ABSTRACT
In the last two decades there has been almost unanimous agreement among Brazilian social and political scientists that sociologist and jurist Francisco Jose de Oliveira Vianna is among the great interpreters of Brazil. The new elements of reflection may contribute to a more satisfactory explanation of how Oliveira Vianna organized his appropriation of the fascist corporate model in the 1930s for the juridical organization of Vargas’s national-developmentalism. The analysis of Oliveira Vianna’s appropriation of fascist corporatism requires preliminary reflection on his cultural and political trajectory in the 1920s. Using Italian legal science of the time, Oliveira Vianna shows how the corporatist model solves, just as the liberal model did in the 19th century, the problem of relations between state and society in the 20th century, going beyond the boundaries of the traditional dichotomous logic: private or public, or law or contract.
