This book is about Brazil, the country I live in, the country I love, the country that haunts me with its Sphinx- shaped sociability. For the last 25 years or so I’ve been researching and publishing on various aspects of the State- capital-labour relations, and then State building, inequality and class formation, and then youth and informality. The array of issues that interest me is widening as I struggle to understand our Sphinx. Frustration is inevitable.
Brazil has changed enormously in the last five or six decades and more intensely in the last 15 years, at a pace that makes it easy to misguidedly take glittering surface fluctuations as the ‘reality’ of its ingrained social dynamics. The challenge of any analyst of our world is to try and avoid the blinding shine of the ‘new’ and to unveil the deep rooted structural and cultural forces that guide change. In Brazil, as anywhere else, the new is always heir of multiple dimensions of the past, and the past, in our case, is marked by social and political authoritarianism, deep socio-economic inequalities, racism, social injustice, poverty, vulnerability of the majority of the population, meagre social policies, a rachitic welfare state… the list is long. While acknowledging and celebrating changes, one must always call attention to the internal mechanisms that, very often, limit the number of Brazilians that benefit from them. This is what I try to do in this book, focusing on selected aspects of the social, political, institutional and economic dimensions of our Sphinx.
The chapters I present here were either written in English or translated into it for somewhat fortuitous reasons. In conversation with friends around a bottle of wine (actually several bottles…) it occurred to us that our ideas about, and our understanding of Brazil should reach wider audiences than those who read Portuguese. Foreign scholars interested in Brazil need to grasp our language if they want to do serious theoretical or empirical research and when they do, they invariably publish in their native languages before having their work translated into Portuguese, so their ideas reach us second-hand. But they eventually do reach us, while our ideas and research and our interpretation of Brazil, if written in Portuguese, reach only the interested scholar.