The idealism of Constitution in Brazil between the 1920s/30s

the rewriting of the text under different political contexts

Abstract

During the 1920s and 1930s there was the emergence of political and social crisis of the models identified with liberal-representative democracy in Brazil and several other countries in the Americas and Western Europe. At that time, many Brazilian intellectuals had produced critiques of liberalism in order to interpret it as responsible for the political, social and economic problems of society at the beginning of the 20^th century, as the case of Francisco Jose de Oliveira Vianna, an important Brazilian intellectual in this period. In this text, based on a perspective from intellectual history, we propose to understand his book The idealism of Constitution (1927) considering, on the one hand, his critique of national liberalism (about the republican experience in the 1920s) and, on the other hand, the dimension of rhetorical and semantic transformation operated by the author in the second edition of the book (1939). In this sense, we argue that to understand this text it is necessary to investigate the mobilization of new values added to the concept of democracy (between the two editions) as a renewed instrument of political and intellectual debates at the time.