Since its first appearance in Brazil in 1949, Victor Nunes Leal's Coronelismo, Enxada e Voto, here entitled Coronelismo: the Municipality and Representative Government in Brazil, has come to be recognized as a classic analysis of the system that emerges from 'the superimposition of structural forms evolved through the representative process on an inadequate social and economic structure'. The text is here published without any substantial change or addition, according to the author's wish. His insights and approach remain as suggestive as when they first appeared; as Barbosa Lima Sobrinho pointed out in the preface to the second Brazilian edition, the work is not only the analysis of a structure, but the record of that structure and of the arguments about it at a certain time, a record important in itself. Its place in the development of political analysis in Brazil is set out in Alberto Venancio Filho's introduction: 'a divide in the history of political science in Brazil... the first landmark of the study of politics in our Universities'. The work is recognized everywhere as an essential text for the student of that country.
