“Liberal In The Economy And Conservative In Costumes”: A Dialectical Totality

Abstract

This essay seeks to discuss the intellectual foundations of the New Right in Brazil, which has in writer Olavo de Carvalho its great organic intellectual, based on the premise that this field is based on the construction of a liberal-conservative amalgam. Although, in general, read as a contradictory and circumstantial amalgam, it is argued herein that it is, in fact, an essentially conservative oxymoron, made possible through the deconstruction of three foundational elements of liberalism, namely egalitarianism, contractualism and jusnaturalism, and the elevation of the traditional family to the rank of social life organize. With this as an international phenomenon, it would have in Carvalho’s narrative its most potent translation for the Brazilian context. The apparent contradiction is, therefore, the veil that covers an essential unity that has, in the negation of Polis, its raison d’être.