Escravidão e formação da vida ideológica nacional

There is a fundamental mistake that runs through the works of some of the most important authors of Brazilian critical theory, from Caio Prado Jr. to Paulo Arantes, including Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco and Roberto Schwarz: by excluding the relations of oppression and resistance inherent to slave domination from their conceptions about the making of Brazilian ideological life, these authors were unable to understand the dynamics of nineteenth-century Brazilian social authoritarianism, neither in its formal aspects nor in its content. Contrasting their elaborations with the findings of the Brazilian historiography of slavery produced in the last forty years, this article proceeds to review concepts and formulate new interpretative hypotheses about the making of national ideological life.