Reasons for a Dictatorship

Mário Pessoa and the National Security Law

Abstract

This essay presents an intertextual and methodological dialogue with the text authored by David Gomes (2010), whose analysis is made in relation to the theory of possible democracy by Manoel Gonçalves Ferreira Filho. The proposal here is to present the authoritarian thought of Mário Pessoa in his work “O direito da segurança nacional” (1971). For that, the argumentative construction of the referred work is demonstrated. Then, it starts to reveal the paradoxes and contradictions in a critical-reflective way of what is categorized as a legal-authoritarian thought. This argumentation is based on the Constitutional Theory with a problematizing bias (re)constructed by author Marcelo Cattoni. It uses other jurists from the time of the business-military dictatorship to provide interpretive support and demonstrate how this thought was not restricted to Mário Pessoa and Ferreira Filho. The point is to reveal how there was an effective intellectual effort, of authoritarian origin, in the search for the supposed legitimacy of the regime of exception. The conclusion was that the discursive model of Pessoa's theory, as well as that of other authoritarian jurists, is contradictory, anti-democratic, elitist and inadequate to the truly democratic projects, however, they are necessary to understand the Brazilian institutional trajectory. From the standpoint of the methodology, this essay has a legal-social, interdisciplinary characteristic. A bibliographic review of a historical-legal nature was also used.