Popular Culture and Authoritarianism

Abstract

Brazil is an authoritarian society, for, even on the verge of the twenty-first century, it has yet to fully realize the (300-year old) principles of liberalism and republicanism. It is a society in which there is no distinction between the public and the private, in which there is an inability to tolerate the formal and abstract principle of equality before the law, in which the dominant class contests the general ideas contained within the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, in which social and popular forms of struggle and organization are repressed, in which racial, sexual, and class discrimination are pervasive. Brazilian society, while sporting the appearance of fluidity (for sociological categories suitable for describing European and North American societies seem to fall short of capturing Brazilian reality) is structured in a rigorously hierarchical manner; here, not only does the state appear as the founder of the very social, but also social relations are formed by notions of tutelage and favor (never rights), and legality is constituted as a fatal cycle of the arbitrary judgment (of the dominant) over the transgression (of the dominated).