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ALBERTO GUERREIRO RAMOS’S ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: THE PARENTHETICAL MAN Ariston Azevedo ˆ State University of Maringa´ Renata Ovenhausen Albernaz Federal University of Santa Catarina Translated by G. G. Candler
ABSTRACT
Alberto Guerreiro Ramos’s intellectual trajectory is analyzed to show his permanent concern with the condition of contemporary humanity. Two moments in his trajectory are specifically addressed. In the first, under the strong influence of Christian intellectual thought, the category of human person was most important to him. In the second moment he sought to demonstrate autonomy from those earlier influences, secularized his thought, and coined the expression Parenthetical Man, which was central to his criticism of the social sciences and especially of organizational theory. From this he proposed his theory of social system delimitation. From this point of view, it is possible to affirm that Guerreiro Ramos’s sociology is predominantly antropocentric, in other words, Ramos takes man as the main reference in his design of social systems. The climax of the social scientist’s concern with history is the idea he comes to hold of the epoch in which he lives. The climax of his concern with biography is the idea he comes to hold of man’s basic nature, and of the limits it may set to the transformation of man by the course of history. (Mills, 1959, p. 165)
It is little known that the social scientist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos began his career as a poet and literary critic in the 1930s in Salvador, in the state of Bahia, Brazil. During the years from 1936 to 1942 he was devoted to realize his desire to become a poet, but was able to publish only two books, as well as some reviews and criticisms. In his first book, O Drama do ser Dois [The Drama of Being Two], which was published in 1937, Ramos, inspired by the Christian anthropology of the Russian 2006, Public Administration Theory Network
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philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, wrote about his permanent existential state of discomfort with the secular world. In this book he admitted that he was living under the tension of strong contradictory sentiments, belonging both to the Kingdom of God and to the Kingdom of Caeser, to heaven and to hell; and that inside himself there existed an incessant fight between good and bad. The experience of these tensions was narrated in poems of a profoundly religious tone, which reveal his sensibility with the reality of the world, his resistance to the unidimensionalization of individual psychology, his dialecticity, lyricism and poetic language. This definition of himself as a man who felt his existence dramatically tensioned between dualities was made at around 22 years of age. But at the age of 66, a few years prior to his death, he still admitted that the tension between dualities was a fundamental characteristic of his personality. In truth, to belong to two worlds meant belonging to neither, but rather to be between them. Thus, without abandoning the expression “the drama of being two” as a definition of his personality, and despite already being considered one of Brazil’s major sociologists, Ramos adopted Voegelin’s expression “in between”1 to explain his existential condition. Ramos’s second book was Introdu¸cao ˜ a` Cultura [Introduction to Culture] (1939). Rather than another book of poetry, this was a collection of studies on culture, humanism, personalism and poetry, in which the author denounced the decadent modus operandi of the modern world. In the 1930s, strongly influenced by French Catholic intellectuals [especially Jacques Maritain (1972) and some personalists allied to French intellectual groups like Espirit and Ordre Nouveau], as well as by Nicolas Berdyaev, Ramos’s critique of the modern world was no less severe than that contained 40 years later in his The New Science of Organizations (1981). According to Ramos (1939), modern civilization had abandoned the possibility of establishing itself on qualitative bases, that is, spiritual and eternal, and had instead based itself on quantitative bases, that is, material and transitory. In other words, Ramos believed that the passage from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age had resulted in a spiritual transubstantiation of humanity: from “To Be” to “To Have.” This change had affected both humanism and culture, two fundamental elements to the operationalization and establishment of any configuration of human associated life. Thus, the young Ramos believed that the historical moment of his day represented the crowning of this transformation, of this hierarchical inversion (To Be—To Have), and demonstrated the abandonment of the philosophical, social and political
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legacy of the classic era. The recuperation of this classical legacy would be one of the principal intellectual activities of his life. In Introdu¸cao ˜ a` cultura one finds the main ideas of Ramos, articulated in language that asserts the necessity of the installation of a new culture, of a new humanity and of a new civilization centered in the notion of the human person and of the community. Ramos’s transformative proposal was very similar to the propositions of the French personalists. Using a conceptual framework based on pairs of contradictory concepts—culture versus civilization, person versus individual, organic versus mechanical, tragic feeling of life versus bourgeois feeling of existence—the young writer defends the necessity of the installation of a new social structure that privileges the necessity of human spirit. In our opinion, these first two of Ramos’s books are very important for the comprehension of his intellectual trajectory, because in them are significant elements—that is to say, certain influences, personal positions, theoretical options, concepts, and themes—that encompass the totality of his intellectual contribution. One of the elements which remain present throughout his career is his commitment to the development of an engaged knowledge. For example, he had an aversion to the idea of art, which left him to criticize harshly what he referred to as a poeta esteta, a type of poet who writes poetry as a mere fictional construction, an artifice, something alienated from the existential life of the creator. For Ramos, poetry was a form of spiritualization, of humanization of man, a way to access God and the reality of the world, and had an important social role, because poetry could help men and women overcome the lack of spirituality in the modern world (1939). Ramos leveled similar criticisms at some Brazilian sociologists. Inspired by the difference proposed by Maritan between habit (evqoς) and habitus (evxiς) (1972, pp. 15-30), Ramos distinguished between a “sociology in habit” and “sociology in act or habitus” to differentiate a real, applied sociology from a more academic, “literate” sociology. While a sociology of habit would require specific training, often academic and repetitive, focused on the exercise of “mere analagic repetition of practices and studies” (Ramos, 1996, p. 120) that is, focused on a trained incapacity; a sociology of action required more than this sociological literacy, because it could only be achieved through the commitment of the sociologist with the immediate social context, and the development of a new type of creative knowledge turned to improve individual and associated human life. This link, this engagement or conscious compromise of sociology with its context, would make it possible to produce an authentic sociology. Without this kind of commitment, Ramos believed
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that sociology would become irrelevant, as little more than a game (1995, p. 107). These personal positions emphasize the critical realism that is one of the fundamental characteristics of Ramos’s thought. “The best way to do science” is to do it “from life,” or better, “from the necessity to respond to the challenges of reality” (Ramos, 1995, p. 105). It was in this way that his main works on important Brazilian social problems had been affected by his own existential circumstance (see Ventriss & Candler, 2005, p. 349), such as those on child development, family budgets, the pattern of life, poverty, infant mortality, popular medicine and others developed in 1940s, when Ramos was strongly influenced by the Chicago School of sociology. The same can be said of his involvement in the Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental Theater), which under the strong influence of Ramos, used the psychodrama and sociometry methods of J. L. Moreno as therapy to help free AfroBrazilians from psychological colonization. This would permit both a provocative analysis of the social relations resulting from these states of discrimination and exclusion, and also the elimination of the emotional difficulties that inhibited the realization of the personality of people of color. ˜ SOCIOLOGICA ´ A REDUC¸ AO AND ITS TRIPLE SIGNIFICANCE In 1958, when it was first published, A Redu¸cao ˜ Sociologica ´ [Sociological Reduction] did not present all of the meanings that Alberto Guerreiro Ramos would come to attribute to the term sociological reduction. The book was written when Ramos was teaching at the Superior Institute of Brazilian Studies, in the School of Public Administration of the Funda¸cao ˜ Getulio ´ Vargas, and beginning his political career. In other words, he was extremely busy, and as a result the edition of 1958 was not consistent with the original project as conceived by the author, but was only an incipient research project about the meaning of sociological reduction. His desire was to develop a method that could help sociologists understand the sociological truth2 of their immediate reality, principally of their national reality; and that would permit them to do this in a critical-assimilative fashion, in the face of different forms of foreign knowledge and experience of this reality. This desire led Ramos to concentrate overmuch in the first edition on only one of the conceptual facets of sociological reduction, which was reduction as a critical assimilation of the foreign sociological literature (see Ventriss & Candler 2005, pp. 349-352).
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In the second edition of the book, published in 1965, Guerreiro Ramos presented two additional meanings of the term sociological reduction: as parenthetical attitude; and as a proposal for a new social science of a markedly pluralistic character (Ramos, 1996, p. 11). Much later, in 1981, when he published the last book of his life, The New Science of Organizations (1981), written in English and translated into Portuguese, one of Ramos’s preoccupations was to furnish to his compatriots, in a preface to the Brazilian edition, his intellectual development in light of the three meanings furnished in 1965. The first sense of the term was presented in his 1958 book. The second was presented in his 1963 Mito e Realidade de Revolu¸cao ˜ Brasileiro [Myth and Reality of the Brazilian Revolution] and in a 1972(a) Public Administration Review article “Models of Man and Administrative Theory.” The third meaning of sociological reduction was presented in an appendix to the second edition of A Redu¸cao ˜ Sociologica ´ (1965), in Administra¸cao ˜ e Estrat´egia do Desenvolvimento (1966), in a book chapter titled “Modernization: Towards a Possibility Model,” and in The New Science of Organizations (1981). With the purpose of better conceptualizing the second meaning of sociological reduction, Ramos elaborated the category of the Parenthetical Man, which is the synthesis of his humanism. As a result, we can consider Ramos’s studies of the parenthetical man as being his more substantive reflections about the relationship between humanism and social theory exactly because those studies enlarged his point of view on the theme. Ramos’s youthful work on humanism was strongly influenced by intellectuals from France, like Jacques Maritain, Leon ´ Bloy, Charles Peguy, ´ Nicolas Berdyaev, Emmanuel Mounier, and centered in the Christian category of human person. This conceptual change in Ramos’s intellectual trajectory—from the category of human person to parenthetical man—was a consequence of a purpose that accompanied him from his youth: to contribute to the elaboration of a new humanism (Ramos, 1939). The category of parenthetical man represented his final reflection regarding the important relation between humanism, social theory and organizational theory, as articulated in his book The New Science of Organizations. Despite this, Ramos’s anthropology is a totally unexplored facet of his thought. The main objective of this paper is to show the importance of Ramos’s reflections on the parenthetical man for his theory of social systems delimitation and, by extension, for the development of a truly new science of organizations.
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THE CONCEPUTALIZATION OF THE PARENTHETICAL ATTITUDE In Mito e Verdade da Revolu¸cao ˜ Brasileira (1963) [Myth and Reality of the Brazilian Revolution], specifically in the chapter titled “organizational man and parenthetical man,” Ramos tried to systematize his own conception of man. It is important to note that the author had started to write this book during his election campaign for the Brazilian Congress, during which he observed that all formal organizations (political parties, in this case) superimpose operational and epistemological constraints that inhibit human development, and consequently human autonomy. From this observation Ramos created, as a contrast to organizational man, the category of parenthetical man, a type of man resistant to the effects of bureaucratic organization on human conduct and psychology. Ramos believed that it was very important to understand the new social fact of the formal organization. Although some people were aware of the role of formal organizations in modern society, Ramos argued that systematic reflections on this role were still recent and dispersed, and so an appropriate analysis of it, and its implications for contemporary man, were necessary. Ramos believed that formal organizations had assumed a fundamental and unprecedented role in the course of human history, and this fact was meaningful to social scientists, as there were human aspects that only became clear if seen from an organizational point of view. In other words, it would be difficult to comprehend the “essentials of collective life” without an organizational perspective (Ramos, 1963, p. 147). As a result, an analytical formulation of human praxis would be incomplete if it omitted this new social domain. Perhaps the consciousness of this fact had stimulated Ramos to assert that, even though humanity had been condemned to act and to interact with organizations, this would not necessarily mean that the human was condemned to be molded into the image of the organization, or to be transformed into a typical Whytean organizational-man. According to Ramos, the modern human would need to resist the organization’s influence on his psyche, but this could only happen through consciousness of the effects organizations produce on human life. Thus, an understanding of the nature of organization would make possible a human existence liberated from a good part of the serfdom that organizations caused for humans, both individually and collectively. The development of a collective critical consciousness of the nature of organization would permit, in Ramos’s eyes, the entrance of human-
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ity into a new phase of the process of structuring human associated life. This new stage of human critical consciousness was especially important because men and women would learn much about how to cope in the face of the growth of organizations. This would add to human consciousness a quality still absent, or at the least not yet dominant: the parenthetical attitude (p. 145). This concept was inspired by Edmund Husserl’s (1967) distinction between natural attitude and critical attitude. Ramos’s parenthetical attitude was defined “by the psychological capacity of the individual to separate their internal and external” circumstances (1972a, p. 243), that is, the capacity of putting between parentheses the Self and the World and the existence of the Self as such. When doing this, men and women would acquire critical consciousness of the Self and of their Circumstances and thus, they would conquer “the plane of self-conscious existence,” of self-determination, indicated in this sense by the conquest of a “superior mode of human existence,” or a type of “learned and transcendent existence” (Ramos, 1966, pp. 1011). Without adoption of the parenthetical attitude, humanity would not be able to overcome the state of “brute existence” (p. 46), would be unable to humanize itself, would lack “power over itself and over its circumstances” (Ramos, 1963, p. 145), and therefore would be unable to promote its active adjustment “to society and to the universe” (p. 145). The parenthetical attitude would have, in Ramos’s thought, a fundamental role in the process of human emancipation. It is important to note that the parenthetical attitude put reason and freedom in the center of human articulation with the world, not in metaphysical terms but as a concrete question, as praxis, ´ once it implied the “discovery and instauration of new organization forms,” making possible “superior possibilities” of human existence (1963, p. 169). ELABORATION OF AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES After “Organization-Man and Parenthetical-Man,” during the period from 1969 to 1972 Ramos would refocus his attention more intensely on his studies of the parenthetical man. It was his intent to publish a book that he would title The Parenthetical Man, in which he would present, beyond his “parenthetical approach,” “the main images of man assumed in different historical stages of the evolution of social sciences”: the operational man, the reactive man, and the parenthetical man (Ramos, 1969, p. 13). Though he did not carry out the book project, he did write a series of works dedicated to examining the theme: “The Parenthetical Trip (I)” (1969), “The Parenthetical Trip (II)” (1970a), “The
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Parenthetical Trip (III)” (1970b), “The Parenthetical Man (An Anthropological Approach to Organization Design)” (1971a), “Beyond Alienation (Work and the Psychohistory of the Future)” (1971b), “The Parenthetical Man” (1971c), “Models of Man and Administrative Theory” (1972a) and “The Parenthetical Diagraph” (1972b). Given what he had written in Mito e Verdade da Revolu¸cao ˜ Brasileira, the degree of elaboration that Ramos put into developing the concept of the parenthetical man is worth noting. It is also worth noting yet another dramatic change in the author’s life during this period. While the book was written Ramos passed through a series of personal tribulations in Brazil: his political activity, the termination of his mandate as Member of Congress by the military government after the 1964 coup, and his restriction to a small office in the Getulio ´ Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, under constant threat of prison and torture. The other works were written in an academic environment more appropriate to intellectual exercise, at the University of Southern California, which he considered “the ideal context to develop” his insights, as the university was “extremely supportive” of his research project (1970a, p. 13), and located in a country passing through a singular moment in history. In general, one can affirm that the texts mentioned above demonstrated a deep preoccupation regarding what sociology, or more broadly the social sciences, were contributing to emphasizing men and women as autonomous beings. For Ramos, the elaboration of an anthropological approach was imperative. The principal aims of this approach would be, first, to serve as an evaluative parameter for the design of social systems and of organizations operating in the social structure, and second, it would contribute to the development of new social systems and social organizations. He was attempting nothing less than the elaboration of a “normative model of man” (1971a, p. 29), in which the assumptions regarding human nature would appear explicitly, and be legitimated by actual human necessities. This position dramatically contradicted the then-existing practice in social science more broadly, and contradicted the theory of organizations and administration specifically, in dealing with the central issue of exposing the psychological bases on which both were founded. Ramos was especially clear on this fact. It was precisely his evaluation of these psychological presuppositions that would lead him to affirm, in 1971, that the “image of man” that the social sciences had assumed was more ideological disguise than science.3 According to the Brazilian sociologist, this false image of man in the social sciences had been cultivated from the end of the eighteenth century, when the social
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sciences decided to take “as standards of individual normality the norms or prescriptions imminent in the social systems” (1971a, p. 17). In this way, through the intermediary of an acritical inductive process, the social sciences assumed as normal whatever type of individual conformed to the psychological norms of the prevalent social system. Any individual who deviated from these norms would be tagged as abnormal, or declared a pathological case. In the economy, for example, homo economicus was taken as the model of man by the classical economists, precisely because this model represented the human quality most appropriate to the psychological and operational norms of a market economy: “the systematic master reference of classical economics is the market. Any human behavior that does not go along with the lines of the psychological prescriptions of the market is considered abnormal” (p. 18). Worse, it was not solely in the economics discipline that these market-centered notions of normality and pathology were used to distinguish “normal” human behavior from the “pathological.” For Ramos, it was possible to find the same attitudes in the discipline of sociology, and he tried to prove this through analyzing Durkheim’s works. This analysis was important because Durkheim sketched a conception of man that represented the point of view assumed by social science schools, “mainly in the United States of America” (1971a, p. 19). In this sense Durkheim was, more than other sociologists, a canon, and Ramos believed that analyzing the French sociologist’s thought would be the best way to demonstrate that the social sciences had become deformed by a sort of pathology of normality. According to Ramos, the normal human, the healthy human defended by Durkheim was, in essence, an “adjusted man,” a man who had adapted perfectly to the social environment in which he lived. Defenseless in the face of social forces, the Durkhemian man would be subject to the tyranny of society, exposed to social coercion, unable to act in a way that, from his point of view, would appear legitimate, under pain of suffering social incomprehension or to be taken as someone abnormal. Ramos also pointed out that, in Durkheim, “the coercive character of society is ethically justified and the individual reaches the highest level of ethical development when he fully conforms to the prescriptions of the social system” (1971a, p. 19). This would lead Ramos to affirm that the criterion of morality in the work of Durkheim was derived from the social system. Durkheim failed to perceive that “the problem of morality could be seen from the standpoint of the individual’s self-actualization” (p. 21), or that the social environment could be
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evaluated in light of human necessities of actualization of human potential, which would leave the social analyst to conclude that the social environment represented, to humanity, something unhealthy, that is, an enormous obstacle to human aspirations of personal development. In other words, Durkheim failed to consider “that the speculation about the unhealthy character of the environment itself would have room in sociology” (p. 19). Obviously Ramos was aware of the existence of another current of sociology that moved significantly from these propositions of Durkheim. These would include those derived from the works of George Simmel, Max Weber and Herbert Mead, where Ramos observed a major emphasis on the individual as an active being, that is, constantly preoccupied with the meaning of actions and seeking to satisfy the necessities of his or her ego. In general, these authors showed an interest in incorporating these preoccupations of the individual into the body of social theory. However, Ramos objected even to these propositions of the individual as a being focused on meaning, as they failed to put into focus the more urgent question of the epoch: “the pathology of social conformity” (1971a, p. 21). Both Talcott Parsons, who enjoyed a strong reputation in North American sociology during this period and had written Social Structure and Personality, and Ralf Dahrendorf, with his notion of homo sociologicus; followed the parameters delineated by Durkheim at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, according to Ramos’s point of view, both failed to escape from a sociology focused on the legitimizing processes of the normative patterns of institutions. In spite of this, it was clear to Ramos that sociology could assume another direction: that associated with an anthropological approach. The introduction of the notion of conflict in sociology, for example, indicated to him new paths. Conflict could not presuppose the necessity of adaptation of man to the social system, as assumed in the idea of social equilibrium, at the same time that it could serve to decree that certain organizational paradigms needed to be overcome, demanding, on the part of social planners and of people in general, the focusing of their creative forces to the elaboration of new social forms, to new spaces related to the exercise of an authentic existence. As he put it: Sociology today is increasingly expanding its horizon. Instead of a view of human behavior from the standpoint of the requirements of social equilibrium, it is developing a view to which nothing human is extraneous, including the individual’s resistance to conformity with episodical social frameworks of social equilibrium. Conflict is ubiquitous in all social systems and sometimes must be considered
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as an indication that an established social order is losing legitimacy. Sociology does not have a systematic commitment with any established social order. (1971a, pp. 22-23)
In this way, Ramos agreed with Peter Berger (1963) in the claim that sociology had insisted, from its origin, in the total equalization of man with determined types of socially validated identities; and also with Karen Horney (1964), who positioned herself against the super-socialized normality and defended the necessity of studying society under the perspective of the psychic difficulties that social arrangements and structures created for individuals. Thus, the social sciences could not remain immune to the criticisms being made regarding the “pathology of conformity or social normality” (Ramos, 1971a, p. 25-6). Psychological works such as those of Eric Fromm (1967), Abraham Maslow (1968), Chris Argyris (1964), Douglas McGregor (1968), Frederick Herzberg (1969), along with Horney, had pointed to the need to articulate a science of man that emphasized the fundamental requirements of human development, reinforcing this plea through an anthropological approach to the social sciences. Also relevant to the development of these ideas was that in the 1960s humanity was experiencing the passage from a period of shortage of material goods and elementary services, to one of abundance. This point was important to Ramos, because past “fundamental lacks” that prevented people from engaging in substantive pursuits and pursuing personal development could now be overcome (Ramos, 1973, p. 393). At the same time, that transformation would lead people to question the legitimacy of some social systems and existent organizations, if they failed to correspond to the new demand for human and social development (p. 402). Instead, formal organizations and the social systems they constituted seemed, in Ramos’s view, true “prisons,” or “a refinement of the master-slave relationship” (p. 396). The “repressive socialization” of organizations was causing “high psychological costs” at both the personal and social level. For Ramos, the: Present organizations and public bureaucracies were designed to be effective in scarcity complexes. And they have proved to be very successful, but the very moment when they have accomplished their goals, because of such efficiency, they are no longer needed. The emerging values of affluence make them intolerable, and if they do not change or are not replaced by more expendable sociotechnical structures, present human problems will reach a threatening criticality. (pp. 395-396)
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Both the social sciences and especially organization theory “must be subsumed under a theory of human development, with the healthy personality as one of its paramount concerns” (p. 398). In this way, the main task of social scientists would be to design “counter-systems according to new images of the future” (p. 399). In other words, it was fundamental to elaborate normative criteria that could serve as an analytical instrument of social and organizational systems. These criteria could not, because of the transitional period that humanity was passing through, be encountered in the precarious and questionable social systems of the day, as these were totally without legitimacy (p. 402). In agreement with all of these observations, Ramos sought to explain the postulates of his anthropological approach in the following terms: 1. a systematic understanding of human nature or of humanity’s basic needs is a condition sine qua non of a meaningful critique of social systems at the macro and micro levels; 2. the ultimate objective of systems design in macro and micro levels is the actualization of human potentialities; 3. human development never ends; 4. the legitimacy of any social system from the standpoint of human development is always precarious; 5. any social system is unviable when its functioning requires the sacrifice of human creativity; and 6. if a science of man is possible, this science has necessarily to transcend the immanent normative criteria of existing social systems. (1971a, pp. 9-10)
PARENTHETICAL MAN, A MODEL OF MAN As a model, the parenthetical man would be the heart of Ramos’s anthropological framework. Before, however, the establishment of the parenthetical man as an analytical model of the stage of development of the social and administrative sciences, Ramos reviewed various studies that also attempted to present his models of humanity. With the aim of organizing these studies, Ramos (1971a; 1971c) categorized them as: 1. Models derived from the author’s concern with the pathological conditions of contemporary man, among which were the psychological types of David Riesman (tradition-orientedness, innerorientedness, other-orientedness), the already cited organizational man of William Whyte, the three types of man of Robert Presthus (Upward mobiles, Ambivalents and Indifferents), the unidimensional-man of Herbert Marcuse, and the relative man of Hurbert Bonner, the encapsulated man proposed by Joseph
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Royce and Charles Reich’s types of man (man of consciousness I and man of consciousness II); 2. models of man derived from a descriptive viewpoint, such as the cases of homo sociologicus of Ralf Dahrendorf, the technological man of Victor Ferkiss, the histrionic man proposed by Goffman, the fallible man of Paul Ricoeur, the global man of Marshall McLuhan, the modular man of Alvin Toffler, among others; and 3. normative models, among which are the proposals of the psychological man of Philip Rieff, the non-adjustable man of Viereck, the autonomous man of Reisman, the transparent man of Jourard, the self-actualized man of Maslow, the phenomenological man of Garfinkel, the transcendent man of Victor Frankel, again among others.
In general, these studies deal with a range of considerations regarding the human condition, and denounce the impotence of contemporary man to obtain personal realization through the social arrangements typical of the era. These studies also point to the urgent need to question the social systems and the organizations that configure society. In the same way, many of these studies attempt to discover the real human necessities, beyond those determined by episodic historical circumstances. After this review, Ramos formulated his own model of man (1971c, p. 465). Though a model, the parenthetical man would be most useful in the evaluation of the design of organizations and social systems. Therefore the psychological characteristics of the parenthetical man would help to identify many of the deficiencies of the social structure that the modern industrial societies had built. Besides its usefulness as an evaluative criterion, Ramos’s model of man could allow analysts and planners of social systems to delineate an enormous diversity of new types of organizations, those more directed to human needs. Before more fully discussing the parenthetical man, it is first necessary to acknowledge three warnings that were elaborated by the author with the intention of aiding the understanding of the model. First: the parenthetical man could not be understood “as an individual psychological character,” because no individual in a contemporary society would entirely represent the personification of the comportamental style of the parenthetical man, which was a normative model (1971c, p. 466). Second: the parenthetical man was not an “abstract archtype, but a concrete possibility in contemporary societies” (p. 467). And third: the parenthetical man was not a “conformity model,” and so could not be explained according to the canons of a psychology of adjustment, be-
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cause the parenthetical man’s autonomy clashes with the excessive regimentation suggested by a behaviorist psychology. Two fundamental characteristics of the Parenthetical Man reveal some aspects of the earlier-discussed Christian legacy of Ramos’s work: first, the parenthetical man as a rational being; and second, the parenthetical man as “self-actualized.” Reason is the central category of Ramos’s humanism since his early works. Reason was always presented by the author in terms of dichotomies, from his first book until his last. In 1939, when addressing the modern dichotomy of reason, he showed two faces of the term: the utilitarian face and the spiritual face. The first, utilitarian reason, would be linked with man as individual, the second would be linked with man as person. Much later, with his deeper knowledge of the works of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim and Eric Voegelin, the duality of the significance of the term reason would gain more sociological characteristics, and become a key component of Ramos’s social thought. In a 1946 text, for example, he called the attention of his readers to the difference Weber established, with the intent of elaborating a comprehensive sociology, “between rationality and irrationality, in terms of function before that of substance” (1946, pp. 132-133). In other words, Ramos called attention to the Weberian distinction between Zweckrationalitat ¨ (formal rationality) and Wertrationalitat ¨ (substantive rationality) and consequently, between rational action referring to ends and rational action referring to values. In this same 1946 work, he also observed that Karl Mannheim had made use of this same distinction to articulate his “theory of social organization” (Ramos, 1946, p. 133). But it would only be in 1966, with the publication of his last book in Brazil before he departed into exile, that Ramos would demonstrate the maturity that the concepts of formal or instrumental rationality and substantive or substantial rationality would develop in his reflections, and indicate the direction in which his social thinking would develop, in the case of the recuperation of the classic meaning of reason and the implications of this for the articulation of human life in union with the individual. In Administra¸cao ˜ e Estrategia do Desenvolvimento (1966), Ramos firmed his understanding of functional and substantial rationality, saying on the one hand, human acts could be functional “when, linked with other actions or elements, they contribute to a predetermined objective. It is functional if the predetermined objective that this kind of rationality could be assessed” (1983, p. 38). On the another hand, all intrinsically intelligent acts that are based in a lucid understanding of the relations among facts are substantially rational. A rational act is one that attests to the transcendence of the human being,
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the individual’s quality as a creature endowed with reason. Here reason, which presides over the act, is not the positive integration of a systematic series of other acts, but a tone of intellectual accuracy. An act is of the dominion of impulses, sentiments, emotions, pre-conceits, and of other factors that disturb the vision and the intelligent understanding of reality. Crudely, substantive rationality is preoccupied with protecting liberty (p. 39). Here, one can see a preoccupation with the subject of human liberty, and the substantive dimension of reason that it supports. Eric Voegelin had drawn on Weber and Mannheim to distinguish between pragmatic rationality (or instrumental rationality) and noetic (or substantial) rationality. Voegelin (1963) showed that a society become a good society if “noetic reason” assumed “the character of creative force” in the process of constructing human associated life (Ramos, 1983, p. 39). Voegelin shared Plato’s opinion that “the polis is man in enlarged scale” (Voegelin, 1982, p. 54). In other words, the polis represented not just a microcosm, but also a macroanthropos (p. 55). This was Plato’s “anthropological principle.” Here it is important to show two aspects: first, “every city reflects in its order the human type from which it is composed”; second, the anthropological principle could be one “instrument of critical social analysis” (p. 55). These points have great relevance for understanding Ramos’s thought, and his efforts to elaborate a model of humanity. In fact, the parenthetical man is par excellence a bearer of reason in the noetic sense. According to Ramos (1981, p. 28), “by exercising reason and living according to its ethical imperatives, man transcends the condition of a purely natural and socially determined being and becomes a political actor,” and consequently the presence of the parenthetical man in a society will improve the quality of political life and freedom. Besides being a reasoning individual, the parenthetical man is concerned with the personal actualization process. In this way, it is important to highlight here that the notions of personal actualization, selfactualization and personal growth are essential to the comprehension of Ramos’s model of man, even though presented at times in a confusing manner, especially in his last book, where he attempts to clarify some of his concepts. On personal actualization, Ramos writes: The individual’s deeds as a jobholder are incidental to his genuine personal actualization. If a person allows the organization to become the primal referent for existence, he loses contact with his real self and instead adapts himself to a contrived reality. Contrived systems like formal organizations have goals which, only by acci-
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dent and secondarily, bear upon a person’s actualization. True actualizers are the actors able to maneuver in the organizationally contrived world, serving its objectives with mental reservations and qualifications, all the while leaving some room for the fulfillment of their unique project of existence. There is therefore a continuous tension between contrived organizational systems and actualizers. To claim that the individual should strive toward the elimination of such tension, thus arriving at a homeostatic equilibrium between himself and the organization. . .is to advise the deformation of the self. Only a defective self can find in contrived systems the adequate milieu for his actualization. (1981, pp. 86-87)
He continues: Self-actualization moves the individual toward inner tension, toward resisting complete socialization of his psyche. . . . the individual’s self-actualization is very often than not an unintended consequence of innumerable courses of action. Paradoxically it is an after-the-fact verification rather than a guaranteed agenda. The more the individual is concerned explicitly with self-actualization, the more trapped he finds himself in the puzzle of existential frustration. (pp. 87-88)
On another note, and still remembering well the ideas of Nicolas Berdayev, Ramos says “personal growth and personal solitude are inseparable. Personal growth unfolds from within the individual’s psyche and most likely is hindered by social or group feedback processes” (1981, p. 112). For Ramos, the parenthetical man was as much a reflex as a reaction to a social environment in which the principal agencies of socialization were rapidly losing their capacity to furnish individuals the sense of direction that they needed for the era. In this sense, whatever relations were established between the existing socializing institutions and the parenthetical man, these were of a very fragile nature, as such institutions had failed to have a lasting impact on the psychological life of man. The self-direction of the parenthetical man would come from a strong ego, and not from social arrangements, institutions, or the exterior social world—the parenthetical man definitely was not “a creature molded by the socialization process” (1971c, p. 474). The parenthetical man would postulate a vision of post-industrial society, in other words, would consider the “institutionalized code of ethics a trick or facade and therefore open to question” (p. 472). As a result society would become “a precarious stage on which roles are played according to rules whose legitimacy is to be evaluated from the standpoint of human development” (p. 473).
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If there was something relevant in the new scenario that could be important to the development of the parenthetical man, this something would be knowledge. The emergence of knowledge as a principal mediator of human socialization would establish: a) requirements, demands, necessities that social systems should show themselves able to respond to; and b) have implications in the configuration of organizational forms and designs more flexible, and adaptive to various exigencies. As a result of this the parenthetical man would be highly pre-occupied with the full actualization of personal potential, and would come into conflict with activities that did not correspond to the necessities of personal actualization, with this especially relevant in relation to work, and so would tend to develop tension in organizational spheres (pp. 475-476). Given how organizations operated in the contemporary era, the parenthetical man would see these as serious threats to his values (p. 476). It is worth noting how Ramos defined the parenthetical man in terms of individual reaction to failure. In societies where the notion of success is heavily centered in institutionalized criteria, failure becomes psychologically devastating for the individual. The parenthetical man, in contrast, is conceived as a highly ego-centered individual motivated to develop the ability to master oneself and the environment and, in this way, is hardly effected by the superego. As a result, the parenthetical man reacts to failure from the viewpoint of his own criteria of achievement, that is, “his reaction is a move to reassess himself and the environment” (p. 481). The parenthetical man does not submit his psyche to any institutionalized definition of failure, and this would have implications on how he would experience sentiments like shame, social embarrassments, scandals, etc. His actions, his sentiments, and his experiences would all be evaluated in light of his own self, rather than by external social factors (pp. 482-483). BY WAY OF CONCLUSION In synthesis: the affirmation of the self, of liberty, of self-realization, and the exercise of noetic rationality emerge as the principal engagements of the parenthetical man. In Ramos’s understanding, these are human characteristics that must be systematically articulated into social science theory, if we want to remove ourselves from the gregarious condition that was launched with the advent of secular modernity. We cannot deny that the categorical types that qualify or that delimit the contours of Ramos’s anthropological presupposition suffered some alterations over time, from his youth to his maturity. Initially, the author was influenced by Catholic thought and linked with the category of the
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human person. After his Catholic phase, Ramos developed the category of the parenthetical man: a being of substantive or noetic reason, with the possibility of transcending the world in which he was put and of acting in a manner consistent with his own subjectivity and meaning, despite the challenges of a society of modern organizations. The parenthetical man would aspire to autonomy, even while continuing to participate actively in organizations; would possess a highly critical conscience developed on the premises of value latently evident in daily life; would be a response to the present time, a reaction to the circumstances felt most intensely in the most advanced industrial societies, and that are rapidly being spread to others; would possess a capacity to “suspend his internal and external circumstances,” able in this way to examine his circumstances with a critical vision; he would manage to separate himself, to abstract himself, to transcend the flux of daily life, so as to examine and evaluate it in the quality of a spectator, a foreigner; and the parenthetical man would be concerned with values that would put noetic or substantive reason in a place of primary importance (Ramos, 1972a, p. 8). By not treating man as a “preformed, predesigned, preconstituted” being, but instead essentially as an “epic being,” a being who could always “form, design, constitute himself by exploring the range of possibilities available at each moment” (Ramos, 1970a, p. 11), Ramos managed to make clear that this necessity of personal actualization that the parenthetical man possessed does not imply a fluid character but, on the contrary, it imples actualization. Here it would signify “the retention of character through change; it is victory over fluidity” (1981, p. 171). Put this way, the implications of studies of the parenthetical man would be enormous, and the first sketch of a typology of social systems and their respective types of man was written in “The Parenthetical Diagraph” (Ramos, 1972b), in which one encounters the notion of organizational delimitation in statu nacenti. Finally, sociological reduction would be, for Ramos, a fundamental instrument which humanity could make use of to achieve success in a mission of self-realization and of emancipation because, through its intermediary, men and women—common people—through the adoption of the parenthetical attitude as part of their daily conduct, could enter into a process of true humanization. It is through this lens that we can interpret the fact that sociology came to substitute, for Guerreiro Ramos, a vocation that in his youth he attributed to poetry, which is to become a knowledge of salvation.
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NOTES 1. Eric Voegelin, recuperating the Platonic notion of metaxy, affirmed that human existence occupied an intermediate (in-between) structure, in which human consciousness could develop. People would experience this intermediate structure of existence as a tension between contrary poles, such as life and death, perfection and imperfection, time and eternity, mortality and immortality, etc. Man did not exist in either of the poles of these tensions, but rather among them. It would be an error, according to Ramos, to consider the poles objectively. They should be treated, instead, as meaning or indices, among which people move existentially. In Ramos’s interpretation, individual existence was in-between structures, in other words, “the tension between the potential and the actual.” In this resided the difficulty of existence explained “by mechanomorphic categories such as those which plague the prevailing model of social science” (Ramos, 1981, p. 111). 2. The subtitle of A Redu¸cao ˜ Sociologica ´ was “introduction to the study of sociological reason.” The term “sociological reason” was inspired by the ideas of historical reason (Dilthey) and vital reason (Ortega y Gasset). For Ramos, sociological reason was a kind of framework of meanings, that is, “the basic reference to sociologists to understand the meaning of all social facts or events that happen in a certain society” (Ramos, 1965, p. 138). 3. In The New Science of Organizations, Ramos broached the behavioral syndrome of formal social theory. According to Ramos, “the behavioral syndrome is a socially conditioned mood affecting individuals’s lives when they confuse the rules and norms of operation peculiar to episodical social systems with rules and norms of their conduct at large” (1981, p. 46). Implicit to him were four principal traits at the basis of the formal theory of organization: the fluidity of the self, perspectivism, formalism, and operationalism.
REFERENCES Argyris, C. (1964). Integrating the individual and the organization. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Berger, P. (1963). Invitation to sociology. New York: Doubleday. Fromm, E. (1967). The sane society. New York: Fawcett World Library. Herzberg, F. (1969). Work and the nature of man. New York: The World Publishing Company. Horney, K. (1964). The neurotic personality of our time. New York: W.W. Norton. Husserl, E. (1967). The thesis of natural standpoint and its suspension. In J. J. Kockelmans (Ed.), Phenomenology, the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and its interpretation (pp. 68-79). Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Maritain, J. (1972). Arte y escolastica ´ [Art and scholarship]. Buenos Aires: Club de Lectores.
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Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of being. Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand. McGregor, D. (1968). Theory X and theory Y. In D. R. Hampton, C. E. Summer, & R. A. Webber (Eds.), Organizational behavior and practice of management (pp. 132-7). Glen View, IL: Scott, Foresman. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. London: Oxford University Press. Ramos, A. G. (1937). O drama de ser dois [The drama of being two]. Salvador. Self published Ramos, A. G. (1939). Introdu¸cao ˜ a` cultura [Introduction to culture]. Rio de Janeiro: Cruzada da Boa Esperan¸ca. Ramos, A. G. (1946). A sociologia de Max Weber (sua importancia ˆ para a teoria e a pratica ´ da administra¸cao) ˜ [The sociology of Max Weber (its importance to the theory and practice of administration)]. Revista do Servi¸co Publico, ´ 3, 129-139. Ramos, A. G. (1958). A redu¸cao ˜ sociologica ´ (introdu¸cao ˜ ao estudo da razao ˜ sociologica) ´ [Sociological reduction (introduction to the study of sociological reason)]. Rio de Janeiro: ISEB. Ramos, A. G. (1963). Mito e verdade da revolu¸cao ˜ brasileira [Myth and reality of the Brazilian revolution]. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores. Ramos, A. G. (1965). A redu¸cao ˜ sociologica: ´ Introdu¸cao ˜ ao estudo da razao ˜ sociologica ´ [Sociological reduction: Introduction to the study of sociological reason)]. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro. Ramos, A. G. (1966). Administra¸cao ˜ e estrat´egia do desenvolvimento: Elementos de uma sociologia especial da administra¸cao ˜ [Administration and development strategy: Elements of a special sociology of administration]. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da FGV. Ramos, A. G. (1969). A parenthetical trip (I)—Phenomenology and social science. Los Angeles, CA. (Mimeo.) Ramos, A. G. (1970a). A parenthetical trip (II)—Man invents himself or toward a theory of the parenthetical encounter. Los Angeles, CA. (Mimeo.) Ramos, A. G. (1970b). A parenthetical trip (III)—The loss of innocence, or toward a post phenomenological social science. Los Angeles, CA. (Mimeo.) Ramos, A. G. (1971a). The parenthetical man (an anthropological approach to organization design). Annals of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Public Administration. (Mimeo.). Ramos, A. G. (1971b). Beyond alienation (work and psychohistory of the future). Annals of the National Conference of Comparative Administration. (Mimeo.)
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Ramos, A. G. (1971c). The parenthetical man. Journal of Human Relations, 19, 463-487. Ramos, A. G. (1972a). Models of man and administrative theory. Public Administration Review, 32, 241-6. Ramos, A. G. (1972b). The parenthetical diagraph. Los Angeles, CA. (Mimeo.) Ramos, A. G. (1973). The new ignorance and the future of public administration in Latin America. In C. E. Thurber & L. S. Graham (Eds.), Developing administration in Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ramos, A. G. (1981). The new science of organizations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ramos, A. G. (1983). Administra¸cao ˜ e contexto brasileiro: Esbo¸co de uma teoria geral da administra¸cao ˜ [Administration and Brazilian context: Outline of a general theory of administration]. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da FGV. Ramos, A. G. (1995). Introdu¸cao ˜ cr´ıtica a` sociologia brasileira [Critical introduction to Brazilian sociology]. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ. Ramos, A. G. (1996). A redu¸cao ˜ sociologica ´ [Sociological reduction]. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ. Ventriss, C., & Candler, G. G. (2005). Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, 20 years later: A new science still unrealized in an era of public cynicism and theoretical ambivalence. Public Administration Review, 65, 347-359. Voegelin, E. (1963). Industrial society in search of reason. In R. Aron (ed.) World technology and human destiny (pp. 31-46). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Voegelin, E. (1982). A nova ciˆencia pol´ıtica [The new political sceince] (J. Viegas Filho, Trans.). Bras´ılia: Editora da UNB.
Professor Ariston Azevedo ˆ teaches at the State University of Maringa, ´ in the state of Parana, ´ Brazil. He has published a range of articles in Brazilian journals on Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, and on Brazilian intellectual history. Email:
[email protected] Renata Ovenhausen Albernaz is pursuing a Doctorate in Law at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Her research focuses on juridical pluralism and social systems delimitation. Email:
[email protected]
