The Practice of Politics in Postcolonial Brazil: Porto Alegre, 1845-1895 (review)

Roger Kittleson's book makes an important original contribution to Latin American and Brazilian history, in both its presentation of new material and its perspective. Nineteenth-century political and economic history continues to be the great uncharted territory of Latin American and Brazilian studies. In this insightful regionally based work, Kittleson analyzes political change and continuity in the relatively small and sparsely settled, ranching economy of Porto Alegre. He argues that in this context the transition from liberal to scientific or positivist politics in the late nineteenth century effectively restructured both politics and society, along with ideologies of national identity. While both liberalism and positivism were antidemocratic, Kittleson contends that the transition signified a profound cultural and political shift: it created a political opportunity for an incipient incorporation of plebeians into the formal political realm. This book walks the lines between cultural history, social, history, and institutional history and makes important contributions to each. It will definitely make an important impact on the literature of Brazilian and Latin American history.

Based on impressive documentation of hundreds of court cases, newspapers and government documents, Kittleson examines relations of power and issues of honor in everyday life for plebeians. He also examines elite concerns for the economy, as well as elections and constitutions. Just as important is Kittleson's treatment of the effects of the new politics at the local level, articulating the ways in which sectors of the popular classes were gradually incorporated into the polity. Kittleson has utilized the court records of individual citizens in Porto Alegre to analyze questions of individual and group rebellion, attitudes toward individual rights, and slavery and also draws on the newspapers, magazines, writings of thinkers, literature, and scholarship of the period. He incorporates the insights of anthropologists and cultural historians to interpret popular and elite attitudes toward themselves and their families, other sectors of society, and the government. His analysis follows the best traditions of both empirical quantitative history and cultural analysis.

Kittleson's insights into changes in the values and ideas of the Brazilian population from the colonial period to the late nineteenth century are especially fascinating. He argues that the ultimate inclusion of the povo in the Brazilian polity was necessary to the success of the modernization project. That change required that Brazilian elites gradually move from viewing members of the popular classes who did not aspire to be their client dependents as "vagrants" to an openness to individual autonomy. Kittleson makes a strong and (to many) surprising argument that there was significant change, along with continuity, in the Brazilian social fabric of the nineteenth century. This thesis of social and political change is a major contribution of this work.

Also significant was the gradual acceptance by the Brazilian elites and the middle class of European models of modernization, which incorporated a more inclusive idea of citizenship than had been followed previously in Brazil. Whereas other scholars have noted that positivism did include the idea of inclusion of the popular classes in politics, previous studies have tended to emphasize that such inclusion was a way of controlling the non-elites. Kittleson offers a counter to this argument by demonstrating that some immigrant factory owners or artisans became active members of the political class in this process. The fact that plebeians won limited political inclusion in Porto Alegre may be attributed to both a less hierarchical social and economic structure than existed elsewhere in Brazil and a process of civic education that opened a space for different political possibilities.

At the same time Kittleson is careful to say that "the rise of associative activity and the push of some near- and non-elites into positions of influence in formal politics did not . . . add up to the birth of democracy" (p. 187). He further adds that "these developments did change the rules of the political game, most notably those governing the definition of what...