Liberalism in retrospective: a look at an ideology in relation to recent Brazil

Abstract

From the 17th to the 20th century, there was the theoretical construction of the ideology known as liberalism, as well as its modification until the so-called neoliberal version. Drawn from classical sources and emerged in the Cold War, this neoliberalism presented intents that would go beyond the individual and national borders. Its
globalism gained ground with the crisis of real socialism in the last decades of the 20th century. Amidst it, we saw Brazil emerging from a twenty-year civil-military dictatorship, therefore, in a process of redemocratization that aimed at economic and social development, but without a strong popular confidence in left-wing policies to solve national problems. As a reflection of this, the elected presidents in the first elections
after the redemocratization had clearly neoliberal administrations (Fernando Collor and Fernando Henrique). However, even the arrival of a left-wing party to power (with Lula and Dilma Rousseff, under the Workers' Party) did not mark a rupture or a great distance from neoliberal measures. In order to present a historical review of liberalism and form key concepts about liberal ideology, an analysis is proposed to identify ideological
markers of neoliberalism in the speeches of Brazilian presidents elected from 1990 to 2016. This way, we seek the answer to the hypothesis that underlies this work: what concepts serve as an analytical lens to seek and identify the neoliberalism present in Brazil's presidential speeches of redemocratization?