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Priest Manuel Antunes and the State

06 Nov

Before rethinking the state, Antunes departs from Portugal, after delineating in the first pages the identity and fragilities of the people, without leaving the chauvinism or isolationism that was characteristic of a post-colonial period, says the thinker: “It is easy to on paper dozens and dozens of political parties. It is easy to make ideological proclamations as if they contain the ultimate and ultimate truth. It is easy to point out programs, innumerable and ideal, but that do not bite in the real “(Antunes, 2011, 38), highlights them once and for all.
It is going to rethink the Portuguese state, as it says “leaving the country we are”, not being possible to put aside: “our most serious problems: the Overseas, the emigration, the multiple delays that affect us in the political, social, economic, scientific, technological and cultural “(ibid., 38), stating that” for fifty years we lived in the hypertrophy of the State “, and this is valid not only in Europe but also in many state models contemporaries.
After parading the functions of the state, it will develop two lines of reflection on two opposing models: “a great line of cleavage rises before us: that separates the monopolist state from the pluralist state” (page 42), in which Brazil will also learn the lesson.
He says of the first: “radically centralizing, bureaucratic, jurisdictional and, at least, totalitarian,” he says of the lesson learned on May 25, that not even his supporters wanted to defend him, it may be said that he was already dead.
The second is: “the second radically decentralizing, taking the nation and society as they are with their inter vivos bodies truly alive, their social strata organizing themselves in the way that suits them and leaving to the free play of the market” , seems better and less bureaucratic, but “between these two extremes lies a wide range in which various combinations are possible” (page 43) is where he develops his ideas.
It will be called “temperate zones” in which “man can build an existence
more in accordance with its nature of being intelligent and free “(idem).
He then asks whether Portugal wants to live in this temperate zone, where the “ideological-affective principle of freedom, equality and fraternity, constantly in a critical review instance in its concrete applications and not reduced to an empty slogan or mere rhetorical discourse without content” which in many places gave rise not only to democratic discredit, but mainly.

 

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