Liberalismo orgânico democrático: Nestor Duarte e sua política da média no "outro ocidente" brasileiro

Abstract

The research aims to revisit the organic idealism lineage of Gildo Marçal Brandão, raising a different approach in its affinities, in order to defend the existence of a liberal bias in the line of thought, which was ignored by Oliveira Vianna and not claimed by Brandão. We suggest that the centralizing core of the Empire – Vianna’s “audacious reactionaries” – who was neither reactionary nor illiberal, in fact, could be called conservative liberal, more intellectually situated in the ideals of post-revolutionary Europe, whether in the British parliamentary monarchy or in the French July monarchy. This imperial elite, focused on the contextual issues of its historical time, paid attention to conciliatory solutions for political stability, embedded in its contradictions. This required them to adapt ideologies to local reality, resulting in a difficult liberalism and conservatism. This liberal conservatism was chosen by Vianna as part of a tradition of organic idealism that he built and conferred on himself, in contrast to the utopian idealism of liberals. Brandão, although he neutralized this ideological dimension of Vianna, did not question the claimed tradition and adopted it as a reference for the “ways of thinking” of his lineage of organic idealism. The research proposal is to defend an organic liberalism as a bias that also stems from the liberal-conservative root and is situated in this tradition, parallel to Vianna's illiberal organic idealism. We suggest that as part of the intellectual and temporal renewal of the line of thought, this organic liberalism goes through the defense of an elitist representation and arrives in the mid-twentieth century with a pluralist version represented in the thought of Nestor Duarte. We revisit, therefore, these parallel intellectual perspectives, demonstrating that, from organic understandings of Brazilian reality and cultural experience, different policy proposals were made for the country. We talk about polyarchy, guardianship and quasi-guardianship solutions, with reference to the democratic theory of Robert Dahl. There are different orientations regarding the “other West”, whether the absorption of full Iberia, in Vianna's Iberism, or in its synthesis with the democratic-pluralism of Duarte.