Bras. Political Sci. Rev.2007;1(1):136-40.
Horizonte do desejo: Instabilidade, fracasso coletivo e inércia social
DOI: 10.1590/1981-3827200700010007
A sombre title for sombre prognostics. A book that begins by refuting dogmas and carries on, announcing at the end of each chapter a new dogma to be refuted in search of an understanding of two permanent questions in the analyses of Brazilian social scientists: the absence of rebellions against a status quo of cumulative inequalities and the non-fulfilment of the expectations aroused by the exercise of democratic practices in Brazil. Firstly, it shows that representative democracy is far from exhausted and that the threats to democracy in Brazil are not the same as in the rich democracies. Secondly, it shows that the causal relationship between inequality and extreme poverty, on the one hand, and Brazil’s notorious political instability, on the other, is spurious. Thirdly, by resuscitating Marx his way, the author situates societies’ objectivity in their infrastructure, the raw materials they are made of: people, populations on the move, migrating, growing, distributing themselves in line with the new tasks determined by the social division of labour. Fourthly, the book explains why the understanding of the social and political processes of peripheral societies has been partly obscured, leading them to interpret their singularities as pathologies and/or backwardness. And in fifth place, it shows how social inertia acts a powerful vector of stability in social interactions and government policies, making very difficult the simple task of avoiding a deterioration of the status quo. In this perspective, conservatism would be the iron cage of contemporary governments. This summarised and incomplete evaluation of the author’s iconoclasm carries but a few of the elements of what, in my understanding, is a new theory of change — accompanying this (non-narrative) macro-history — in Brazilian society, grounded on its historical-material objectivity. And by way of what, after all?
His central issue is the centuries-old conformism with our inequalities. Why aren’t the deep and intense economic and political transformations matched by the correction of inequalities? Why hasn’t democracy and the amazing growth in electoral mobilization from 1945 to 2006 produced here, as in other countries, a subversion of the status quo and of the structure of inequalities?
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