Positivism, education and hegemony: dialogues between José Veríssimo and Benjamin Constant

Abstract

The reflection exercise present in this study seeks to understand and analyze the presence of the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century - a time of economic, social and fundamentally political transformations - among intellectual circles in Brazil, with particular interest in its introduction into Brazilian educational thought. In fact, we tried to focus our research on the spread of positivism in education based on two specific intellectuals: Benjamin Constant and José Veríssimo, for both, to draw up a debate that each sought in its own way, based on the positivist ideology, to undertake changes that would bring to Brazil progress and civilizing order within the same frameworks that were available in western Europe and the United States of America. We intend, therefore, to express that the formation of certain intellectual layers, centered on positivist precepts, manifested the search for hegemony, in the sense explained by Antonio Gramsci (2000, 2004), of a republican and abolitionist elite, composed of military fractions, civil servants public, as well as, a small bourgeoisie still in formation made up of liberal professionals, such as writers, doctors, journalists, among others. Such a group, far from advocating a cohesive country project, sought to dispute its conceptions of the world with the Brazilian State.