Gestão, desenvolvimento e êxito: Sociogénese da literatura de auto‑ajuda em Portugal

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the behavioural and emotional code emerging from self-help literature published in Portugal from the 1950s onwards, the time when this type of publication first began to acquire a presence and visibility. Initially this code seems far removed from the traditional precepts of the New State. However, an analysis of its social basis – economic development, integrating the country into the international capitalist circuit, the company as a new focus for social integration, the presence of new technocratic mentalities and the search by the political authorities for a new type of legitimacy based on performance – allows us to make a better assessment of this potential “distance”, and to examine how the regime incorporated and assumed a new behavioural and emotional culture of self-help as a complex product of authority and liberty. Taking neo-Foucauldian theories of governamentality as its reference, it uses the example of self-help to analyse this combination of a liberal and authoritarian political rationale evident in the final twenty years of the New State.

Keywords

• behavioral psychology
• New State
• governmentality
• ideology
• Portugal
• self-help