Nothing new in 400 white men deciding the fate of Brazil

Abstract

It will be 100 years old, in 2018, the alert that the jurist and sociologist Francisco José de Oliveira Vianna wrote in his Southern Populations in Brazil for those who, in total, were his interlocutors. He drew the attention of his peers, in the introduction of the first volume of the book, to stop staggering, as they had done for a century before and to assume the destiny of the country. Later, within the book, the author deepened his arguments, stating that one of the major problems in the organization of Brazilian social life, in its four centuries of existence, would have been the control of white anarchy. Roughly speaking, in a land where there were many chiefs, with different levels of power and where the state was absent or a place in dispute, organizing the ruling class was urgent, in order to maintain general control.