A natureza do pensamento administrativo-político de Mariana Mazzucato: fundamentos teóricos, apologia do estado e programa gerencial

Abstract

A present dissertation investigates the nature of Mariana Mazzucato’s administrative-economic thought, with emphasis on the “mission-oriented approach”, which functions as a methodological reference in Brazil’s recent industrial policy, Nova Indústria Brasil (NIB). Adopting materialism and historical-immanent analysis as its methodological orientation, the study examines the author’s central works – The Entrepreneurial State, The Value of Everything, and Mission Economy – to understand how her propositions are structured as a historically situated ideal formation, articulated to the transformations of contemporary capitalism. The analysis shows that Mazzucato promotes a dissolution of the category of value, tending to equate it with the flow of wealth production and social utility – an operation that underpins the legitimation of the State not merely as a regulator, but as a “co-creator” of value and a strategic investor. It is argued that the author mobilizes a theoretical eclecticism to reconfigure structural contradictions—such as financialization and private risk aversion – into problems of management, coordination, and institutional design. The study identifies that the mission-oriented approach corresponds, in essence, to the elevation of the classical administrative cycle (Planning, Organizing, Directing, and Controlling—PODC) to the scale of the political administration of the economy, drawing on the moonshot metaphor as a means of mobilization and legitimation for the state bureaucracy. It concludes that this construction operates as a modality of politicism and as an indirect apology for capitalism, offering a managerial grammar that renders antagonisms and social tensions administrable without overcoming the objective constraints of the social metabolism of capital.