Brazil, Land of the Past

The book traces the continuity and resilience of a system of thought based on the idea of a God-given hierarchical order to be defended against any social contract and modernizing relativization. It explains in detail how today a diverse movement which includes actors ranging from the authoritarian Bolsonaro wing to economic liberals to the military to both Catholic and evangelical religious conservatives assumes unanimously the ideas of this tradition as underlying premises of their political action. Though not always explicitly, this drives the self-declared liberal-conservative but rather anti-modernist reaction which claims to liberate an imaginary authentic Brazil from an aberrant State and in so doing intends to preserve inherited privilege in an extremely unequal society.