Title: The “Cordial Man”: A Latin American Concept in the Brazilian Essay

Abstract: This article analyzes Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Roots of Brazil, a seminal book in the Brazilian essayist tradition. Discussion begins with the limits of Brazil’s search for national specificity, so as to consider Brazilian cultural formation as a projection of its colonial Iberian roots. In this context, the “cordial man” emerges as a metaphor for the lack of public space in Brazil. On the one hand, the cordial man is a product of turn-of-the-century debates on Latin American exceptionalism, a figure almost capable of withstanding the disillusions of the modern world. On the other hand, the cordial man offers Buarque de Holanda a window into the limits of democratic liberalism and the personalistic political traditions of Latin America: an impasse discussed at length but never resolved in Roots of Brazil. Ultimately, the book permits a deeper questioning of the collective pulses and individual desires that, together, form the matter to which populism would respond, a political form temporarily capable of meeting the people’s demands.

Keywords: Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, culture and politics in Brazil, essayism, populism, cordial man

Author: Pedro Meira Monteiro, Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, the United States.