DARIO CINTRA DE NEGREIROS RIBEIRO

Political philosophy is done whenever the work of thought is attracted by the enigma of Formação (Formation): it is this attraction that has set in motion a good part of Brazilian social thought for almost a century; this is the enigma that leads us. The works of Caio Prado Jr., Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco and Roberto Schwarz, some of the most fundamental authors in the Brazilian critical tradition of Formation, are nevertheless witnesses of one and the same absence, which condemned them to the error: by excluding the relations of oppression and resistance inherent to slave domination from the making of our ideological life, these authors were unable to understand the dynamics of Brazilian social authoritarianism neither in its formal aspects nor in its content. Contrasting its elaborations with the findings of the Brazilian historiography of slavery produced in the last forty years, this Thesis proceeds to review concepts and formulate new interpretative hypotheses about the making of Brazilian social authoritarianism.