"Lilia Moritz Schwarcz shows how Brazil's philosophers, politicians, and scientists gratefully accepted social Darwinist ideas about innate racial differences, yet feared the havoc such ideas would have wrought in Brazil. In the end, Brazil's intellectuals could not condemn the miscegenation which had so long been an essential feature of Brazilian society - and which lay at the very heart of the country's new national structures.

Schwarcz illustrates how the work of these "men of science" was crucial to Brazil's modernization and to the development of its sense of national destiny."--BOOK JACKET.