the ramos's model of man: the parenthetical man

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Administrative Theory & Praxis Vol. 28, No. 4, 2006: 501–521 R

ALBERTO GUERREIRO RAMOS’SANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE SOCIAL

SCIENCES: THE PARENTHETICAL MAN

Ariston AzevedoState University of Maringa

Renata Ovenhausen AlbernazFederal University of Santa Catarina

Translated by G. G. Candler

ABSTRACT

Alberto Guerreiro Ramos’s intellectual trajectory is analyzed toshow his permanent concern with the condition of contemporary hu-manity. Two moments in his trajectory are specifically addressed. Inthe first, under the strong influence of Christian intellectual thought,the category of human person was most important to him. In thesecond moment he sought to demonstrate autonomy from those ear-lier influences, secularized his thought, and coined the expressionParenthetical Man, which was central to his criticism of the socialsciences and especially of organizational theory. From this he pro-posed his theory of social system delimitation. From this point ofview, it is possible to affirm that Guerreiro Ramos’s sociology ispredominantly antropocentric, in other words, Ramos takes man asthe main reference in his design of social systems.

The climax of the social scientist’s concern with history is the ideahe comes to hold of the epoch in which he lives. The climax of hisconcern with biography is the idea he comes to hold of man’s basicnature, and of the limits it may set to the transformation of man bythe course of history. (Mills, 1959, p. 165)

It is little known that the social scientist Alberto Guerreiro Ramosbegan his career as a poet and literary critic in the 1930s in Salvador, inthe state of Bahia, Brazil. During the years from 1936 to 1942 he wasdevoted to realize his desire to become a poet, but was able to publishonly 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 publishedin 1937, Ramos, inspired by the Christian anthropology of the Russian

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philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, wrote about his permanent existentialstate of discomfort with the secular world. In this book he admitted thathe was living under the tension of strong contradictory sentiments, be-longing both to the Kingdom of God and to the Kingdom of Caeser, toheaven and to hell; and that inside himself there existed an incessantfight between good and bad.

The experience of these tensions was narrated in poems of a pro-foundly religious tone, which reveal his sensibility with the reality of theworld, his resistance to the unidimensionalization of individual psychol-ogy, his dialecticity, lyricism and poetic language. This definition ofhimself as a man who felt his existence dramatically tensioned betweendualities was made at around 22 years of age. But at the age of 66, a fewyears prior to his death, he still admitted that the tension between duali-ties was a fundamental characteristic of his personality. In truth, to be-long to two worlds meant belonging to neither, but rather to bebetween them. Thus, without abandoning the expression “the drama ofbeing two” as a definition of his personality, and despite already beingconsidered one of Brazil’s major sociologists, Ramos adopted Voege-lin’s expression “in between”1 to explain his existential condition.

Ramos’s second book was Introducao a Cultura [Introduction to Cul-ture] (1939). Rather than another book of poetry, this was a collectionof studies on culture, humanism, personalism and poetry, in which theauthor denounced the decadent modus operandi of the modern world.In the 1930s, strongly influenced by French Catholic intellectuals [espe-cially Jacques Maritain (1972) and some personalists allied to Frenchintellectual groups like Espirit and Ordre Nouveau], as well as by Nico-las Berdyaev, Ramos’s critique of the modern world was no less severethan that contained 40 years later in his The New Science of Organiza-tions (1981). According to Ramos (1939), modern civilization had aban-doned 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 thepassage from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age had resulted in aspiritual transubstantiation of humanity: from “To Be” to “To Have.”This change had affected both humanism and culture, two fundamentalelements to the operationalization and establishment of any configura-tion of human associated life. Thus, the young Ramos believed that thehistorical moment of his day represented the crowning of this transfor-mation, of this hierarchical inversion (To Be—To Have), and demon-strated the abandonment of the philosophical, social and political


Azevedo and Ovenhausen Albernaz 503

legacy of the classic era. The recuperation of this classical legacy wouldbe one of the principal intellectual activities of his life.

In Introducao a cultura one finds the main ideas of Ramos, articu-lated in language that asserts the necessity of the installation of a newculture, of a new humanity and of a new civilization centered in thenotion of the human person and of the community. Ramos’s transform-ative proposal was very similar to the propositions of the French per-sonalists. Using a conceptual framework based on pairs of contradictoryconcepts—culture versus civilization, person versus individual, organicversus mechanical, tragic feeling of life versus bourgeois feeling of exis-tence—the young writer defends the necessity of the installation of anew social structure that privileges the necessity of human spirit.

In our opinion, these first two of Ramos’s books are very importantfor the comprehension of his intellectual trajectory, because in them aresignificant elements—that is to say, certain influences, personal posi-tions, theoretical options, concepts, and themes—that encompass thetotality of his intellectual contribution. One of the elements which re-main present throughout his career is his commitment to the develop-ment of an engaged knowledge. For example, he had an aversion to theidea of art, which left him to criticize harshly what he referred to as apoeta esteta, a type of poet who writes poetry as a mere fictional con-struction, an artifice, something alienated from the existential life of thecreator. For Ramos, poetry was a form of spiritualization, of humaniza-tion of man, a way to access God and the reality of the world, and hadan important social role, because poetry could help men and womenovercome the lack of spirituality in the modern world (1939).

Ramos leveled similar criticisms at some Brazilian sociologists. In-spired by the difference proposed by Maritan between habit (evqoς) andhabitus (evxiς) (1972, pp. 15-30), Ramos distinguished between a “soci-ology in habit” and “sociology in act or habitus” to differentiate a real,applied sociology from a more academic, “literate” sociology. While asociology of habit would require specific training, often academic andrepetitive, focused on the exercise of “mere analagic repetition of prac-tices and studies” (Ramos, 1996, p. 120) that is, focused on a trainedincapacity; a sociology of action required more than this sociologicalliteracy, because it could only be achieved through the commitment ofthe sociologist with the immediate social context, and the developmentof a new type of creative knowledge turned to improve individual andassociated human life. This link, this engagement or conscious compro-mise of sociology with its context, would make it possible to produce anauthentic sociology. Without this kind of commitment, Ramos believed



that sociology would become irrelevant, as little more than a game(1995, p. 107).

These personal positions emphasize the critical realism that is one ofthe fundamental characteristics of Ramos’s thought. “The best way todo science” is to do it “from life,” or better, “from the necessity to re-spond to the challenges of reality” (Ramos, 1995, p. 105). It was in thisway that his main works on important Brazilian social problems hadbeen affected by his own existential circumstance (see Ventriss & Can-dler, 2005, p. 349), such as those on child development, family budgets,the pattern of life, poverty, infant mortality, popular medicine andothers developed in 1940s, when Ramos was strongly influenced by theChicago School of sociology. The same can be said of his involvementin the Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental Theater),which under the strong influence of Ramos, used the psychodrama andsociometry methods of J. L. Moreno as therapy to help free Afro-Brazilians from psychological colonization. This would permit both aprovocative analysis of the social relations resulting from these states ofdiscrimination and exclusion, and also the elimination of the emotionaldifficulties that inhibited the realization of the personality of people ofcolor.

A REDUCAO SOCIOLOGICA AND ITSTRIPLE SIGNIFICANCE

In 1958, when it was first published, A Reducao Sociologica [Socio-logical Reduction] did not present all of the meanings that AlbertoGuerreiro Ramos would come to attribute to the term sociological re-duction. The book was written when Ramos was teaching at the Supe-rior Institute of Brazilian Studies, in the School of PublicAdministration of the Fundacao Getulio Vargas, and beginning his po-litical career. In other words, he was extremely busy, and as a result theedition of 1958 was not consistent with the original project as conceivedby the author, but was only an incipient research project about themeaning of sociological reduction. His desire was to develop a methodthat could help sociologists understand the sociological truth2 of theirimmediate reality, principally of their national reality; and that wouldpermit them to do this in a critical-assimilative fashion, in the face ofdifferent forms of foreign knowledge and experience of this reality. Thisdesire led Ramos to concentrate overmuch in the first edition on onlyone of the conceptual facets of sociological reduction, which was reduc-tion as a critical assimilation of the foreign sociological literature (seeVentriss & Candler 2005, pp. 349-352).



In the second edition of the book, published in 1965, Guerreiro Ra-mos presented two additional meanings of the term sociological reduc-tion: as parenthetical attitude; and as a proposal for a new social scienceof a markedly pluralistic character (Ramos, 1996, p. 11). Much later, in1981, when he published the last book of his life, The New Science ofOrganizations (1981), written in English and translated into Portuguese,one of Ramos’s preoccupations was to furnish to his compatriots, in apreface to the Brazilian edition, his intellectual development in light ofthe three meanings furnished in 1965. The first sense of the term waspresented in his 1958 book. The second was presented in his 1963 Mito eRealidade de Revolucao Brasileiro [Myth and Reality of the BrazilianRevolution] and in a 1972(a) Public Administration Review article“Models of Man and Administrative Theory.” The third meaning of so-ciological reduction was presented in an appendix to the second editionof A Reducao Sociologica (1965), in Administracao e Estrategia doDesenvolvimento (1966), in a book chapter titled “Modernization: To-wards a Possibility Model,” and in The New Science of Organizations(1981).

With the purpose of better conceptualizing the second meaning ofsociological reduction, Ramos elaborated the category of the Parenthet-ical Man, which is the synthesis of his humanism. As a result, we canconsider Ramos’s studies of the parenthetical man as being his moresubstantive reflections about the relationship between humanism andsocial theory exactly because those studies enlarged his point of view onthe theme. Ramos’s youthful work on humanism was strongly influ-enced by intellectuals from France, like Jacques Maritain, Leon Bloy,Charles Peguy, Nicolas Berdyaev, Emmanuel Mounier, and centered inthe Christian category of human person. This conceptual change in Ra-mos’s intellectual trajectory—from the category of human person toparenthetical man—was a consequence of a purpose that accompaniedhim from his youth: to contribute to the elaboration of a new humanism(Ramos, 1939). The category of parenthetical man represented his finalreflection regarding the important relation between humanism, socialtheory and organizational theory, as articulated in his book The NewScience of Organizations. Despite this, Ramos’s anthropology is a to-tally unexplored facet of his thought. The main objective of this paper isto show the importance of Ramos’s reflections on the parentheticalman for his theory of social systems delimitation and, by extension, forthe development of a truly new science of organizations.



THE CONCEPUTALIZATION OF THEPARENTHETICAL ATTITUDE

In Mito e Verdade da Revolucao Brasileira (1963) [Myth and Realityof the Brazilian Revolution], specifically in the chapter titled “organiza-tional man and parenthetical man,” Ramos tried to systematize his ownconception of man. It is important to note that the author had started towrite this book during his election campaign for the Brazilian Congress,during which he observed that all formal organizations (political par-ties, in this case) superimpose operational and epistemological con-straints that inhibit human development, and consequently humanautonomy. From this observation Ramos created, as a contrast to orga-nizational man, the category of parenthetical man, a type of man resis-tant to the effects of bureaucratic organization on human conduct andpsychology.

Ramos believed that it was very important to understand the newsocial fact of the formal organization. Although some people wereaware of the role of formal organizations in modern society, Ramosargued that systematic reflections on this role were still recent and dis-persed, and so an appropriate analysis of it, and its implications for con-temporary man, were necessary. Ramos believed that formalorganizations had assumed a fundamental and unprecedented role inthe course of human history, and this fact was meaningful to socialscientists, as there were human aspects that only became clear if seenfrom an organizational point of view. In other words, it would be diffi-cult to comprehend the “essentials of collective life” without an organi-zational perspective (Ramos, 1963, p. 147). As a result, an analyticalformulation of human praxis would be incomplete if it omitted this newsocial domain.

Perhaps the consciousness of this fact had stimulated Ramos to as-sert that, even though humanity had been condemned to act and tointeract with organizations, this would not necessarily mean that thehuman was condemned to be molded into the image of the organiza-tion, or to be transformed into a typical Whytean organizational-man.According to Ramos, the modern human would need to resist the or-ganization’s influence on his psyche, but this could only happen throughconsciousness of the effects organizations produce on human life. Thus,an understanding of the nature of organization would make possible ahuman existence liberated from a good part of the serfdom that organi-zations caused for humans, both individually and collectively.

The development of a collective critical consciousness of the natureof organization would permit, in Ramos’s eyes, the entrance of human-



ity into a new phase of the process of structuring human associated life.This new stage of human critical consciousness was especially importantbecause men and women would learn much about how to cope in theface of the growth of organizations. This would add to human con-sciousness a quality still absent, or at the least not yet dominant: theparenthetical attitude (p. 145). This concept was inspired by EdmundHusserl’s (1967) distinction between natural attitude and critical atti-tude. Ramos’s parenthetical attitude was defined “by the psychologicalcapacity of the individual to separate their internal and external” cir-cumstances (1972a, p. 243), that is, the capacity of putting between pa-rentheses the Self and the World and the existence of the Self as such.When doing this, men and women would acquire critical consciousnessof the Self and of their Circumstances and thus, they would conquer“the plane of self-conscious existence,” of self-determination, indicatedin this sense by the conquest of a “superior mode of human existence,”or a type of “learned and transcendent existence” (Ramos, 1966, pp. 10-11). Without adoption of the parenthetical attitude, humanity wouldnot be able to overcome the state of “brute existence” (p. 46), would beunable to humanize itself, would lack “power over itself and over itscircumstances” (Ramos, 1963, p. 145), and therefore would be unable topromote its active adjustment “to society and to the universe” (p. 145).

The parenthetical attitude would have, in Ramos’s thought, a funda-mental role in the process of human emancipation. It is important tonote that the parenthetical attitude put reason and freedom in thecenter of human articulation with the world, not in metaphysical termsbut as a concrete question, as praxis, once it implied the “discovery andinstauration of new organization forms,” making possible “superiorpossibilities” of human existence (1963, p. 169).

ELABORATION OF AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

After “Organization-Man and Parenthetical-Man,” during the periodfrom 1969 to 1972 Ramos would refocus his attention more intensely onhis studies of the parenthetical man. It was his intent to publish a bookthat he would title The Parenthetical Man, in which he would present,beyond his “parenthetical approach,” “the main images of man as-sumed in different historical stages of the evolution of social sciences”:the operational man, the reactive man, and the parenthetical man (Ra-mos, 1969, p. 13). Though he did not carry out the book project, he didwrite a series of works dedicated to examining the theme: “The Paren-thetical Trip (I)” (1969), “The Parenthetical Trip (II)” (1970a), “The



Parenthetical Trip (III)” (1970b), “The Parenthetical Man (An Anthro-pological Approach to Organization Design)” (1971a), “Beyond Alien-ation (Work and the Psychohistory of the Future)” (1971b), “TheParenthetical Man” (1971c), “Models of Man and Administrative The-ory” (1972a) and “The Parenthetical Diagraph” (1972b).

Given what he had written in Mito e Verdade da RevolucaoBrasileira, the degree of elaboration that Ramos put into developingthe concept of the parenthetical man is worth noting. It is also worthnoting yet another dramatic change in the author’s life during this pe-riod. While the book was written Ramos passed through a series of per-sonal tribulations in Brazil: his political activity, the termination of hismandate as Member of Congress by the military government after the1964 coup, and his restriction to a small office in the Getulio VargasFoundation in Rio de Janeiro, under constant threat of prison and tor-ture. The other works were written in an academic environment moreappropriate to intellectual exercise, at the University of Southern Cali-fornia, 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 mo-ment in history. In general, one can affirm that the texts mentionedabove demonstrated a deep preoccupation regarding what sociology, ormore broadly the social sciences, were contributing to emphasizing menand women as autonomous beings.

For Ramos, the elaboration of an anthropological approach was im-perative. The principal aims of this approach would be, first, to serve asan evaluative parameter for the design of social systems and of organi-zations operating in the social structure, and second, it would contributeto the development of new social systems and social organizations. Hewas attempting nothing less than the elaboration of a “normative modelof man” (1971a, p. 29), in which the assumptions regarding human na-ture would appear explicitly, and be legitimated by actual human neces-sities. This position dramatically contradicted the then-existing practicein social science more broadly, and contradicted the theory of organiza-tions and administration specifically, in dealing with the central issue ofexposing the psychological bases on which both were founded.

Ramos was especially clear on this fact. It was precisely his evalua-tion of these psychological presuppositions that would lead him to af-firm, in 1971, that the “image of man” that the social sciences hadassumed was more ideological disguise than science.3 According to theBrazilian sociologist, this false image of man in the social sciences hadbeen cultivated from the end of the eighteenth century, when the social



sciences decided to take “as standards of individual normality thenorms 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 con-formed to the psychological norms of the prevalent social system. Anyindividual who deviated from these norms would be tagged as abnor-mal, or declared a pathological case. In the economy, for example,homo economicus was taken as the model of man by the classical econ-omists, precisely because this model represented the human qualitymost appropriate to the psychological and operational norms of a mar-ket economy: “the systematic master reference of classical economics isthe market. Any human behavior that does not go along with the linesof the psychological prescriptions of the market is considered abnor-mal” (p. 18).

Worse, it was not solely in the economics discipline that these mar-ket-centered notions of normality and pathology were used to distin-guish “normal” human behavior from the “pathological.” For Ramos, itwas possible to find the same attitudes in the discipline of sociology,and he tried to prove this through analyzing Durkheim’s works. Thisanalysis was important because Durkheim sketched a conception ofman that represented the point of view assumed by social scienceschools, “mainly in the United States of America” (1971a, p. 19). In thissense Durkheim was, more than other sociologists, a canon, and Ramosbelieved that analyzing the French sociologist’s thought would be thebest way to demonstrate that the social sciences had become deformedby a sort of pathology of normality.

According to Ramos, the normal human, the healthy human de-fended by Durkheim was, in essence, an “adjusted man,” a man whohad adapted perfectly to the social environment in which he lived. De-fenseless in the face of social forces, the Durkhemian man would besubject to the tyranny of society, exposed to social coercion, unable toact in a way that, from his point of view, would appear legitimate, underpain of suffering social incomprehension or to be taken as someone ab-normal. Ramos also pointed out that, in Durkheim, “the coercive char-acter of society is ethically justified and the individual reaches thehighest level of ethical development when he fully conforms to the pre-scriptions of the social system” (1971a, p. 19). This would lead Ramosto affirm that the criterion of morality in the work of Durkheim wasderived from the social system. Durkheim failed to perceive that “theproblem of morality could be seen from the standpoint of the individ-ual’s self-actualization” (p. 21), or that the social environment could be



evaluated in light of human necessities of actualization of human poten-tial, which would leave the social analyst to conclude that the socialenvironment represented, to humanity, something unhealthy, that is, anenormous obstacle to human aspirations of personal development. Inother words, Durkheim failed to consider “that the speculation aboutthe unhealthy character of the environment itself would have room insociology” (p. 19).

Obviously Ramos was aware of the existence of another current ofsociology that moved significantly from these propositions of Durk-heim. These would include those derived from the works of GeorgeSimmel, Max Weber and Herbert Mead, where Ramos observed a ma-jor emphasis on the individual as an active being, that is, constantlypreoccupied with the meaning of actions and seeking to satisfy the ne-cessities of his or her ego. In general, these authors showed an interestin incorporating these preoccupations of the individual into the body ofsocial theory. However, Ramos objected even to these propositions ofthe individual as a being focused on meaning, as they failed to put intofocus the more urgent question of the epoch: “the pathology of socialconformity” (1971a, p. 21). Both Talcott Parsons, who enjoyed a strongreputation in North American sociology during this period and hadwritten Social Structure and Personality, and Ralf Dahrendorf, with hisnotion of homo sociologicus; followed the parameters delineated byDurkheim at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, according toRamos’s point of view, both failed to escape from a sociology focusedon the legitimizing processes of the normative patterns of institutions.

In spite of this, it was clear to Ramos that sociology could assumeanother direction: that associated with an anthropological approach.The introduction of the notion of conflict in sociology, for example, in-dicated to him new paths. Conflict could not presuppose the necessityof adaptation of man to the social system, as assumed in the idea ofsocial equilibrium, at the same time that it could serve to decree thatcertain organizational paradigms needed to be overcome, demanding,on the part of social planners and of people in general, the focusing oftheir creative forces to the elaboration of new social forms, to newspaces related to the exercise of an authentic existence. As he put it:

Sociology today is increasingly expanding its horizon. Instead of aview of human behavior from the standpoint of the requirements ofsocial equilibrium, it is developing a view to which nothing humanis extraneous, including the individual’s resistance to conformitywith episodical social frameworks of social equilibrium. Conflict isubiquitous in all social systems and sometimes must be considered



as an indication that an established social order is losing legitimacy.Sociology does not have a systematic commitment with any estab-lished social order. (1971a, pp. 22-23)

In this way, Ramos agreed with Peter Berger (1963) in the claim thatsociology had insisted, from its origin, in the total equalization of manwith determined types of socially validated identities; and also withKaren Horney (1964), who positioned herself against the super-social-ized normality and defended the necessity of studying society under theperspective of the psychic difficulties that social arrangements andstructures created for individuals. Thus, the social sciences could notremain immune to the criticisms being made regarding the “pathologyof conformity or social normality” (Ramos, 1971a, p. 25-6). Psychologi-cal works such as those of Eric Fromm (1967), Abraham Maslow(1968), Chris Argyris (1964), Douglas McGregor (1968), FrederickHerzberg (1969), along with Horney, had pointed to the need to articu-late a science of man that emphasized the fundamental requirements ofhuman development, reinforcing this plea through an anthropologicalapproach to the social sciences.

Also relevant to the development of these ideas was that in the 1960shumanity was experiencing the passage from a period of shortage ofmaterial goods and elementary services, to one of abundance. Thispoint was important to Ramos, because past “fundamental lacks” thatprevented people from engaging in substantive pursuits and pursuingpersonal development could now be overcome (Ramos, 1973, p. 393).At the same time, that transformation would lead people to questionthe legitimacy of some social systems and existent organizations, if theyfailed to correspond to the new demand for human and social develop-ment (p. 402). Instead, formal organizations and the social systems theyconstituted seemed, in Ramos’s view, true “prisons,” or “a refinementof the master-slave relationship” (p. 396). The “repressive socialization”of organizations was causing “high psychological costs” at both the per-sonal and social level. For Ramos, the:

Present organizations and public bureaucracies were designed to beeffective in scarcity complexes. And they have proved to be verysuccessful, but the very moment when they have accomplishedtheir goals, because of such efficiency, they are no longer needed.The emerging values of affluence make them intolerable, and ifthey do not change or are not replaced by more expendable soci-otechnical structures, present human problems will reach a threat-ening criticality. (pp. 395-396)



Both the social sciences and especially organization theory “must besubsumed under a theory of human development, with the healthy per-sonality as one of its paramount concerns” (p. 398). In this way, themain task of social scientists would be to design “counter-systems ac-cording to new images of the future” (p. 399). In other words, it wasfundamental to elaborate normative criteria that could serve as an ana-lytical instrument of social and organizational systems. These criteriacould not, because of the transitional period that humanity was passingthrough, be encountered in the precarious and questionable social sys-tems of the day, as these were totally without legitimacy (p. 402).

In agreement with all of these observations, Ramos sought to explainthe postulates of his anthropological approach in the following terms:

1. a systematic understanding of human nature or of humanity’sbasic needs is a condition sine qua non of a meaningful critiqueof social systems at the macro and micro levels;

2. the ultimate objective of systems design in macro and microlevels 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; and6. if a science of man is possible, this science has necessarily to

transcend the immanent normative criteria of existing social sys-tems. (1971a, pp. 9-10)

PARENTHETICAL MAN, A MODEL OF MAN

As a model, the parenthetical man would be the heart of Ramos’santhropological framework. Before, however, the establishment of theparenthetical man as an analytical model of the stage of development ofthe social and administrative sciences, Ramos reviewed various studiesthat also attempted to present his models of humanity. With the aim oforganizing these studies, Ramos (1971a; 1971c) categorized them as:

1. Models derived from the author’s concern with the pathologicalconditions of contemporary man, among which were the psycho-logical types of David Riesman (tradition-orientedness, inner-orientedness, other-orientedness), the already cited organiza-tional man of William Whyte, the three types of man of RobertPresthus (Upward mobiles, Ambivalents and Indifferents), theunidimensional-man of Herbert Marcuse, and the relative manof Hurbert Bonner, the encapsulated man proposed by Joseph



Royce and Charles Reich’s types of man (man of consciousness Iand man of consciousness II);

2. models of man derived from a descriptive viewpoint, such as thecases of homo sociologicus of Ralf Dahrendorf, the technologi-cal man of Victor Ferkiss, the histrionic man proposed byGoffman, the fallible man of Paul Ricoeur, the global man ofMarshall McLuhan, the modular man of Alvin Toffler, amongothers; and

3. normative models, among which are the proposals of the psy-chological man of Philip Rieff, the non-adjustable man of Vier-eck, the autonomous man of Reisman, the transparent man ofJourard, the self-actualized man of Maslow, the phenomenologi-cal man of Garfinkel, the transcendent man of Victor Frankel,again among others.

In general, these studies deal with a range of considerations regard-ing the human condition, and denounce the impotence of contemporaryman to obtain personal realization through the social arrangements typ-ical of the era. These studies also point to the urgent need to questionthe social systems and the organizations that configure society. In thesame way, many of these studies attempt to discover the real humannecessities, beyond those determined by episodic historical circum-stances. After this review, Ramos formulated his own model of man(1971c, p. 465).

Though a model, the parenthetical man would be most useful in theevaluation of the design of organizations and social systems. Thereforethe psychological characteristics of the parenthetical man would help toidentify many of the deficiencies of the social structure that the modernindustrial societies had built. Besides its usefulness as an evaluative cri-terion, Ramos’s model of man could allow analysts and planners of so-cial systems to delineate an enormous diversity of new types oforganizations, those more directed to human needs.

Before more fully discussing the parenthetical man, it is first neces-sary to acknowledge three warnings that were elaborated by the authorwith the intention of aiding the understanding of the model. First: theparenthetical man could not be understood “as an individual psycholog-ical character,” because no individual in a contemporary society wouldentirely represent the personification of the comportamental style ofthe parenthetical man, which was a normative model (1971c, p. 466).Second: the parenthetical man was not an “abstract archtype, but a con-crete possibility in contemporary societies” (p. 467). And third: the par-enthetical man was not a “conformity model,” and so could not beexplained according to the canons of a psychology of adjustment, be-



cause the parenthetical man’s autonomy clashes with the excessive regi-mentation suggested by a behaviorist psychology.

Two fundamental characteristics of the Parenthetical Man revealsome aspects of the earlier-discussed Christian legacy of Ramos’s work:first, the parenthetical man as a rational being; and second, the paren-thetical man as “self-actualized.” Reason is the central category of Ra-mos’s humanism since his early works. Reason was always presented bythe author in terms of dichotomies, from his first book until his last. In1939, when addressing the modern dichotomy of reason, he showed twofaces of the term: the utilitarian face and the spiritual face. The first,utilitarian reason, would be linked with man as individual, the secondwould be linked with man as person. Much later, with his deeper knowl-edge of the works of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim and Eric Voegelin,the duality of the significance of the term reason would gain more soci-ological characteristics, and become a key component of Ramos’s socialthought. In a 1946 text, for example, he called the attention of his read-ers to the difference Weber established, with the intent of elaborating acomprehensive sociology, “between rationality and irrationality, interms of function before that of substance” (1946, pp. 132-133). In otherwords, Ramos called attention to the Weberian distinction betweenZweckrationalitat (formal rationality) and Wertrationalitat (substantiverationality) and consequently, between rational action referring to endsand rational action referring to values. In this same 1946 work, he alsoobserved that Karl Mannheim had made use of this same distinction toarticulate his “theory of social organization” (Ramos, 1946, p. 133).

But it would only be in 1966, with the publication of his last book inBrazil before he departed into exile, that Ramos would demonstrate thematurity that the concepts of formal or instrumental rationality andsubstantive or substantial rationality would develop in his reflections,and indicate the direction in which his social thinking would develop, inthe case of the recuperation of the classic meaning of reason and theimplications of this for the articulation of human life in union with theindividual. In Administracao e Estrategia do Desenvolvimento (1966),Ramos firmed his understanding of functional and substantial rational-ity, saying on the one hand, human acts could be functional “when,linked with other actions or elements, they contribute to a predeter-mined objective. It is functional if the predetermined objective that thiskind of rationality could be assessed” (1983, p. 38). On the anotherhand, all intrinsically intelligent acts that are based in a lucid under-standing of the relations among facts are substantially rational. A ra-tional act is one that attests to the transcendence of the human being,



the individual’s quality as a creature endowed with reason. Here rea-son, which presides over the act, is not the positive integration of a sys-tematic series of other acts, but a tone of intellectual accuracy. An act isof the dominion of impulses, sentiments, emotions, pre-conceits, and ofother factors that disturb the vision and the intelligent understanding ofreality. Crudely, substantive rationality is preoccupied with protectingliberty (p. 39).

Here, one can see a preoccupation with the subject of human liberty,and the substantive dimension of reason that it supports. Eric Voegelinhad drawn on Weber and Mannheim to distinguish between pragmaticrationality (or instrumental rationality) and noetic (or substantial) ra-tionality. Voegelin (1963) showed that a society become a good societyif “noetic reason” assumed “the character of creative force” in the pro-cess of constructing human associated life (Ramos, 1983, p. 39).

Voegelin shared Plato’s opinion that “the polis is man in enlargedscale” (Voegelin, 1982, p. 54). In other words, the polis represented notjust 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 iscomposed”; second, the anthropological principle could be one “instru-ment of critical social analysis” (p. 55). These points have great rele-vance for understanding Ramos’s thought, and his efforts to elaborate amodel of humanity. In fact, the parenthetical man is par excellence abearer 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 deter-mined being and becomes a political actor,” and consequently the pres-ence of the parenthetical man in a society will improve the quality ofpolitical life and freedom.

Besides being a reasoning individual, the parenthetical man is con-cerned with the personal actualization process. In this way, it is impor-tant to highlight here that the notions of personal actualization, self-actualization and personal growth are essential to the comprehension ofRamos’s model of man, even though presented at times in a confusingmanner, especially in his last book, where he attempts to clarify some ofhis concepts. On personal actualization, Ramos writes:

The individual’s deeds as a jobholder are incidental to his genuinepersonal actualization. If a person allows the organization to be-come the primal referent for existence, he loses contact with hisreal self and instead adapts himself to a contrived reality. Contrivedsystems like formal organizations have goals which, only by acci-



dent and secondarily, bear upon a person’s actualization. True actu-alizers are the actors able to maneuver in the organizationallycontrived world, serving its objectives with mental reservations andqualifications, all the while leaving some room for the fulfillment oftheir unique project of existence. There is therefore a continuoustension between contrived organizational systems and actualizers.To claim that the individual should strive toward the elimination ofsuch tension, thus arriving at a homeostatic equilibrium betweenhimself and the organization. . .is to advise the deformation of theself. Only a defective self can find in contrived systems the ade-quate milieu for his actualization. (1981, pp. 86-87)

He continues:

Self-actualization moves the individual toward inner tension, to-ward resisting complete socialization of his psyche. . . . the individ-ual’s self-actualization is very often than not an unintendedconsequence of innumerable courses of action. Paradoxically it isan after-the-fact verification rather than a guaranteed agenda. Themore the individual is concerned explicitly with self-actualization,the more trapped he finds himself in the puzzle of existential frus-tration. (pp. 87-88)

On another note, and still remembering well the ideas of NicolasBerdayev, Ramos says “personal growth and personal solitude are in-separable. Personal growth unfolds from within the individual’s psycheand 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 reactionto a social environment in which the principal agencies of socializationwere rapidly losing their capacity to furnish individuals the sense of di-rection that they needed for the era. In this sense, whatever relationswere established between the existing socializing institutions and theparenthetical man, these were of a very fragile nature, as such institu-tions had failed to have a lasting impact on the psychological life ofman. The self-direction of the parenthetical man would come from astrong ego, and not from social arrangements, institutions, or the exte-rior social world—the parenthetical man definitely was not “a creaturemolded by the socialization process” (1971c, p. 474). The parentheticalman would postulate a vision of post-industrial society, in other words,would consider the “institutionalized code of ethics a trick or facadeand therefore open to question” (p. 472). As a result society would be-come “a precarious stage on which roles are played according to ruleswhose legitimacy is to be evaluated from the standpoint of human de-velopment” (p. 473).



If there was something relevant in the new scenario that could beimportant to the development of the parenthetical man, this somethingwould be knowledge. The emergence of knowledge as a principal medi-ator of human socialization would establish: a) requirements, demands,necessities that social systems should show themselves able to respondto; and b) have implications in the configuration of organizationalforms and designs more flexible, and adaptive to various exigencies. Asa result of this the parenthetical man would be highly pre-occupied withthe full actualization of personal potential, and would come into conflictwith activities that did not correspond to the necessities of personal ac-tualization, with this especially relevant in relation to work, and sowould tend to develop tension in organizational spheres (pp. 475-476).Given how organizations operated in the contemporary era, the paren-thetical man would see these as serious threats to his values (p. 476).

It is worth noting how Ramos defined the parenthetical man in termsof individual reaction to failure. In societies where the notion of successis heavily centered in institutionalized criteria, failure becomes psycho-logically devastating for the individual. The parenthetical man, in con-trast, is conceived as a highly ego-centered individual motivated todevelop the ability to master oneself and the environment and, in thisway, is hardly effected by the superego. As a result, the parentheticalman reacts to failure from the viewpoint of his own criteria of achieve-ment, that is, “his reaction is a move to reassess himself and the envi-ronment” (p. 481). The parenthetical man does not submit his psyche toany institutionalized definition of failure, and this would have implica-tions on how he would experience sentiments like shame, social embar-rassments, scandals, etc. His actions, his sentiments, and his experienceswould all be evaluated in light of his own self, rather than by externalsocial 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 engage-ments of the parenthetical man. In Ramos’s understanding, these arehuman characteristics that must be systematically articulated into socialscience theory, if we want to remove ourselves from the gregarious con-dition that was launched with the advent of secular modernity. We can-not deny that the categorical types that qualify or that delimit thecontours of Ramos’s anthropological presupposition suffered some al-terations over time, from his youth to his maturity. Initially, the authorwas influenced by Catholic thought and linked with the category of the



human person. After his Catholic phase, Ramos developed the categoryof the parenthetical man: a being of substantive or noetic reason, withthe possibility of transcending the world in which he was put and ofacting 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 contin-uing to participate actively in organizations; would possess a highly crit-ical conscience developed on the premises of value latently evident indaily life; would be a response to the present time, a reaction to thecircumstances felt most intensely in the most advanced industrial socie-ties, and that are rapidly being spread to others; would possess a capac-ity to “suspend his internal and external circumstances,” able in thisway to examine his circumstances with a critical vision; he would man-age to separate himself, to abstract himself, to transcend the flux ofdaily life, so as to examine and evaluate it in the quality of a spectator, aforeigner; and the parenthetical man would be concerned with valuesthat would put noetic or substantive reason in a place of primary impor-tance (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 al-ways “form, design, constitute himself by exploring the range of pos-sibilities available at each moment” (Ramos, 1970a, p. 11), Ramosmanaged to make clear that this necessity of personal actualization thatthe parenthetical man possessed does not imply a fluid character but,on the contrary, it imples actualization. Here it would signify “the re-tention of character through change; it is victory over fluidity” (1981, p.171). Put this way, the implications of studies of the parenthetical manwould be enormous, and the first sketch of a typology of social systemsand their respective types of man was written in “The Parenthetical Di-agraph” (Ramos, 1972b), in which one encounters the notion of organi-zational delimitation in statu nacenti.

Finally, sociological reduction would be, for Ramos, a fundamentalinstrument which humanity could make use of to achieve success in amission of self-realization and of emancipation because, through its in-termediary, men and women—common people—through the adoptionof the parenthetical attitude as part of their daily conduct, could enterinto a process of true humanization. It is through this lens that we caninterpret the fact that sociology came to substitute, for Guerreiro Ra-mos, a vocation that in his youth he attributed to poetry, which is tobecome a knowledge of salvation.



NOTES

1. Eric Voegelin, recuperating the Platonic notion of metaxy, affirmed thathuman existence occupied an intermediate (in-between) structure, in whichhuman consciousness could develop. People would experience this intermediatestructure of existence as a tension between contrary poles, such as life anddeath, perfection and imperfection, time and eternity, mortality and immortal-ity, etc. Man did not exist in either of the poles of these tensions, but ratheramong them. It would be an error, according to Ramos, to consider the polesobjectively. They should be treated, instead, as meaning or indices, amongwhich people move existentially. In Ramos’s interpretation, individual exis-tence was in-between structures, in other words, “the tension between the po-tential and the actual.” In this resided the difficulty of existence explained “bymechanomorphic categories such as those which plague the prevailing model ofsocial science” (Ramos, 1981, p. 111).

2. The subtitle of A Reducao Sociologica was “introduction to the study ofsociological reason.” The term “sociological reason” was inspired by the ideasof historical reason (Dilthey) and vital reason (Ortega y Gasset). For Ramos,sociological reason was a kind of framework of meanings, that is, “the basicreference to sociologists to understand the meaning of all social facts or eventsthat happen in a certain society” (Ramos, 1965, p. 138).

3. In The New Science of Organizations, Ramos broached the behavioralsyndrome of formal social theory. According to Ramos, “the behavioral syn-drome is a socially conditioned mood affecting individuals’s lives when theyconfuse the rules and norms of operation peculiar to episodical social systemswith rules and norms of their conduct at large” (1981, p. 46). Implicit to himwere four principal traits at the basis of the formal theory of organization: thefluidity of the self, perspectivism, formalism, and operationalism.

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Professor Ariston Azevedo teaches at the State University of Maringa, in thestate of Parana, Brazil. He has published a range of articles in Brazilian journalson Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, and on Brazilian intellectual history. Email:[email protected]

Renata Ovenhausen Albernaz is pursuing a Doctorate in Law at the FederalUniversity of Santa Catarina. Her research focuses on juridical pluralism andsocial systems delimitation. Email: [email protected]

the ramos's model of man: the parenthetical man

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