It is a happy initiative to produce an English version of Victor Nunes Leal's book. It appeared in 1948 as a thesis presented in the competition for the chair in politics in the National Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Brazil, under the title of The Municipality and the Representative Regime in Brazil – A Contribution to the Study of Coronelismo, and was made known to the public under the title of Coronelismo, Enxada e Voto. In Brazil, the edition rapidly went out of print, and today it is a bibliographical rarity avidly sought after in the second-hand bookshops. Perhaps its publication in English will also make it easier for Brazilian students to get to know this fundamental work on the political institutions of their country, one that marks a divide in the history of political science in Brazil, being the first landmark in the study of politics in our universities.

These remarks are not lightly made, but correspond to the strictest truth. Before that date, studies in political science in Brazil were carried out by the self-taught amateur. Some had genius, as did Tavares Bastos, Alberto Torres and Oliveira Viana, but all suffered nonetheless from a lack of systematic culture in this field and from little contact in the university with foreign literature and the foreign masters. And coming as nearly all of them did from the faculties of law, their works ran parallel to those in public law, such as Pedro Lessa's O Poder Judiciário, or Anibal Freire's O Poder Executivo na República Brasileira.