Organiser le désordre: Raízes do Brasil en 1936

Abstract

This article seeks to reconstruct the political dilemma faced by Sergio Buarque de Holanda in the first edition of his work Raízes do Brasil. It argues that in the construction of the arguments contained in his debut, the author dialogued intellectually with two important Brazilian thinkers, Oliveira Vianna and Gilberto Freyre. The engagement with the works of these authors helped Sérgio Buarque delineate the negative and positive aspect of the type of sociability passed down from Brazil’s colonial past – “cordiality” – and to diagnose the incompatibility between political doctrines and national reality, and also seeking how to overcome this disjunction. The idea of “organizing disorder” reflects the difficulty in founding a respectable state in a society engrained with anarchical elements without repressing the traditional cultural substrate of its population.