Transformações do pensamento constitucional brasileiro: A história intelectual dos juristas da Era Vargas (1930-1945)

Abstract

This thesis traces the decay of liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in Brazil in the era of strongman Getúlio Vargas, between 1930 and 1945. It centers on the consecration of authoritarianism in the Vargas Era and its impact on the development of legal theory and constitutional history. The Study begins with the decline of Liberal constitutionalism as the dominant intellectual model in the 1920s, when the constitutional tradition of the First Republic went into crisis and lost prestige among a new generation of jurists. There follows an analysis of the consolidation of Brazilian authoritarian constitutionalism that reaches its culminating point in the new state, from the works of jurists as Oliveira Vianna, Francisco Campos, Almir de Andrade, Monte Arraes and Miguel Reale. The thesis reconstructs constitutional thought as a history of the legal ideas of the inter-war period, addressing the gestation of the main concepts of constitutional law from the slow process of consolidation of Varguismo (1930-1937) to the hardening of the Regime and the New State (1937-1945); and it presents an understanding of the phenomenon of corporatism as seen through the prism of Constitutional Law and describes both the position of the legal community in the new corporatist institutions and the authoritative formation of a corporatist judicial order. The thesis concludes with an articulated narrative of the project of authoritarian constitutionalism, the radicalization of politics and the ideologies typical of the inter-war period; thus offers a synthetic view of the political and legal reorganization and the new separation of powers in the Vargas Era.