LIBERALISM DEFINED

In Europe, liberalism was originally a bourgeois ideology, intimately related to the development of capitalism and the crisis of the seigneurial [feudal] world. Liberal notions were born out of the struggles of the bourgeoisie against the abuses of royal authority, the privileges of the clergy and the nobility, the monopolies that inhibited production, and traditional obstacles to free circulation, free trade, and free labor. In their struggle against absolutism, liberals defended the theory of social contract, stressed the sovereignty of the people and the supremacy of the law, fought for the division of powers and for representative forms of government. To destroy corporate privilege, they made freedom, equality before the law, and the right to property universal rights of men. And to the traditional regulations that inhibited production and trade they opposed free trade and free labor. Although rooted in an expanding capitalist economy and in the experience of the bourgeoisie, the liberal message was universal enough to appeal to other social groups that, for one reason or another, felt oppressed by institutions of the 'ancien regime'

(Emilia Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire: Myths & Histories, p. 54)

LIBERALISM, OUTCOME

In Europe, liberalism was the expression of a rising bourgeoisie and urban middle class struggling against the power of a landed aristocracy. When liberalism was imported into Brazil, however, it was seized by the landed elites, the Brazilian analogue of the European nobility, who used its denunciations of privilege and monopoly to justify the removal of Portuguese colonial control over Brazilian politics and economy. The civil libertarian aspects of liberalism, and its insistence on juridical equality and the rights of citizenship, were of much less interests to landowners, who saw the great mass of the Brazilian population (and certainly the Afro-Brazilian population) as utterly unfit to have a voice. Unable to jettison the libertarian component of liberalism, Brazilian elites embarked on a search for political and ideological formulas which would permit the exclusion of the overwhelming majority of the population from full political and economic participation while formally maintaining the principles of citizenship and justice.

(George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo; p. 132)