This useful collection has much to offer the specialist, the student, and the general reader interested in finding out what happened to Brazil between the ebullient Kubitschek years and the current boom. Latin Americanists will appreciate the extensive data and the many citations, which are convenient for working into the research of Brazilianist colleagues. In addition to beginners looking for term paper topics, graduate students will find these essays are a good way to approach the recent large volume of scholarship on Brazil. And general readers will welcome the clear expositions of many basic Brazilian issues. Thus the book will appeal to several constituencies, thanks to Riordan Roett and the other authors, almost all of whom teach at Vanderbilt.
Outstanding, in my opinion, is Douglas Chalmers’s discussion of authoritarian politics, based on vertical structures of patron-client relationships. This is an emerging type of polity which cannot be explained adequately by either pluralist or marxist analysis. In assessing why Brazil appears to be developing into “a sort of flexible corporate state in which politics takes place essentially within nominally administrative structures” (p. 52), Chalmers places Brazil within the Latin American context and draws upon the rapidly growing literature on corporatism, a topic of great current interest. Peter Bell tells why the initial intimacy in Brazilian-American relations became strained, while perhaps underplaying the fundamental congruence of economic interest between the two nations, ties which were furthered and strengthened in this decade. Roett provides a good chronology of events and relies heavily upon Samuel Huntington’s by now classic analysis.
Also strong (if less speculative) are the four essays on the economy by Werner Baer and Isaac Kerstenetzky, William H. Nicholls, Andrea Maneschi, and David E. Goodman. Noteworthy is Nicholls’s demolition of the widespread myth that Brazilian agriculture did not produce adequately in recent times. Douglas Graham’s long essay on higher education reform is well done, and he provides a much needed account of a main thrust in Brazilian government policy during the 1950s. Emilio Willems, who writes on the middle class farmers in Paraná, gives us a glimpse of a much larger phenomenon, the on-going frontier. The remaining essays on the Church and on Brazilian literature are all well worth reading.
Aside from Roett’s chapter on the military and Bell’s essay on foreign policy, the other authors chose not to comment directly on the highly charged political events and ideological issues which distinguished this near decade of authoritarian government from the democratic 1950s. Readers interested in dependency, specifically in the broad effects and consequences of Brazil’s heavy reliance on foreign capital and technology, will not be satisfied. To be sure, Baer and Kerstenetzky do discuss the probable social costs attendant upon the government’s economic policies. There is nothing on Indians, now undergoing the final agonies of forced acculturation as the frontier expands, nor is the burgeoning urban environment treated here. The collection is strong on substantive changes in government structures, politics and the economy. As is usual with such collections, the essays hang together loosely around a general theme, in this case institutional and policy changes in the 1960s, with some attention to the society and literature. And while there is no essay by a contemporary historian, several authors are nonetheless refreshingly alert to a key question: how much of the new Brazil was prefigured in the old?
