Georg Simmel, Sergio Buarque de Hollanda, and the Modern Individual: Jewish Roots of Brazilian Social Thought

We investigate Brazilian social thought in the light of the sociology of Georg Simmel and his profoundly humanistic understanding of modern life, whose Jewish roots are easily found. We examine Simmel’s influence on historian Sergio Buarque de Hollanda, who wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in the city of São Paulo, and who might have Jewish ancestry. We compare Buarque’s thought, which share Simmel’s distanced interest in the modern individual, with two Brazilian authors who started seemingly opposed schools of thought, Gilberto Freyre and Florestan Fernandes. The former is an enthusiast of the particular Brazilian sociability forged in sugar cane engenhos in Northeast Brazil, providing a description of the intimate national life that inspires a loving narrative of the country. The latter offers a conflictual picture of class and race relations; his critical view of Brazilian society is omnipresent in intellectual circles. Far from antipodes, we argue they fail together in seeing profound but subtle tensions in the modern individual, which demand a gaze at once attentive and generous. Buarque’s thought goes hand in hand with Simmel’s delicate theoretical reasoning, extremely inspiring but incapable of creating powerful schools of thought. His interest in human destiny, devoid of exaltation or condescendence, makes his thought difficult to instrumentalize. His followers have to start it over from the same initial point: the inquiring gaze over men and women, their actions, and their follies. With no dogmas or icons, Buarque’s thought demands an interpretive ethic whose roots we recognize in Jewish thought.