This slim volume provides a good sampling of the work and thought of one of Brazil’s major historians. Included are scholarly essays, newspaper articles, interviews, and debates.
For the late José Honório Rodrigues, “history is always contemporary, always present” (p. 144). It differs from the social sciences in that its perspective is “long term” (p. 19). To grasp long-term causality, the historian must study the present as well as the past. Proficiency in the art of history—which is “to reveal the dignity and the values of human life” (p. 39)—requires observation of the current scene, for “contemporaries are the only people [the historian] can capture alive” (p. 97). And they are the beneficiaries: history must be written “to serve the present and the living” (p. 43). In short, it must have a social purpose.
“I have never been a Marxist,” Rodrigues declares. “My political and ideological position is absolutely antidictatorial, democratic, liberal—from the political, social, and economic standpoint” (p. 143). He served the cause of liberal democracy in Brazil not as a political activist, but as a historian, archivist, and writer. As director of the Brazilian National Archives (1958-64) he fought to open government records to researchers. The military coup of 1964 cost him his job, as the new rulers exhibited the usual—for “totalitarians, left or right” (p. 105)—phobia of freedom of information. Earlier, as a civilian participant in conferences at the Brazilian Superior War College (ESG), he had become frighteningly familiar with the obscurantist mentality of those officers who would try to rule Brazil without regard for its people or its history. José Honorio’s experience with the ESG had a profound influence on “the visão joseonoriana of the history of Brazil” (p. 197).
While Brazilians make national history, José Honorio’s view is that most of the history that they “consume” is universal, produced by major forces operating in the world at large. Though Brazil has had minimal influence on world developments, to which the nation has had to adjust, Brazilians and their Portuguese forebears are the ones most responsible for shaping Brazilian society. The “colonialism” that has subjugated Brazil since independence from Portugal has been internal: the oppression of the Brazilian majority by a native ruling class. The liberal impulse of the independence period was soon tamed by conservatives who devised this new form of colonialism to replace Portuguese “absolutism.” Scholars may differ about the roles played by specific individuals in this process, or about the significance of certain dates—1824, 1831, 1842—but Rodrigues’s broad view is clear and, it seems to me, incontrovertible. “Brazil is a historic example,” he writes, “of a society of unshakable continuity, conservative, traditionalist” (p. 25). In Brazil, no revolutions have triumphed, “only counterrevolutions, from Independence to our time. The dominant forces have always had the strength to contain profound aspirations for change and turn back [revolutionary] movements in order to sustain the dominant class, its system, and its privileges” (p. 123).
Rodrigues discerns three currents in Brazilian history: “acquiescence, apathy, and violence” (p. 206). Although Brazil’s national experience has not been especially violent, he reminds us that millions of blacks and Indians perished under the Portuguese colonial regime, and that the war for independence in Brazil was far from bloodless and involved more military and naval forces than did the independence struggle in any other South American country. The threat of violence preserved slavery in Brazil until 1888 and denied most Brazilians access to information and full participation in the electoral process until the present. Rodrigues reveals the “fallacy of the cordial Brazilian man” (p. 24). While Brazil’s rulers have conciliated supposed adversaries and incorporated some outsiders into the governing class, they have regularly resorted to force to keep the majority of Brazilians away from the levers of political power. Today, the coercion has abated and the Brazilian liberal-democratic revolution seems finally triumphant—but the visão joseonoriana of Brazilian history urges caution and vigilance. Victory celebrations may be premature.
