The Culturalist Conservatism of Gilberto Freyre: Society, Decline and Social Change in Sobrados E Mucambos (1936)

Abstract

This work aims to deepen the knowledge of the culturalist, Iberian and Catholic aspects of Brazilian conservatism, turning to the work by Gilberto Freyre, Sobrados e mucambos. We seek to understand how his work, positively received in the modernist, nationalist and anti-liberal context of the 1930s due to its revealing of the roots and ‘essence’ or ‘originality’ of Brazilian society, fell into disfavour after the Second World War when the process of massification and democratization of society led more radical sectors of the expanding middle class to lean toward socialism. In concluding, we point out how an imaginary of national belonging, in the form of common positive referents, was due in large measure to authors such as José de Alencar and Freyre.