Pensamento constitucional brasileiro: notas sobre o itinerário intelectual de Raimundo de Monte Arraes

Abstract

This work intends to be a small contribution to the study of Brazilian political thought, regarding especially the legal thought. The work will focus on the writings of the jurist from Ceará Raimundo de Monte Arraes (1888-1965), later settled in Rio de Janeiro. The author was a public figure throughout his adult life, whether as a writer and director of periodicals from Ceará and Rio de Janeiro, or as a politician, or even as a jurist who published dozens of books and studies. However, the number of academic works published about his thought is very low, if not non-existent. The aim is to manage two specific periods of the author's intellectual itinerary and compare them. The first period takes place in 1933, when Monte Arraes wrote a book with his analyzes and proposals for the National Constituent Assembly of 1933/1934, and the second deals with the years between 1937 and 1945, the period of Estado Novo administration. In the first of them, Arraes expressly defends that, opposing the experience of the first Republic, the new constitution should adopt a constitutional system with an efficient separation of powers and a truly limited government. In the second period, the author publishes books and articles incisively defending the Estado Novo. Despite the obvious contradiction, the main goal of the work is to show that this contradiction is much less evident than it appears, once in the first period it is already possible to identify central themes of Monte Arraes' thought that were later addressed by the Estado Novo.