In Brazil, between the 18th and 19th centuries, the children of the agrarian oligarchy sent to Europe to study, returned bringing in the suitcases an entire formation guided by the main ideological currents that circulated on the European continent in that time course. Thus, a process of ideological “import” was started, which in the future would come up against a completely national context. averse to the European scenario, featuring a true ideological artificiality of a State that thought in a way, but acted in a other. From the Empire to the years before the Republic, an attempt was made to copy the ideologies of the European and American contexts in an attempt to building a state with decentralized power on impersonal and rational bases, with functions given within a bureaucracy technique.
However, such attempts failed, since the Brazilian social organization conditioned a political life guided by overlapping between public orders (which concerns the collective interests of society as a whole) and private (private, individual interest only). In other words, the cause of the artificiality of liberal ideals and the failure of this “import of ideals” could be found in the relationship of promiscuity or intercrossing between the public and the private, since the rational policies of a positivist and liberal nature that the State defended in the sphere of thought had to be molded to the patriarchal, slave-holding and patrimonial society. If liberalism was synonymous with freedom and political decentralization (which was interesting since the autonomy of the elite could be of greater value than the submission to power of the imperial figure), on the other hand it went against the conservative reality of the Brazil. The traditional and elitist ideas of maintaining the territory (and the power that came from it), territoriality and the economic system of production based on slavery prevailed.
The way in which the country's independence took place without the outbreak of a revolution (like those that occurred in other Latin American countries) makes it clear that although it was motivated by a “liberal-modern” spirit, it was promoted by the maintenance of systems and activities of the colony, for activities still closely linked to the context of the rural privatist order, a scenario that shaped the artificiality ideological. This was, certainly, the high point of the mismatch of national political practices with the liberal positivist ideals of the time. This happened both in the essay for the constitution of the Empire and for the advent of the Republic.
As shown by Luiz Werneck Vianna (1996), the revolutionary nationalist idealism that motivated the break with the Portuguese metropolis and, later, the advent of the Republic itself, gave way to the logic of “conserving changing”. The attempt to build a State based on the preservation of factors such as slave labor and territorialism (maintaining the large latifundium and the status of private property), allowed it (the State) to be marked by a great ambiguity given by its longing for modernity and its attachment to tradition.
“The radical ambiguity of the State – between liberalism and slavery – should be resolved in itself, a tense institution, architect of a work claiming the complicity of time, delegating itself to the future the task of overcoming the barbarity of a fragmentary and invertebrate society, until it came to correspond and meet the demands of the civilizing ideals of which he would be the only one carrier"(VIANNA, 1996, p.378).
This context of partial transformation of the political sphere or the use of liberalism as an “dropper”, in the words of Werneck (1996), is also referred to by Wanderley G. of the Saints. When discussing the evolution of liberalism in Brazil in one of his works, he shows his perspective on the way this national political context was formed with a liberal air and democratic, but impregnated with obscure questions that denounced a “complete non-conversion” to liberalism and the positivist practices proclaimed, in theory, by the State and the Constitution.
“Thus, for the liberal state to operate satisfactorily, as described in the Constitution, it would be enough to wipe out corrupt politicians from the system. This idea would form the backbone of the liberal politicians' agenda until 1930: honest elections, removal of corrupt politicians, freedom for the political market to operate as it should. It shouldn't surprise anyone, however, to find many who have joined this type of liberalism asking the state to support coffee prices, or the government to support the economy sugar bowl" (SANTOS, 1998, p.34).
Therefore, nothing more indicative than these obscure issues (present in political practice) to denounce the existing ideological artificialism, which would later contribute to the vilification of the Brazilian political space of general way. Thus, if the attempt to carry out political practices involved by the European ideals in vogue could be read as an action aimed at the sphere and if, on the other hand, the way in which the political class tried to guide its actions in defense of its interests denounces the attempt to perpetuation of the private sphere in power, what can be inferred is that the national political organization was built on this overlap between such spheres. Thus, this overlap or symbiosis between public and private things will be the fundamental point for to think about how the field of politics in Brazil was also built, which, as is known, has many weaknesses.
Paulo Silvino Ribeiro
Brazil School Collaborator
Bachelor in Social Sciences from UNICAMP - State University of Campinas
Master in Sociology from UNESP - São Paulo State University "Júlio de Mesquita Filho"
Doctoral Student in Sociology at UNICAMP - State University of Campinas
Sociology - Brazil School
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/sociologia/o-descompasso-entre-pratica-teoria-ideias-liberais.htm
