Biography of Brazil: social history and psychological individualism

Abstract

This article analyzes the book Brasil: uma biografia, written by Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling. The work proposes to make a historical, social and political study of Brazil, seeking to insert itself in the tradition of the great syntheses written between the 1930s and 1990s. However, unlike these, which worked with notions such as formation, evolution, meaning, Schwarcz and Starling's book proposes thinking about the country by resorting to biography. The proposal, which may sound unusual, is consistent with a successful publishing trend that consists of building biographies on virtually any subject. This widening of the scope of what can be biographed configures a form that combines historical perspective and a psychologizing viewpoint that, when applied to think a country's social process, drains the potentially problematizing and political content inherent to the theme that the reflection puts on the scene. The incapacity to think about social history from its material, historical, cultural conditioning is related to the neoliberal rationality which, by presenting itself as an unavoidable reference for all collective and individual experience, configures a specific type of totalitarianism.