The coup d’état led by Getúlio Vargas in 1930, along with the rise of Nazism, heavily influenced the writing of Raízes do Brasil , a work published a year before the establishment of Vargas's dictatorship in November 1937. In this book, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda sought to explain both the crisis of the liberal democratic system in Europe and the challenges faced by Ibero-American countries in freeing themselves from caudilhismo (strongman rule) and local authoritarianism. Subject to ongoing debate, the author himself later tempered and disavowed some of the claims made in the original text through its numerous editions: “I wrote that book partly in Germany, the classical land of historicism and anti-positivism: positivism as it was understood in the last century ” ( Centro de Estudos Históricos Afonso de Taunay , in Sistema de Informação e Arquivo-Fundo SBH, 17p.).

Indeed, studies of the book’s publication history highlight significant changes made by the author in the 1948 and 1956 editions, where the psychosocial approach to the coloniser was softened. However, the work became a publishing phenomenon, especially after the 1969 edition, which featured a preface by Antônio Candido de Mello e Souza titled “O significado de Raízes do Brasil” [ "The Meaning of Raízes do Brasil" ] ( Raízes do Brasil , 1982, pp. XI–XII). This new edition coincided with the removal and exile of Holanda's friends and colleagues from Brazilian universities following the Institutional Acts that marked the escalation of Brazil’s Military Dictatorship.

Holanda invokes the wanderlust, spatial awareness, attachment to the tangible, and mercantile pragmatism of the colonisers to characterise the Iberian legacy. However, he identifies slavery as the defining feature of Brazilian society. The reliance on coerced labour and the violence of social relations undermined solidarity among individuals and groups. Slavery also devalued manual labour, fostering a society dominated by domestic life, which hindered the development of a public sphere that could transcend patriarchal and personal interests. Within this framework, Holanda contrasts Anglo-Saxon and Iberian colonisation. The predominance of primary or communal relations in the latter shaped what he termed the ethos of cordiality , a behaviour antithetical to the liberal bourgeois social contract. Relationships of intimacy and affection between individuals in asymmetrical positions created complex chains of dependence but also fostered insubordination.

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