The modern “scientific” model of historiography experienced a twofold – epistemic and political – triumph in the nineteenth century, when history imposed itself as evidence, due to the possibility of a direct grasping of the past in a methodologically verifiable way.¹ At that moment, historical narratives became instruments through which collectivities could construct their own genealogies as nations, based on a specific notion of time as an intrinsic and immanent quality of the real world.² As objects of historians’ writings, nations acted as an unsurmountable frontier for elaborations about past experience and expectations regarding the future, and, consequently for the conceptions of history itself, as it was establishing its place as a discipline in the European context.³ In fact, if, on the one hand, the uses of the past and of history-writing were beyond doubt in the construction of the political identities of nineteenth-century nation-states, on the other the opposite is no less important if we call to mind the manifold and persistent uses of the “nation” category by historians, in spite of the semantic complexity of the concept, as the organising principle of a corpus of significant texts that constituted the histories of historiography.

From this perspective, the present article briefly assesses Brazilian historiography from the 1840s to the 1950s and identifies impasses, tensions and disputes that marked the concomitant processes of nationalising the past and institutionalising historical research in the country. The central reasoning to be explored is that, in those decades, the writing of Brazil’s history demanded several types of narrative and interpretative reconfigurations regarding the colonial past. They portrayed a nation with multiple temporalities and contrasts, then perceived as structural features of the present time and causes to explain its alleged “backwardness”, thereby contributing to a continuous postponement of the future expectation of fully attaining modernity. Thus, in the following pages, we propose a panoramic, rather than exhaustive, examination of representative works and authors at decisive moments in the history of Brazilian historiography, keeping as a focus of our analysis the relationship between the writing of history, the issue of nationality and the development of variable modes of the experience of time.

In the nineteenth century, the most effective efforts to construct a historiography in Brazil emerged in the context of institutionalising historical research and writing, with the creation of the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute (Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, IHGB) in 1838, in Rio de Janeiro^. The consolidation of the IHGB as a leading locus of knowledge production coincided with the centralisation process of the monarchical state in the 1840s and 1850s and marked a continuity of the civilisational project that started with the Portuguese colonisation.⁴ The institution took up the tasks of providing the historical, geographic and ethnographic references of what “Brazil” and the “Brazilians” were, and these references were expected to contribute to the identity amalgam of the elements involved in the heterogeneous formation of a society marked by slave work and the existence of indigenous populations. The nation, conceived as a regulatory ideal in the IHGB’s historiographical project, was understood as a tropical unfolding of a white and European civilisation.⁵

National history immediately became the object of a debate that resulted in different perceptions of how writing about it should be. How could one possibly change a society that “emerged from the coinage of colonial currency” into the object of a historical narrative in the model of the histories of civilised European nations?⁶ An even more specific challenge involved determining what time and place could be ascribed in a history of Brazil to those “others” who populated its territory – indigenous peoples and Africans – as extraneous elements to civilisation. It was the task of a botanist and explorer, Carl Friedrich von Martius, to outline the first proposal of a solution to the problem in his dissertation “How to write the history of Brazil” (“Como se deve escrever a História do Brasil”, 1844), which provided guidelines for approaching the national past through a narrative that should inescapably integrate the elements with a distinct nature that added to the emerging Brazilian population, whose particularity was found in the mixture of three races: the American, “copper-coloured” race; the white or “Caucasian” race; and the dark-skinned or “Ethiopic” race.⁷ The investigation of the national past should extend back to the time before the overseas conquest to include the history of Brazil’s “primitive” inhabitants. The original aspect of Martius’ proposal consisted not only in the attempt to integrate the indigenous element to the formation-process of a nationality – which may be attributed to the Romantic component of Brazil’s nineteenth-century culture – but, above all, in a recognition of its condition as a historical reality previous to the arrival of the Portuguese. Such a fact was not evinced in the historiography of the day, for which the history of Brazil had effectively started with the Portuguese discovery and occupation.

A response to the overarching wish to consolidate the imperial order, to construct a “rhetoric of nationality”, was to assume a retrospective look towards the experience of the pre-independence past in the hope of making it intelligible as a stepping-stone in the historical process leading to national political unity.⁸ The first work to embody such sense of purpose was the História Geral do Brasil (General history of Brazil), published from 1854 to 1857, by Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, with a narrative based on a vast array of documents, which Capistrano de Abreu referred to as a “cyclopean mass of accumulated materials”. Varnhagen produced a historical narrative that intended to portray “the genuine national point of view” and, thus, to represent progress, in contrast to the accounts of chroniclers and historians of colonial times, for whom Brazil was merely an appendix of Portugal.⁹ It was up to Varnhagen, who became the viscount of Porto Seguro, to establish the links of continuity between the colony and the nation in a temporal order through which the past becomes a forger of the present and the future. In spite of its place as a foundational milestone of national historiography, this narrative model would become limited vis-à-vis the time experience of the generation of intellectuals who became active from the 1870s.

In 1879, the writer Machado de Assis referred to a “new generation” that had emerged in the country, recognising in his poetic works the expression of “something that is not yet the future, but no longer is the past”.¹⁰ Taken from one of the author’s famous critical texts, this citation is noteworthy as it points to the ambiguous situation of Brazil’s intellectual production in the final decades of the nineteenth century. An opposite view to Machado de Assis can be identified in a phrase of Sílvio Romero, which was bound to predominate as a watchword for identifying the intellectual context of the 1870s: “a whole batch of new ideas” were in motion in Brazil, marking the rupture with the Romantic past and the dismantling of the imperial tradition in all instances. It is important to point out that the profusion of works on themes that were at once literary, historical and ethnographic was a sign of the incipient delimitations of disciplinary boundaries, and that criticism, far from being a practice of specialists, represented an attitude of reflexive openness for issues that were raised as “national issues”, which would be rethought based on the scientificism of new European theoretical references.¹¹

The problem of national formation lingered amid an acute and repeated questioning, for instance by Capistrano de Abreu in 1911: “is the Brazilian population a new people or a decrepit one? And are the facts idealised throughout time worthier than the current ones?”¹² Abreu was not the only one to recognise the failure of some reformist aspirations – highly- prized for men of letters born in the second half of the nineteenth century – that aimed at an effective political and social transformation of the country after the crisis of the Second Regency, the abolition of slavery (1888) and the establishment of the Republican regime (1889). Differently from the generation of Romantic writers of the beginning of the previous century, who were driven by the belief in a temporal order capable of forging links of continuity between the past, present and future of the nation, the “frustrated paladins” of the First Republic shared a burden of doubt and disbelief regarding the form of the newly constituted nationality in Brazil.¹³ It was therefore inevitable that the criticism of obsolete institutions, values and practices of the monarchical regime should also extend to the foundations that explained the historical ordering of the national past, exposing the limitations of the historiographical model of which Varnhagen was the main exponent. It became necessary to overcome the explanatory logic of a historiography committed above all to the purposes of the imperial state, which saw the colonial movements that were “engendering” independence as the product of a crisis, since they were opposing an allegedly necessary and inevitable order of things – that is, the formation of a centralised and territorially unified national state as the crowning achievement of a civilising process in the tropics that had started with colonisation.

The sense of incompleteness regarding the formation of nationality, as it stood before the ideals of civilisation and progress (and linked to the awareness of innumerable gaps to be bridged in relation to colonial times), was broadly shared by the authors who emerged in Brazil’s intellectual scene in the late nineteenth century, thus indicating the impasses around historical writing. The expectations of grasping the deepest extracts of the nation’s past converged in a renewal of the interpretation of the country’s history based on ethnographic references, which allowed the enigmatic, “obscure” indigenous history to be approached. After 1870, this history no longer could be written without considering the historical background of the “savages”, which meant to qualify them as “primitives” living at a specific stage of the modern temporal order.¹⁴ Nor could such a narrative confine itself to the events of the coastal conquest; it needed to shed light on the inland’s slow-paced occupation. As much as the “indigenous question”, the sertão (Brazilian backlands) was an enigmatic object to be studied and an unavoidable task for deciphering the nation’s history. This was, in short, an attempt to seek the appropriate ways to represent the time of the nation in the context of a unique historical reality that unfolded in distinct and simultaneous spaces and times.

The view of Brazil’s geographical, historical and ethnographic discontinuities reached its most tangible form in Euclides da Cunha’s account of his journey to Canudos in 1897. Written from the experience of distance and otherness, his testimony in Os sertões (1902) became a canonical work of Brazilian social thought, revealing a mismatch between the scientificist theoretical arsenal mobilised by the author, on the one hand, and the reality that presented itself to observation, on the other; in other words, a mismatch between the cognitive structures of civilisation and the sertão’s testimony of barbarism. How could one possibly account for a geographic space marked by a “play of antitheses” and by the peculiar figure – both “strong” and “retrograde” – of the local mestizo? How could one to describe and explain such an unknown land and folk?¹⁵

As Fernando Nicolazzi correctly remarked, in Os sertões the solution to the question brings up a specific conception of time.¹⁶ The experience of the distance covered in the space between the coast of Bahia and the inhospitable backlands, and the view of the sertanejo as the “other” of civilised man, are translated in the form of a displacement in time, that is, as a “separation between the present and the past, between the modern and the savage, between culture and nature, between history and its denial”.¹⁷ The conceptual apparatus used by Cunha made it possible to apprehend a fleeting and unknown reality, but it also set the limits of this narrative marked by distance and difference. After all, the Canudos incident presented itself as an eloquent lesson for the present and a notorious example of defects in the social evolution of the nation, which, for the author, was “condemned to civilisation” in spite of the still living presence of the forces of its past. The journey to the distant sertão highlighted a disagreement in the national historical order, inasmuch as its geographical remoteness from the “civilised” coast was an undeniable sign of a time-distance that expressed itself in the Canudos incident (for him, “a retrocession in history”) and in the existence of the “retrograde” sertão inhabitants. The acknowledgment of coevalness and of the spatialisation of time would not be possible without the assumption of civilisation and modernity as universal values.¹⁸ It is not a coincidence that for Cunha, the solution arose from his strong conviction that the “driving force of history” would make civilisation advance towards the sertões.¹⁹

The acknowledgment of overwhelming differences and considerable time lapses that set Brazilian society apart from modern European civilisation accentuated the impasses in the search for historical explanations for the formation of identity in Brazil. These dilemmas doubtlessly emerged in the reception of the discourses of modernity in vogue in nineteenth-century Europe, which asserted not only a hierarchy among the evolutionary stages of societies, but also a concomitant specialisation of different time-notions. The complex task of deciphering the deepest causes of the alleged Brazilian inability to join the march of civilised societies exposed a conspicuous disagreement in modernity’s unitary temporal order, and, as a result, imposed the need for new forms of representing the past, thus creating space for new interpretations of the national “backwardness”.

As if the criticisms of the so-called 1870 generation were not enough, the war that raged in Europe from 1914 became an additional element in the mind frame of anxieties of Brazilian intellectuals. By presenting the ugly face of the belle époque, the conflict would suggest the failure of the civilisation that hitherto had been followed as a model. It imposed, as a result, the need to either deepen or retake in different terms the reflection on the nation and its destiny. This, for instance, was announced in the editorial of the first issue of Revista do Brasil in January 1916: “We are not yet a nation that knows itself … we are a nation that has not yet had the courage to break through onwards by itself, in a rigorous and fiery projection of its personality.”²⁰

This publication soon became a leading forum for debate on the national question. It was crucial to evaluate and discuss the above-mentioned “backwardness” of the country and to point out paths for building a suitable and adequate future for the Brazilian nation – in other words, a future capable of fully reflecting its singularities.²¹ As such, the future could only emanate from the nation itself; it was urgent to reach back to the past in order to identify the fundamental traces of the formation of a national identity, or, even better, brasilidade (“Brazility”), as it was termed. The key to the future was to be found in the past, and between the former and the latter a present had to be overcome. Beyond establishing the continuity between distinct historical times, it was important to record, and even to propose, the rupture between them: this was the compass by which a large part – but not all – of Brazilian intellectuality guided itself in the early twentieth century.

At the quintessential locus of historians – the IHGB – everything remained in order, as showed the First Congress of National History, held in Rio de Janeiro in September 1914. Having as its focus the period from 1500 to 1871 and the chronology of the “great political events” of the colonial and imperial period, the congress reaffirmed the interpretative model of the past, which had been practiced at the institute since its inception. In the same year, Alberto Torres voiced his dissatisfaction with the social and political studies on Brazil, which were based on postulates and data that referred to other countries and found no possible application to the reality of societies formed by colonisation, hence the conclusion that contemporary intellectuals were undergoing an anarchic crisis (“a tremendous confusion of ideas”) without a direction and bound to repetition. It was urgent to become aware of such problems and, in Torres’ view, this did not involve equipping oneself with concepts and truths, or even becoming attached to explicative systems or formulas. The path to be pursued was one of analysis and synthesis.²²

A few years later, the discomfort with the intellectual production was expressed more vehemently. In the 1920s, the discussions on modernity and modernism were presented as the starting point for “rediscovering” Brazil. In the debate, Tristão de Athayde acknowledged in 1924 that there was a mismatch between the country’s reality and its existing interpretations. Athayde accused the previous generation of evading social and political action, and, further on, expressed a hard-hitting view of Brazil that inserted the country in the Latin American context. In his words:

Thus, Athayde also expressed a consciousness of coevalness between “civilisation” and “barbarism”, indicating a perception of time that was quite representative of Brazilian historical and historiographical culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Hence the diagnosis that Brazilians were standing, as in no other epoch of their history, “before a multiplicity of times of growth”, which made that moment “anarchic in its appearance … A quite modern world is pressing itself over, or else inserting itself, here, in a quite past world.”²⁴ The acknowledgment of the coexistence of distinct and temporally distant stages produced a sense of instability in which everything seemed fleeting, ephemeral and incapable of creating lasting effects for posterity. In such context, the present was experienced as a time in which past and future overlapped in a chaotic and meaningless way.²⁵

In that moment of uncertainties, an author made an invitation to cast a look “for an instant to the visible, palpable and living reality of this today that emerges, transforms itself and fades at a glance, as the moving landscape of an automobile’s ride”. What was seen then was “the spectacle of a people living in a territory that legend – beyond truth – considers as an immense territory of unequalled wealth, but not knowing how to explore and enjoy its lot”. This was how Paulo Prado reaffirmed his purpose in a long postscript to his 1928 Retrato do Brasil: ensaio sobre a tristeza brasileira (Portrait of Brazil: essay on Brazilian sadness). As a country full of problems that were worsened by the “vice of imitation” and petty politics, “Brazil does not advance indeed: it lives and grows, as a sick child grows, with the slow development of a poorly organised body”. Ignoring the transformations that were taking place abroad, “Brazil sleeps in its colonial slumber”.²⁶ As its subtitle suggests, the work had the intention of showing how and why “in a radiant land, a sad folk lives”. Focused on the study of the colonial period, the Retrato announced in the themes of each of its chapters the reasons for the “sadness” that defined the “Brazilian national character”: lust, covetousness, sadness itself and Romanticism – the latter, in the sense of a sentimental, pompous, egotist and, therefore, useless rhetoric.

According to Prado, the country could only count on two “catastrophic” solutions to avoid the dismantling of its unity: “war, revolution”.²⁷ Aware of his own radicalism, he understood that faced with an intolerable present state, being a revolutionary meant to become a “builder of a new order” and to believe in the future, “which cannot be worse than the past”.²⁸

Prado’s diagnosis would soon, in 1930, attain a prophetic mood due to the conspiracy that toppled president Washington Luis, replacing him with Getúlio Vargas. Even though the Revolution of 1930²⁹ was far from achieving the substantial rupture so many intellectuals yearned for, it did put an end to a republic, which was henceforth referred to as the “Old Republic”. By doing so, it brought up the urgent need to build a new state and a new society within the existing nation, as well as the need to establish – perhaps more than ever – another history capable of corresponding to the newly inaugurated temporal order.

In the section “Notas e comentários” (Notes and comments) of its November 1939 issue, Revista do Brasil highlighted a significant development in the “taste for historical and sociological studies referring to Brazil”, along with the relevant number of authors who were dedicating themselves to it. This movement sought “a more intimate and deeper knowledge of our formation, of our development, of the peculiarities of our national existence”.³⁰ The remark reflected an important turning point in relation to the customary grasp of representing the past, that is, the mere chronological narrative of events was giving way to the investigation of the manifold elements and dynamics of Brazilian social life.

There was also no doubt in relation to the author responsible for it – a proof of this fact was that the above-mentioned article in Revista do Brasil nominally quoted him. In 1933, with the first edition of Casa-Grande & Senzala: formação da família brasileira sob o regime da economia patriarchal (translated as The masters and the slaves: a study in the development of Brazilian civilization), Gilberto Freyre offered some answers to the “national question” that stood out more sharply in the agenda of Brazilian intellectuals in the early decades of the twentieth century, through the debate marked by the race mixture issue. It is important to highlight the proximity of the book with the hypothesis of the “mixture of the three races” presented by Martius in his 1844 dissertation. For the generation of Brazilian intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century, the contact among the distinct ethnic groups – indigenous, white and black – was seen as the problem that crippled national progress and Brazil’s access to the values of modern western civilisation. The originality of Freyre’s work resides in the substantive change in this evaluation of the “national problem” and in his emphasis on the particular value of indigenous and African influences, and of the hybrid character of Portuguese colonisation.³¹ His linkage with the North American anthropology of Franz Boas allowed him to set the notions of race and culture apart, while ascribing to the latter an absolute primacy in the analysis of social life. Based on this perspective, the race-mixture notion does not mean a mystifying idea of the colonial past: it was applied by Freyre, who already in the first pages of the work loses the aura of his identity as a “pure” European white, to deconstruct the aura of the identity of the Portuguese colonisers as “pure” white European. Thus, in Casa-grande & senzala, the formation of Brazil – and this is the central argument of the work – is defined as a balancing of countless antagonisms, starting from the deepest of all: the antagonism between the landowner and the slave. In this process, the African element plays a preponderant role of mediation between the European and indigenous cultures.³²

One of the distinctive hallmarks of Freyre’s work, which has been highlighted by many scholars, is the use of a colloquial language with a touch of orality, resembling a conversation. This feature allows for the creation of a link between experience and narrative: by using the oral language in many passages of his work, the author seems to demonstrate the survival of colonial values in the present. Approaching the patriarchal experience in Brazil’s historical formation, Freyre builds on a particular conception of time that evinces an intimate and homogeneous linkage between past, present and future. As Nicolazzi has pointed out, for Freyre, writing about the colonial past is to write out what was seen (even if through the testimonies of chroniclers and travellers) and what is still seen; it is, therefore, to bring this past’s presence into the present, and to bring it to life by its representation.³³ Thus, under the “balancing of antagonisms” motto, one may identify a meaning of temporality, which, far from presenting itself as a lapse and a mismatch in the temporal order – both, strongly demarcated in Cunha’s narrative – points out to a possible conciliation between the past and the present experience of Brazilian society in its future projections.

The importance attained by Freyre’s interpretation of history did not by any means prevent other representations of the national past from taking shape in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the most vigorous of these other representations was written by Caio Prado Júnior in two somehow complementary works, Evolução política do Brasil (Brazil’s political evolution) in 1933 and Formação do Brasil contemporâneo (Formation of contemporary Brazil) in 1942, which proposed a “materialistic interpretation” of Brazilian history. The first of these books, albeit dealing with the Portuguese colonisation, the conflicts between the colony and colonial power, independence and the main national tensions in the nineteenth century, was not, as its author claims, “a history of Brazil” but “a simple essay” presenting a synthesis of it.³⁴ Theoretically refined and based on the Brazilian historiography produced up to his time, Prado Júnior analysed the “political evolution of Brazil” in the light of the economic structure put in place by the Portuguese, whose logic of exploitation of the territory led to continuities and discontinuities in the formation of Brazilian society. Its purpose was evidently to grasp such permanencies and ruptures in order to overcome the reality of the 1930s and 1940s, still marked by economic backwardness, social exclusion and political weakness, as aspects linked to the colonial-heritage problem.³⁵ The very same issue guided the work Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo, now with a wider scope, covering “that past that seems to be distant, but still surrounds us from all sides”;³⁶ more precisely what Prado Júnior called the “colonial system”, since its inception in the sixteenth century until its exhaustion in the nineteenth century. This deliberately established arrival point is presented as the “decisive moment” that, on the one hand, led to the final product of the “work undertaken throughout three centuries of colonisation”, and, on the other, to the explanatory key “for interpreting the subsequent historical process and its result, namely today’s Brazil … erected upon that foundation”.³⁷

Therefore, for Prado Júnior, the historical time of the Brazilian nation not only had an order, but also a meaning. The first chapter of Formação do Brasil contemporâneo clearly makes this point both in its title – “Meaning of colonisation” – and its opening words, which assert that “seen from the distance, every people has a certain ‘meaning’ in its evolution”. The historian’s task, thus, consists in delimiting the “set of essential facts”, demonstrating the unity that converges around “an uninterrupted main line of events that follow on each other in rigorous order and always aimed at a particular orientation”.³⁸

Contrary to what his words suggest, Prado Júnior’s conception of history cannot be reduced to a mere teleological statement. Along with his analysis of the historical chronology in the form of thematic approaches (“settlement”, “material life”, and “social life”, with several other subthemes), he proposed “the first logical approach in the history of Brazil”, and, as Fernando Novais affirms, was possibly the first author “to treat the history of Portuguese colonisation in its own terms, as the history of a colony that becomes a nation”.³⁹ That is, in his work, time and the past are reordered in a new configuration that propitiates access to Brazilian history from other avenues, which – interlinked by dialectics – articulated the totality of the colonial experience to an external dynamic, that is, to dynamic of a broader system.

If Freyre pointed towards a possible conciliation between the present and the past, and if Prado Júnior established a way of reordering historical time and providing it with meaning, another author on his turn sought to observe the present in the light of the past, contributing to the reflection on the possibilities of historical change, of “our revolution”, less as a rupture and more as an ongoing and slow – but certain – process.

Roberto Vecchi has pointed that in the temporal structure of Raízes do Brasil, the past acts as a residue capable of determining the contemporary condition of the country. According to him, the axis at the heart of this work consists in the combination of two antagonistic times: a regressive time associated with the past; and a progressive time related to the future and to a sluggish revolution. The present, then, appears as a “residual time” or as a “time in between” forged by this bent and simultaneously inscribed in both temporalities. In other words, the present is “a remnant of the clash between the regressive time of the leather-like cordial past in its existing ruins … and the other, antagonistic and progressive temporal directive of modernity”. There are, therefore, two antagonistic times: the time of the past, which remains, and the time of the “revolution” in progress – both seen from the vantage-point of the present.⁴⁰ For Tristão de Athayde in the 1920s, such a present had “a multiplicity of times of growth”, capable of making it “anarchic in its appearance”.⁴¹ The prospect of overcoming the colonial roots in the future sustained itself by a denaturalisation of the past as a contingency (what did happen could have otherwise not happened), and this was precisely what provided legitimacy to action in the present, according to another commentator of the work, Thiago Lima Nicodemo.⁴² In other words, Buarque de Holanda sought to break up a nationalist perspective that projected a “meaning” onto the history of Portuguese America as if this history were a sufficient and necessary clue to the formation of Brazilian nationality. Thus, he turned the assumption of nineteenth-century nationalist historiography into a historiographical problem, by challenging its anachronism.

For Nicodemo, this work describes Brazil’s formation process as a “not yet” that seeks to annul the nation as a teleological assumption of the historical narrative, since only by overcoming the archaic, Iberian-rooted past would it be possible for the country to establish itself as a culture and a society on its own. It is a matter of understanding the nation as a historical construct and not as a teleological assumption. The central element in Buarque de Holanda’s conception of history is, therefore, the interaction of two distinct temporal dimensions. One of them is found in the dialectics involving Iberian elements and native elements in the colonisation process. The other is the analysis of how these elements, while carrying their own logic, were reused in the formation of the Brazilian state and nation in a process that had unfolded from the nineteenth century to the present, that is, the 1930s, when the work was published.⁴³ In this sense, for Buarque de Holanda, the coexistence of distinct times was made possible by considering the past as residue in the present. At the same time, the break with the past is seen as possible and the first condition for attaining this break would be to know the “roots” of such a past – a metaphor that allows a more complex look at the formation process, with its manifold aspects and directions.

The idea of modernity gained new contours during the 1940s and 1950s. The decadence of coffee farming in the 1930s and the increasing strength of industry precipitated an economic transformation, while the crisis of liberalism and the reflections on the role of the state as a regulator – with the issues of poverty and underdevelopment, as their consequences – became internationally debated themes. If up to the end of the Second World War, modernisation prescriptions for Brazil indicated the organisation of the state as a priority, after 1945 such modernisation should be guided by the implementation of development policies for the country, which could accelerate its economic growth towards industrialisation and urbanisation, thus enabling the idea of a transition moment, or even of a rupture with the heritage of the colonial past. The evolution of capitalism, understood as a one-sided process that all countries could adapt under free-market rules, and theories of change⁴⁴ dominated the discussions and provided a basis for the political uses of time. And, if “time can shape the relations of power and inequality, under the conditions of capitalist industrial production”,⁴⁵ then the 1940s and 1950s can be seen as crucial periods in the consolidation of a particular use of time as a way of defining an object named Brazil, by building on the conceptual distinction between development and underdevelopment.⁴⁶

In the debate on developmentalism, one may observe the effort to annul the national telos constructed in the nineteenth century and to substitute it by a linkage between the past, present and future, while employing a conceptual and rhetorical mind frame that is supportive of demonstrating the acceleration of the process described, as well as the coevalness of distinct times in the same territory. For many analysts of the period, both the past and the present coexisted in contemporary Brazil, as had been already been pointed since the beginning of the century. This can be observed in works such as Jacques Lambert’s Os dois Brasis (The two Brazils) (French edition, 1953; Brazilian edition, 1959) and Raymundo Faoro’s 1958 Os donos do poder: formação do patronato político brasileiro (The owners of power: the formation of Brazilian political patronage).

In Faoro’s specific example, the central thesis is that Brazil’s historical formation had been and was still marked by patrimonial domination, transplanted from Portugal to America by colonisation. A prevailing idea is the continuity of the structures that have existed since the creation of the modern Portuguese state (fourteenth century), strengthened by the linkage between state centralisation and a type of capitalism that was politically bent towards benefitting the monarchical state. A longue-durée structure remained unaltered in the present: a stratified and bureaucratic patrimonialism, which had previously (and then, still) prevented the development of a modern and rational economy.

Inspired by the writings of Max Weber,⁴⁷ Faoro’s interpretation of Brazil’s historical process is marked by the perception of a persistent anachronism, which corresponded to the forces of backwardness, to the non-fulfilment of modernity and the non-emergence of a genuine Brazilian culture among Brazilians, as the expansion of the country’s society remained hampered “by the resistance of anachronistic institutions”.⁴⁸ As Marcelo Jasmim noted, the anachronistic forces arising from the mixture of archaic and modern elements forestalled historical novelty and the full attainment of modernity.⁴⁹ In the words of Faoro himself: “From John I of Portugal to Getúlio Vargas, in the course of six centuries, a political social structure has resisted all fundamental transformations, the deepest challenges, the crossing of the large ocean.”⁵⁰ That explains the title of the final chapter in the work’s 1975 edition, “A viagem redonda: do patrimonialismo ao estamento” (The round journey: from patrimonialism to stratification), which expresses a time-view of continuity and permanence, an eternal recurrence that was perhaps hardly understood when the expectations of development towards modernity and the future prevailed.

The history of the historiography produced in Brazil since the 1940s and 1950s must consider the changes introduced by new ways of conceiving and practicing intellectual work, along with convergences and rifts between history and social sciences, resulting from the creation of the first university courses in the 1930s. It is also necessary to bear in mind the flow of interpretations about the country through an essay-writing tradition that persisted into the first half of the twentieth century, which included authors with several intellectual backgrounds, who sometimes bypassed the university environment.

In the specific case of history as a discipline, it must be pointed out that the schools of philosophy and of language/literature became places that aimed above all to prepare teachers for basic education. Thus, while an academic stance based on theories, scientific methods and field studies was sought in the domain of social sciences and literary criticism, historians, on the other hand, continued with “a bookish and academic training, surrounded by erudition, engulfed by a mass of facts lacking the indispensable theoretical basis”.⁵¹ The learning of rudimentary historical research was sluggish and slow to yield results. Meanwhile, the “institutionalisation discourse”⁵² asserted that the university was (or should be) the setting par excellence for developing ways to explain the reality and intervene in it. As these explanatory forms had to be historically and scientifically based, sociologists and economists – as well as others, from outside the universities – gained a strong legitimacy as agents capable of linking science to public life while producing studies that had great repercussions.⁵³

As final considerations of this analysis, we call attention to the recurrence of a concept in the historiography produced between the 1930s and 1950s, since the study of it can be useful for the purpose of comprehending the ways in which the experience of time was conceived and narrated in that period. The concept is the term formação (formation), found in the titles of some of the fundamental works published, for instance, the above-mentioned Casa-Grande & Senzala, by Freyre; Formação do Brasil contemporâneo, by Prado Júnior; and Os donos do poder: formação do patronato político brasileiro, by Faoro; and also Formação da sociedade brasileira (The formation of Brazilian society) (1942), by Nelson Werneck Sodré; Formação e problema da cultura brasileira (The formation and problem of Brazilian culture) (1958), by Roland Corbisier; Formação econômica do Brasil (The economic formation of Brazil) (1959), by Celso Furtado; and Formação da literatura brasileira (The formation of Brazilian literature) (1959), by Antônio Cândido.

Carlos Guilherme Mota defines the formation works by their most usual connotation, that is, as works aimed at the “construction process of the nation, of the national element, of our collective identity”.⁵⁴ As a counterpoint, Abel Barros Baptista points to a displacement of the definition of nationality as an implicit assumption behind the idea of formation, in which “the final form” would establish the grounds for pinpointing the origins in a line of continuity, thus accentuating the teleological connotation of the term. Here, the use of the term was bound to strengthen the efficacy of lines of reasoning that offered an answer to the nationality problem, demarcating the necessary and inevitable character of its construction.⁵⁵ But as Berthold Zilly noted, the use of the formation concept also suggests the idea that Brazil has not yet reached full maturity and is developing towards a more well-finished form, aiming, therefore, at a telos, that is, a more complete and superior reality. Thus, the concept could simultaneously suggest both the process and its aim, both the dynamic and its result, even though the works on the national formation may seem to emphasise the former perspective in these pairs.⁵⁶ Furthermore, both in the ancient sense (of the Greek paideia) and in the modern sense (of the German Bildung), the concept points to an ideal yet to be attained, in other words, to something that can be indefinitely procrastinated. Beyond certainties, it evokes expectations, as the process (in the sense of progression, but also of imitation or return to a previously existing ideal) is continuous and infinite. This allows us to assume that formation is a process marked by the anguish of improvement and change, because of its inconclusiveness.⁵⁷

In the many interpretations about the history of the formation of Brazilian nationality, a highlight is the opposition between the archaic and rural (or even feudal) Brazil, on the one hand, and the modern and industrial (or capitalist) Brazil, on the other.⁵⁸ Glaucia Villas Bôas linked this opposition to a lingering “myth of national ambiguity”, which accompanied the reflections on modernity in Brazil.⁵⁹ Several intellectuals have taken up the task of accounting for the difficult reconciliation of the country with its past, as the marks of its colonial and slavery-based origins were still perceived as something present, which prevented the arrival of modernity. These intellectuals wrote history from the standpoint of distinct institutional, discursive and disciplinary places, seeking to grasp and to explain an experience marked by the existence of structural obstacles or resistances to change,⁶⁰ while frequently employing a narrative form guided by the formation concept. And even in contexts with a noticeable possibility of transformation or rupture with the backwardness traits, there was a prevailing sense that the past had not really passed but remained as a burden on the shoulders of the Brazilian people. Evidently, these intellectuals had an explicit aim of intervening in the country’s destiny and a political commitment with the national element, which, at least up to the 1950s, served as a parameter for their approaches to collective issues. Here, we see the accuracy of Paulo Eduardo Arantes’ remark that the emblematic word “formation” can be seen as “the key of a basic intellectual experience” that is itself the mark of an accelerated time, in which the future seems to become increasingly uncertain.⁶¹ Above all, the use of the formation idea favoured the descriptive, synthetic and sometimes normative accounts supposedly aimed at a reader in search of explanations and prognoses, if not certainties.