De um ponto de vista mais geral: a república como ideal normativo.

Abstract

The return to Republicanism has occupied a significant portion of the contemporary debates concerning democracy, particularly the effort to problematize some of the basic assumptions of liberal thought. The topic of Republicanism has thus been the reflection upon notions such as justice, liberty and participation building upon a return to the tradition of Western political thought, in which institutional arrangements and communitarian experiments prior to modernity are mobilized as a critical counter point to the present. The goal of the thesis is to recover elements of political theory in the construction of a Republican tradition of thought, based on the discussion of key concepts such as elective affinities and pragmatic choices that are not evident in current classifications. The endeavor consists of the formulation of a normative ideal of Republic based on five elements: (1) good government ; (2) authority; (3) liberty; (4) moral reciprocity; and (5) non-violence. However, unlike the contextualist perspective preoccupied with the intentionality of actor in the reconstitution of the original context of works yet without denying its validity and importance in the recovery of Republican thought in the twentieth century, this thesis advances an analytical perspective, centered around the possibility that similar fruitful arguments can be found in history for a critical understanding of the present. Thus, despite the inexistence of such a thing as equal historical conditions a contextualist concern the thesis identifies an analogy in the theoretical conditions of the analyzed authors, notwithstanding the diachronic. Hence, in this situation the idea of Republic is thought of beyond the historical limits of their approaches opening the path to two related movements: on one hand, the recovery of authors of the past has the goal of finding answers to the dilemmas of democracy in the present, overcoming through tradition the limitations imposed by the neo-liberal agenda; on the other one, the argument sustained here allows for the outline of our very own Republican tradition. The investigation thus employs a concept of tradition that does not eschew particular historical contexts, but pursues the possibility of interweaving different moments of political imagination and contribute critically to present reflections, crossing lineages in search of a Republic agenda with progressive elements that serve as an alternative to extant models. This endeavor is above all an effort to recover, through tradition, the Republic as a normative ideal in facing the dilemmas of Brazilian democracy.