Público e privado: construção conceitual e política no Brasil (sécs. XVII-XIX)

Abstract

Considered as fundamental concepts of modern democracy, public and private still seem to suggest more problems than to offer answers to the challenges of interpretation, systematization and organization of the reality experienced and analyzed. Several political, economic and social changes in the 19th century are commonly attributed to the supposed separation between the concepts. Ultimately, they mark the emergence of the “modern state”. However, just as there is no consensus regarding the processes that led to the emergence of the State, there are also serious questions about the separation between the public and the private in Brazil (as in the theses of Brazilian patrimonialism). Starting from the importance of these concepts for political theory and, simultaneously, paying attention to the need to understand them in their own historical situations, the present thesis, through conceptual history (begriffsgeschichte), aims to investigate the way these concepts were used among the 17th century until approximately the final years of the 19th. The approach will seek the pragmatic, cultural and semantic levels. It is an attempt to provide a long-term interpretation about their developments, trying to think in their persuasive functions, in the orientations of the political discourse and the impact that may have on the political and social practice. To this end, I transited between the Iberian Peninsula and Portuguese America, centering the analysis on Brazilian territory from the 19th century onwards.