Brazilian liberalism already started
in the higher rungs of the social ladder, in a modernizing elite without
much of a revolution to perform and practically immune to pressures from
below.
In other words, the key to understanding the weakness of Brazilian liberalism
lies in the concept of an authoritarian, conservative modernization, carried
out without a significant redistribution of resources to include the lower
strata in the countryside.(7) Rather than
having to fight against an old rural aristocracy, the new industrialists
in the state of Sao Paulo were closely related to it. As the central administration
began to implement a national policy of economic industrialization and to
build up a modern infrastructure of services for the country, it became
much more advantageous for the industrialists to cooperate with the government
than to insist on their free market, non-interventionist values and on the
reduction of public expenditure. The bitterness of 1932 did not wash away,
but in the early forties it was already weak enough to allow the Paulista
industrialists to participate in the country's drive for self-sufficiency
during the war years.
Conservative modernization in the countryside and capitalist development
through access to political favors, led to an extremely stratified society,
which did little to foster the development of a modern market economy or
of social participation, social mobility and income redistribution. It is
from this perspective that the central administration with its centralized
"people-oriented" substantive policies gains new significance. At its best,
it can reach out to the nation as a whole, beyond and above the rich few,
and provide something for the population as a whole - - a more accessible
educational system, some kind of social security, a policy for economic
development, and mechanisms for the masses symbolic participation in national
life, through radio and, especially, TV At its worse, it means political
patronage and fascism.
Brazilian history since the thirties should be understood in terms of the
interplay between different trends, which were already present at that time:
a trend towards an increasingly complex and sophisticated political stratum,
which descents from the liturgical honoratiores of the past; a
growing military and technocratic bureaucracy; a trend towards liberal politics;
a trend towards increasing mass participation in the industrial and rural
centers; and a process of continuous economic and technological modernization
in the countryside, which is socially and politically conservative, leading
to a continuous outflow of people from rural to urban centers(8) . Each of these "'trends" correspond to different
social groups and relatively autonomous social processes. They develop independently
up to the point when they contradict each other. When this happens, political
compromises are worked out, and sometimes open conflicts breaks up. The
development of a political stratum is thus limited by the strength of the
central bureaucracy; a civilian civil service cannot develop fully because
there is no well organized political system to give it legitimacy and set
its limits; the trends towards liberal politics are limited by the central
administration' s capacity to co-opt the emerging bourgeoisie to its projects
of state-building; mass participation is limited by the process of conservative
modernization in the countryside, and by the limits that the political and
economic alliances of the state bureaucracy place in any moves towards some
kind of participatory democracy. There is obviously, lastly, a military
component in the public bureaucracy which tends to be more structured, efficient
and heavy-handed than the remaining of the public sector.
To these internal trends and processes a very significant, external dimension
should be added. Brazil is part of an international community which places
very definite and important constraints on its development. probably the
most well-known of these constraints , and certainly a very important one,
is Brazil's reliance on foreign capital and technology, Above that, the
country's political and military alignment with the West has defined, historically,
fairly clear demarcation lines on how far plebiscitarian, populist and reformist
leanings of its governments can go.
But there is another external dimension which is also important: the presence
of values, aspirations and motivations of Western society, which penetrate
the country. They are the values of rich, consumption-oriented societies,
which usually bring enormous pressures and almost impossible demands upon
the country' s economic system. But they can also carry such notions as
personal freedom, freedom for social organization, social security, social
equity, and even a critical view of the benefits of endless industrialization.
External factors are thus also contradictory, and they add to the internal
trends in the determination of how and where the country can develop . They
could, eventually, help to create a national public opinion which, in a
context of increasing international awareness, could contribute to break
the deadlock produced by the combination of authoritarian bureaucracy and
conservative modernization which had so far prevailed in the country.
IV
If this ever happens, it might mean that it is possible to recreate a social
pact which could support a new type of rational-legal public bureaucracy,
without, and independently from, a bourgeois revolution that never was and
never will be. It just may be that, in contemporary times, Sao Palo or the
liberal spirit it once embodied, could recover its place as the center of
the country's political life, but this time with a much more open and egalitarian
system of social and political participation.
History is never simple and straightforward, and a paper-length global interpretation
of Brazilian state and society could not hope to fare better. It is, however,
possible to try to recover, at the end, the thread that supposedly pervades
the centuries of history we so quickly tried to interpret.
Politically, the main question that concern us is how the Brazilian state
was established, how it modernized itself and how it became what it is today.
This question is closely related to another, which deals with the relations
between this state and the country' s"civil society" throughout history.
We believe that there are at least two main dimensions for this analysis,
One has to with the process by which it evolved from a traditional to a
modern type of bureaucratic administration. The other deals with the political
content, the political pact that have historically supported the existence
of this administration - and here we deal directly with the question of
the relations between the state and the society as a whole.
We mentioned the main concepts and some more significant events and structures
that highlight this history. First, the Weberian concept of patrimonialism,
as a species of traditional domination, helped us to see that there are
several roads to modernization, each leading to quite different states in
the modern times. Then we dealt with one of the most significant political
structures of the country in its period of state building in the 19th
century, the Guarda Nacional. We saw how it helped to create a
modern and far reaching governmental structure in the absence of economic
resources similar to the gold that helped to create the much more bureaucratized
structures in Spanish America. At the same time, we saw how the Guarda
Nacional was too weak as a political structure to withstand the centralizing
tendencies which followed the creation of a modern army during the Paraguayan
campaign in the 187's.
After that, we tried to show how Brazil's political history could be seen
in terms of a protracted conflict between two opposite tendencies, towards
centralization and towards decentralization. We suggested that these are
not simple ideological options. The first tend to be authoritarian, nationalistic,
and sometimes populist and plebiscitarian; the second tends to be liberal,
oligarchic, cosmopolitan, and sometimes democratic. We discussed the transition
of 1930's to illustrate the two tendencies, and saw how they are not simply
a matter of political differences, but have implications on how science,
education and the whole society should and can be organized. Finally, we
tried to suggest which factors come into play when the history which develops
after the thirties is to be understood. The fact that some of them were
referred to very briefly - the patterns of colonial administration, the
slave system, the economic dependency towards Britain and later the United
States - does not that they are less significant; on the contrary, they
set the limits in which our analysis is valid.
We believe, however, that, in spite of its limits, there is place, in Brazilian
society, for politics, which is another way of saying that there are options
to be made. To show where the options are and what persons, groups and political
actors can affect them is the main justification for global interpretations
of this kind.
Notes
1. A shorter version of this section appeared in Fernando
Uricoechea, Patrimonialism, Electoral Patterns and Social Stratification
in Imperial Brazil (Rio de Janeiro IUPERJ, 1977).
2. For a discussion on the application of these concepts
to Brazil, see Schwartzman, S. , "Back to Weber: Corporatism and Patrimonialism
in the Seventies," in J. Malloy, ed. , Authoritarianism and Corporatism
in Latin America, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976.
3. This section appears also in Uricoechea, Patrimonialism,...
, op. cit. For a more comprehensive interpretation, cf. Uricoechea,
O Minotauro Imperial: A burocratização do estado patrimonial brasileiro.
São Paulo: DIFEL, 1978, forthcoming), and Uricoechea, '"Formación y expansión
del estado burocrático-patrimonial en Colombia y Brasil, " in Eugene Havens
et al., (eds.), Metodologia y desarrollo en las ciencias sociales
(Bogota: CEDE, Universidad de los Andes, 1977).
4. Already in the last quarter of the 18th century the
Colombian state had its patrimonial structure trimmed at the periphery.
Cf. José Maria Ots Capdequi, Instituciones de gobierno del
Nuevo Reino de Granada durante el siglo XVIII (Bogotá: Universidad
Nacional de Colombia, 1950); J. M. Ots Capdequi, Nuevos aspectos del
siglo XVIII Española en America (Bogotá: Editorial Centro, 1946), and
Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, Diferenciación social en el Nuevo Reino de Granada
en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1967).
5. The text that follows is based, essentially, on Simon
Schwartzman, Sao Paulo e o Estado Nacional (Sao Paulo, DIFEL, 1975).
For the political role of Rio Grande do Sul, J. Love, Rio Grande do
Sul and Brazilian Regionalism (Stanford, 1971). For the Brazilian military,
A. Stepan, The Military in Politics (Princeton 1971).
6. Apud Ivan Lins, História do Positivismo
no Brasil (Sao Paulo, Cia. Editora Nacional, 1967). See also, for a
more general interpretation, Antonio Paim, Historia das Ideias Filosóficas
no Brasil (Sao Paulo, USP Grijalbo, 1974).
7. For an analysis of conservative modernization in the
Brazilian countryside, see Elisa Pereira Reis, "Conservative Modernization
in Brazilian Agriculture: the post-abolition plantation"; paper presented
at the Latin American Studies Association meeting, Houston, Texas, November,
1977. For the identities between agricultural and industrialist groups in
Sao Paulo, cf. Warren Dean, The Industrialization of Sao Paulo, 1880-1945
(Texas, 1969).
8. For an overview of the political and social consequences
of the process of rural-urban migration, see Elisa Pereira Reis and Simon
Schwartzman, "Spacial Dislocation and Social Identity building: Brazil"
, forthcoming in the International Social Science Journal (Unesco,
Paris, 1978). Above that, the country's political and military alignment
with the West has defined, historically, fairly clear demarcation lines
on how far plebiscitarian, populist and reformist leanings of its governments
can go.
<