ABSTRACT
Considerably scarce in the vast critical fortune dedicated to the authors, this work focuses on the close and exhaustive dialogue between Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Alceu Amoroso Lima. By proposing a contrasting reading of the writings of the two intellectuals between the 1920s and 1940s, such as letters, newspaper articles and their publications in books, we will present the recurrence of a criticism - sometimes encrypted, sometimes explicit - from Buarque de Holanda to the thomist conception of Amoroso Lima. Judging by Buarque de Holanda’s impressions, this conception guides the various instances of Amoroso Lima’s life, at an aesthetic, epistemological, political, economic, and social levels. Starting from - and eventually returning to - a punctual analysis of some modifications made by Sérgio Buarque during the first two editions of Raízes do Brasil (1936-1948), we will reconstruct the historicity of the strategies and the ways in which the thought of the catholic intellectual - by then embedded in a conservative bias - since the days of the modernist contention, it has been inscribed in the combat and semantically condenses a set of signifiers confluent with the topics of backwardness; especially if we think that the historian’s debut book, from the 1948 edition onwards, sharply falls within the formation paradigm, endowing it with a progressive political character, not yet foreseen in the 1936 edition.
Keywords:
Sérgio Buarque de Holanda; Alceu Amoroso Lima; Raízes do Brasil; thomism; topics of backwardness