Critique of Thomas Flory’s “Judicial Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”
It is a pity that Thomas Flory in his "Judicial Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil" is so dominated by traditional historiographical assumptions concerning the Empire that his principal thesis seriously misinterprets and confuses even his own evidence. Flory's examination of the "functions and personnel" (p. 665) of the professional magistracy, which is perceived as exercising a crucial "political brokerage" (p. 665) between "the ministry and its landed support" (p. 683), is based on a number of assumptions concerning the Empire: (a) that power and status in Imperial Brazil were held by "the empire's landowning elite" (p. 685), which was also "its socially privileged" (p. 682), and that because members of the judiciary did not basically come from this group "relatively few could claim elite status as a birthright" (p. 680); (b) that the national government, characterized as "the monarch and his ministers" (p. 665) or as synonymous with a political party ("and central government or political party on the other," p. 669) did not of itself constitute the center of power but took its initiative from the political party in office; (c) that from the 1820s the two political parties acted "on ideological premises" (p. 666) with the Conservatives being "reactionaries" (pp. 668 and 674) and the Liberals "reformers" in favor of "democracy" (p. 666);