It is a social history, to be sure, but what kind of social history? One key to answering the question lies in the first word of the book's title, in which “modern” refers not to the last two centuries or more, but rather to the years since 1950, when the Brazilian population made its demographic transition from a pattern that the authors call “pre-modern” to the contemporary standard of low mortality and fertility rates. As that suggests, demography is at the core of this social history, where it is joined by economic data and other easily quantifiable material. The question that drove many social historians of Klein's generation—“who rides whom and how,” was how two luminaries put it—is absent, as is subsequent generations’ fascination with the agency of ordinary people. Power—at the core of both approaches—is only a faint presence in this book, beyond references to the actions of a disembodied state and description of a civil society at once all-encompassing and atomized. The uninitiated might, therefore, see this book as fulfilment of a nearly ancient ideal, of social history as “history with the politics left out.” That would be a mistake.
In structure, this book consists of nine topical chapters. These chapters are concerned with economic developments, demographic shifts, changes in the social roles of women and the structure of the family, state-supplied social assistance, urbanization and life in the city, various kinds of inequality, and the aforementioned civil society, with much overlap and repetition from chapter to chapter. The evidence is overwhelmingly statistical, much of it drawn from the websites of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and other government organs; elsewhere, an ill-advised reliance on unrefereed secondary sources—also accessed online—leads to predictable, if minor, errors of fact (on early shopping centers and supermarkets, to take two examples). Tables are abundant, though they do not always deliver the points that the text would have them make, while some feature obvious typographical errors and omissions (for example, Tables 7.2 and 9.11).
Readers of Klein and Vidal Luna's other books will recognize the approach and some of the material. The result, if hardly pleasing to any imaginable student audience, will feature on graduate-school reading lists; some of the data may be drawn on in undergraduate lectures on contemporary Brazilian history by instructors not inclined to consult the IBGE's website on their own. What then, one might ask, distinguishes the present work from a book-length data dump? One answer comes in looking at the book's politics. Pointed asides regarding the administrations of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–10) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–16) reflect the outlook of the party that Vidal Luna served in the state government of São Paulo under the now disgraced José Serra, the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), an electoral vehicle long devoid of any of the social-democratic character suggested in its name. So too is the vaunted concern with a supposedly novel civil society as a Third-Way answer to the collapse of old verities, the latter dating to a time when social democracy and socialism were synonymous.
If not history with the politics left out, then, to what school of social history does this book belong? It is difficult to say, but there seems to be more than passing resemblance to the proto-modernization-theory-driven histories of Britain—Walt Whitman Rostow's among them—that Edward Thompson famously charged with “a moral complacency, a narrowness of reference, and an insufficient familiarity with the actual movements of the working people of the time.” There are even intellectual lines of descent to be traced, including the influence of Talcott Parsons, transmitted through Florestan Fernandes, on PSDB grandees the likes of former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso when he was a student at the University of São Paulo, where Vidal Luna holds a professorship. But that would be an altogether different kind of history.
