Divided elites: Brazil between two milestones of the bourgeois revolution

Abstract

In order to analyze the history of Brazil from a perspective that combines the micro and macro dimensions - the directions and contradictions of the historical process as well as the selected biographies – we focused on the life trajectories of expressive elite social actors through the analysis of archives and interviews from the period between 1930 and 1974. For understand not only the “Brazilian elite”, but the actors that compose it, the article is divided with emphasis on three relevant links in the studied processes: 1) the actor and the social system; 2) the actor and the political system; and 3) the actor and the historical process. Considering the particularities of each period, we conclude that Brazilian history is marked by the difficulty that the civil society has to self-organize, which enhances the presence of elite groups, characterized, in turn, by many internal conflicts and divisions, in a trajectory marked by the incidence of crises and turbulence, appeased by partial consensus.