From the mistake of the people of england to the fetishism of representation: Luiz Roberto Salinas Fortes, political writer

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze Salinas Fortes philosophical formation under the following perspective: by recovering his studies on Rousseau’s works, we’ll seek to examine how his history of philosophy background has provided him intellectual tools in a way that, in his last years, he was
able to constitute a political and intervention style of writing – intellectual work in which the central question is the notion of democracy. In this sense, during the 1980’s a collection of writings called “A Constituinte em Debate” was organized by Salinas Fortes, a crucial book in which he writes a fundamental text comprehending the stalemates that surrounded the period of the Constituent in Brazil. Is this article, Salinas Fortes is concerned with political issues that were deviating the Constituent process of its democratizing purposes. In a few words, the question was how to bring to reality an effective democracy in Brazil, bearing in mind the goosebumps the notion of “direct democracy” caused among those who Salinas Fortes called “liberals”. If notions such as “sovereignty”, “equality”, “power of the people” and, most of all, the issues concerning the uses of
the “representative democracy” concept, did not observe an ample public debate and a more extensive participation of the people in the constitutional rules, those same concepts could be used in and ideological way that would just conceal the real problems surrounding this period of
transition in Brazilian history. According to Salinas Fortes, failing in establishing this public debate would represent to accept a “democracy ersatz”: thus, the crucial role of the political writer and the public intellectual. Is in this context, an essential question is raised, a matter that is still waiting for an answer: how to turn into reality, in Brazil, this comprehensive project of citizenship?