Doctor Sócrates

4 ideas

1. Corinthians Democracy under Brazil's military rule

   From about 1982 to 1984, with Brazil still under military dictatorship, Corinthians players led by Sócrates put club decisions to a vote with one vote per person, whether player, kit man or director. Those decisions covered the pre-match confinement known as concentração, training schedules and signings. The team printed 'Democracia' on its shirts, won São Paulo state titles in 1982 and 1983, and showed that a self-governing workplace could be both functional and successful under an authoritarian state.

2. Sócrates bets his career on direct elections

   At a huge 1984 Diretas Já rally in São Paulo, Sócrates publicly promised to turn down a move to Italy if Congress passed the amendment restoring direct presidential elections. The amendment failed, and he left for Fiorentina. The episode shows a celebrity staking a concrete personal cost on a political outcome, and losing it.

3. Collective autonomy can't cure individual self-destruction

   The same Sócrates who demanded freedom from club control over players' private lives, including their drinking and confinement, died of alcohol-related illness in 2011 at 57. The biography treats his rejection of paternalistic discipline and his inability to govern his own drinking as one character trait rather than a contradiction. Liberating people from institutional control does not give them self-control. The freedom that powered his politics also removed the external limits that might have protected him.

4. Outsider biography built on the subject's voice

   This is a portrait of a Brazilian icon by a Scottish foreign correspondent who spent decades in Brazil, not by a Brazilian. Readers should weigh an outsider's framing for an international audience against a subject-supplied account, which can carry his self-justifications, especially about politics and drinking.

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