Liberalismo contra Democracia: origem e fundamentos da oposição entre o Liberalismo e a Tradição Democrática

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the historical and conceptual relationship between democracy and political liberalism, in its classic period. We seek to demonstrate the serious departure from liberal ideas in relation to democratic ideas, going through historical moments that marked the constitution of liberal thought, from its origin to the consolidation of its institutional model. We do this by confronting it with what we call the “modern democratic tradition”, faithful to the sense of class that gave rise to the old democracy and heir to the egalitarianism of popular revolts and the thinking of radical philosophers of the era of transition between the feudal regime and the modernity. Tying together democracy and revolution, this tradition, even before the emergence of Marxist communism, organized ideas about freedom and its relation to equality, resulting in the defense of the universalization of rights. Presenting an institutional model that strongly linked political representation and popular sovereignty, it was an alternative to the advancement of capitalist mercantile laws that promoted the worsening conditions for the existence of popular classes and boosted the colonialist expansion of the so-called “European barbarism”. We support the hypothesis that liberalism was formed in good measure against this tradition, placing itself in the opposite pole to the defense of the universalization of democratic rights and ideas. We seek to demonstrate how this is expressed in liberal theory, especially regarding the fundamental discussion about freedom, and how it manifests itself in the institutional model of classical political liberalism. It is, therefore, an attempt to re-read some historical and conceptual aspects of democracy and liberalism.