‘Real Self-Help’ and the Seeds of Neoliberalism: Foreign Aid to Brazil from Kennedy to Johnson

Abstract

Drawing from sources at the Kennedy and Johnson presidential libraries, as well as secondary literature, this article has two main goals. The first is to examine the concept of self-help employed by U.S. officials in the formulation of foreign policy in the 1960s as a discursive metric to evaluate political events in Brazil after the 1964 military coup. I argue that this innocuous-sounding policy trope enabled U.S. policymakers to understate their investment in affecting political conditions in contested areas around the world, particularly in Brazil where it sanctioned a right-wing military coup in 1964. The second, more tentative aim of this article is to situate self-help as a discursive forerunner of what would later be called neoliberalism. Emphasizing technocratic interventions, personal responsibility, and a vision of government that placed the onus for combatting poverty on apolitical individuals rather than a state democratically accountable to its citizens, the notion of self-help carried profound political implications.