Abstract
The aim of this paper is to examine how, in the context of the Cold War and Latin America’s National Security dictatorships, conservative Brazilian intellectuals turned to history to demonstrate the country’s ‘incompatibility’ with progressive values and left-wing government. It analyzes a selection of lectures given by acclaimed conservative intellectuals at the National War College during the 1960s and 70s. An examination of these lectures demonstrates that many of the elements chosen to define ‘national identity’ under the ‘Estado Novo’ dictatorship of 1937-45 – such as the valorization of miscegenation, a belief in the docile nature of the Brazilian people, the exaltation of work and the idea of a nation founded on cohesion and cooperation – were revived after 1964. Thus, conservative intellectuals made an important contribution to legitimizing the military dictatorship of 1964-85 by inscribing it within what they believed the Brazilian tradition to be, presenting it as the only regime capable of preserving national unity and culture against the threats posed by Marxism and communism.
Highlights
Introduction: conservative intellectuals and ideology in Brazil’s Cold War: some comments on the literature and methods
According to an initial study published by Joseph Comblin (1978), the de Segurança Nacional’ (DSN) was imported from the United States to be used by the Latin American armed forces in the fight against communism
This paper has sought to analyze the manner in which conservative intellectuals turned to Brazil’s past and to the idea of a ‘Brazilian culture’ within the context of the Cold War, helping to legitimize the Brazilian military dictatorship
Summary
These arguments are found to a greater or lesser extent in the lectures of the conservative intellectuals analyzed in this paper. The Empire represented ‘the instinctive affirmation of nationality’ and reinforced institutions linked to culture, which were its very basis: higher education, the press, the library, the theater This movement of cultural emancipation – in which romanticism played a decisive role – was superior to that of political life, and reached ‘cultural maturity’ in the nineteenth century through: Comtism, which invaded polytechnic and military education; the sociology, that shook things up in the legal field through to metaphysics, with the ‘School of Recife’; soon, cultural anthropology, embedded in the recent patterns of Lombrosian criminology and German psychiatry, with an immediate literary reflex in Sertões, in the prose of the engineer Euclides da Cunha – emerged, imposed itself, and triumphed at a time when the intellectual elite (in open conflict, on the eve of the Republic, with the ruling elite) proclaimed its cultural maturity In the midst of the dictatorship, that enabled Calmon to conclude his lecture in the following manner: e0001 - 11/32
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
