Machado de Assis, pensador político: liberdade religiosa, anticlericalismo e secularização (1861 e 1872)

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the newspaper chronicles written by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis between 1861 and 1872, with the aim of demonstrating that these texts contain elements of political imagination, articulated through the political language of nineteenth-century liberalism. Its central hypothesis is that Machado's chronicles can be read as repositories of Brazilian political thought, in the sense proposed by Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos in his analyses of Brazilian Political Thought. To support this hypothesis, the research focuses on the first four series of chronicles published by the author — Comentários da Semana, O Futuro, Ao Acaso, and Badaladas — examining how Machado incorporates records, evaluations, and analyses of Brazilian political processes. The thematic scope privileges issues such as religious freedom, tolerance, the secularization of public life, the separation between Church and State, and the rise of ultramontane ideas. These themes constitute the core of what nineteenth-century public debate referred to as the “religious question” and are closely linked to broader movements of contestation of the imperial order in the 1860s and 1870s, such as abolitionism and political reform. The investigation adopts the methodological perspective of linguistic contextualism, inspired by the work of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock, aiming to reinsert Machado de Assis’s chronicles into the discursive, political, and social universe in which they were produced. In this sense, the study examines what Machado was doing when writing about religion and politics: with whom and against whom he spoke, which historical events he addressed, which newspapers and intellectuals he engaged with, and how his texts were received by public opinion. By analyzing how Machado de Assis observes, interprets, and evaluates the role of the Catholic Church in the imperial political arrangement, the thesis reveals the writer as a political analyst who, drawing on the common vocabulary of nineteenth-century liberalism, intervenes critically in public debate and contributes to the production of Brazilian political imagination.