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This book reconceptualizes the relationship between Portuguese society and Salazar's political police. By studying the PIDE from below, Salazar's PIDE and Portuguese Society challenges the prevailing historiographic emphasis on processes of top-down repression whose effect has been to relegate the bulk of the population to the status of passive victims. The analysis concentrates on various forms of spontaneous interactions between individual citizens and the PIDE. Duncan Simpson focuses on the mass of depoliticised citizens, rather than the small minority of oppositionists, using new research methodologies, like oral history and opinion surveying, and original archival material in the form of denunciation letters, petitions, and applications to join the PIDE.

From a theoretical perspective, the book draws on the international scholarship of totalitarianism, 'accusatory practices', and everyday life under dictatorship; work which has highlighted the complexity of the relations between State and society by uncovering the prevalence of widespread processes of individual adjustment and accommodation. Indeed Simpson's underlying - and convincing - argument is that the relationship between the PIDE and society was far more dynamic, multifaceted, and interactive than has been acknowledged until now.