19TH CENTURY LIDES AND REPUBLICAN READINGS: Tobias Barreto's nation project between evolution and progress

Abstract

We analyze the contours of formulating a projection for Brazil within the ideas of Tobias Barreto (1839-1889) with an emphasis on the concepts of evolution and progress. Tributary to the Germanic thought of the nineteenth century, the Sergipe thinker articulated a critique of Imperial Brazil from a political and cultural point of view with a view to a philosophical and scientific imaginary for post-unification Germany. In this way, the presence in his ideas and works of the notions of evolution and progress, from a scientific perspective, is the center of articulation of a reformist projection for Brazil in the context of the international circulation of ideas within the so-called generation of 1870. Our results point to a criticism of the historiography about the so-called “Recife School” that goes beyond the thesis of ideological mimicry and dependence on foreign European references since tobiatic Germanophilia did not mean an unconditional adherence to German thought at the time.