Transformations in the Social State and challenges for Brazilian democracy

• Grant number: 16/21461-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: June 01, 2017
• End date: September 30, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Law
• Principal Investigator: Jose Garcez Ghirardi
• Grantee: Jose Garcez Ghirardi
• Host Investigator: Supiot Alain
• Host Institution: Escola de Direito de São Paulo. Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Collège de France, France

Abstract

The recent political crisis in Brazil, its contextual reasons notwithstanding, allows one to see deeper and more serious challenges for the country. It suggests, on the one hand, a widespread dissatisfaction with democracy, which translates into a perceived gap of legitimacy of political institutions. On the other hands, it bespeaks the broader crisis of the social State, which Alain Supiot minutely discusses in his work. This project aims at understanding better the impact of such crisis of the social State on Brazilian society, as well as its roots and implications. It takes as a starting point the idea that the country's present dilemmas represent a specific manifestation of a general crisis on the ways of conceptualizing, organizing and imagining the State which emerges on the wake of globalization and the current transformations in the forms of producing wealth and political identities.The theoretical basis adopted is the work of Alain Supiot, a leading scholar in this field whose contribution is virtually unknown in Brazil. It is suggested that Supiot's large experience with the centralized model of the French State coupled with his deep knowledge of the regional differences within the European community add up to make his theoretical model potentially more productive to think about Brazilian reality than the Anglo-Saxon alternatives more usual in current Brazilian research in this area.