Essayism as a Sociological Research Tradition in Brazil: a Definition of Essay and Essayism for Sociology Veridiana Domingos Cordeiro 1 & Hugo Neri 2 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract The paper discusses the form of the essay as a writing and thinking style in Sociology. By resuming some relevant German sociological writings (esp. Simmel, Weber and Elias), we explore how they are essays profoundly influenced the first Brazilian (pre) sociological writings. At the beginning of the institutionalization of Social Sciences in Brazil, we find essayists (esp. Buarque de Holanda, Freye and Prado) who wrote essential texts on the nation formation and Brazilian ethos. Its non-systematic, literary style and historical arguments join them together in what would be later called as the “Brazilian Essayism.” After these first writings, although a scientific wave flooded Brazilian Sociology, the discipline have always referred (positively or negatively) to these seminal works. Keywords German Essayism . Brazilian Essayism . Brazilian ethos Introduction What is the contemporary epistemological purpose of essays in Social Sciences, or particularly in Sociology? Do they contribute with scientific knowledge when com- pared with the scientific paper, which is the dominant genre? As a scholar of the essayist genre states, “as science became collectively organized, it tended to become less essayistic … the essay stayed on the margins of science, as a vehicle either for unorthodox speculations or for communicating some of science’ s results to a non- specialist audience” (Good 1997, p. ii). Following Good’ s cue, the primary role of the The American Sociologist https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09438-0 * Veridiana Domingos Cordeiro veridiana.cordeiro@usp.br Hugo Neri hugo.munhoz@gmail.com 1 Department of Sociology, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil 2 Center for Artificial Intelligence, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil