Determinado liberalismo de um intelectual comprometido: José Guilherme Merquior como autor do pensamento político brasileiro

Abstract

This dissertation, motivated by the intense circulation of liberal ideas in Brazil in recent years, investigates the ideas of career diplomat and renowned liberal intellectual, José Guilherme Merquior (1941-1991). The research is carried out in the context of Brazilian political thought and, by highlighting how Merquior thinks about the country, it aims to justify his importance to the field in question. The work is concerned with Merquior's theoretical production from 1979 onwards, when his liberal turn and his position in favor of modernity and progress are clear and his texts explore more of the field of political and social theory, in the Brazilian case with a view to the question of democracy. Scrutinizing this author's thinking with Brazil as the object takes up the problem of the relationship between liberal values and Brazilian reality. The research suggestion found in Gildo Marçal Brandão's work on the lineages of Brazilian political thought offers a perspective, which this dissertation pursues, that allows us to visualize a heterogeneity within a given ideology when he says that there is no relationship of homology between organic idealism and conservatism or constitutional idealism and liberalism. In this way, when the research here suggests an affinity between organic idealism and liberalism by José Guilherme Merquior, it also aims to contribute as well to the very understanding of Brazilian liberal thought, so that it can be perceived in its plurality. In Merquior's case, this can be seen in how he understands progress - an inclusive improvement of the human race - which means that his historical-processual vision applied to Brazil, based on the dialectic of the state and civil society alternating in responsibility for social development, does not position these two poles as anathemas to each other. The Brazilian path appears, under the concept of “other West", as an original modulation of the Western tradition, to have its problems of social integration solved by creative and complete assimilation of modernity, which would require both a re-functionalization of the state as a promoter and protector and the institutionalization of the liberal-democratic synthesis. From this emerges a liberal conscience with social concerns which, from Merquior's perspective, is the effective way to relate liberalism to Brazilian reality without betraying its presuppositions and without reviving reactionary attitudes.