Abstract:
By reexamining some of the most prestigious essays originally published by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Caio Prado Jr and Gilberto Freyre between the early 1930s and the mid-1940s, the article probes into their interpretative affinities around two correlated questions: on the one hand, the conceptions of time that implicitly or explicitly underlie their views on the intricacies of Brazilian social life and, on the other hand, how such notions predetermine their ideas about the asymmetric place and the particular condition of this society in the modern world. I conclude by examining the correspondences and symmetries between these authors’ representations of Brazil, showing that they tend to allude to a temporality that is only partially in synchrony with social and political visions of modernity.
Keywords:
Caio Prado Jr.; Gilberto Freyre; Sérgio Buarque de Holanda; Brazilian social thought; modernity in Brazil