Roots of Brazil

Roots of Brazil came out in 1936, at the height of a generation of writers trying to make sense of a Brazil fresh out of the Revolution of 1930, when the country swapped the power of the states for a more centralized government. The book was published by José Olympio, in the Documentos Brasileiros series, alongside other classics pursuing the same project: explaining the social formation of the country.

Unlike other classics of the same generation, which lean on abundant detail about life on the colonial plantation, Sérgio Buarque writes a short, dense essay, almost a philosophical argument. He revised the text in 1948 and again in 1956, fixing passages and adding notes, proof that he saw his own book as a work in progress, not a closed truth.

The central thesis can be summed up like this: Brazil inherited from Portugal a way of organizing life in society that rests more on the person and on affection than on impersonal rules and offices, and that inheritance keeps shaping how Brazilians deal with authority, with the state, and with one another.

The first chapter does not talk about Brazil yet: it talks about Portugal and Spain within Europe itself. Sérgio Buarque describes the Iberian Peninsula as a region that resisted, more than the rest of the continent, a trait gaining strength in places like Holland: the discipline of subjecting individual will to a rule or an organized body.

He calls this the culture of personality: a tendency to value the individual, personal talent, and merit recognized by face and name, instead of valuing the office or the impersonal association among strangers. Where other parts of Europe early on built guilds and orders that were strong as collective bodies, the Iberian Peninsula kept betting on the figure of the standout individual.

This distinction matters because it is the foundation of everything that follows in the book: for the author, Brazil did not invent personalism on its own, nor the resistance to cold rules and to the anonymity of the orderly line. It inherited this even before existing as a colony, in the cultural baggage of those who crossed the Atlantic.

To explain the mentality the colonizers brought, Sérgio Buarque proposes two ideal types, meaning models that help us think, even knowing that no real person fits perfectly into either one. On one side is the worker: someone who values steady effort and long-term planning. On the other is the adventurer: someone who aims for big, immediate results and treats the long, methodical road as a waste of time.

The adventurer is not, in the book, a synonym for slacker or irresponsible person. He is someone willing to take a high risk for a high reward, in a hurry to harvest results and with little patience for investing decades in a single trade, the spirit of someone who would rather prospect for gold than plow a field, who would rather find a shortcut than slowly build a road.

For Sérgio Buarque, the Portuguese colonizer brought this adventurer spirit to Brazil in a more pronounced way than other colonizing peoples. Not because he was braver or greedier than other Europeans, but because Portugal's own formation, a small kingdom turned early toward long-distance trade, pushed in that direction.