Do patrimonialismo à impessoalidade: o Estado brasileiro

Abstract

The present work seeks to trace a dialogue between two different areas of knowledge, Law and History, in order to better understand a central aspect of the process of construction of the Brazilian State, from the Colony to the 1988 Constitution, the problem of changing the patrimonialist way to the impersonal way of functioning of the state machine. It seeks to rescue how the discussion of the central theme was being consciously elaborated in works of theoretical transcendence in the field of constitutional law, such as Norberto Bobbio, Celso Antônio Bandeira de Melo, José dos Santos Carvalho Filho, Paulo Bonavides, Bernardo Fernandes and others. These authors provided elements to establish the relationship between the liberal character of democracy and the constitutional principle of impersonality. In such a theme, Weber's work acquires the character of theoretical orientation because it is his general formulation of the very fundamental problem managed in the thesis. This required an exposition of how the author typifies the patrimonialist state and the modern bureaucratic state. Finally, emerging from this discussion and seeking to opt for a perspective of reading the problem, the thesis tapers to the hypothesis that the historical link between Brazilian patrimonialism and the current stage of impersonality of our public administration responds to the historical force of cordial personality that it has established itself among us, since the construction of the Colony, in spite of every surface transformation, that of a legal type. To show that personhood was a decisive axis in the construction of the Brazilian State, we resorted mainly to the works of Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Raymundo Faoro, Gilberto Freyre and Darcy Ribeiro