The improbable hero and the elixir of social harmony

Neointegralism and the defense of Corporatist state in Goffredo Telles Junior

Abstract

The reproduction of pleasant myths, the fabrication of heroic predecessors for present political movements and the upkeep of useful lies for the defence of noble causes should not constitute the aim of legal historians. On the contrary, it is their scientific duty to point out the inappropriateness of such conducts and the lack of plausibility of narratives produced this way. Showing how the legal community of São Paulo has reconstructed its memory, the article offers a new interpretation about the path of Goffredo Telles Junior as a political militant and State theorist. Re-examining forgotten remains of such path and reinterpreting the already known sources, we aim at demonstrating that his adhesion to Integralismo, far from having been an insignificant and episodical juvenile whim, was a decisive moment which affected his ideological views along four decades. From the thirties to the hardest times of the Military Dictatorship, his texts abounded with typical elements of the far-right antidemocratic thought: the obsession with corporatism as a supposed antidote against class struggle, the repugnance for liberal democracy, the disdain for the opinions of the average citizen, the strong attachment to hierarchy and to the “Principle of Authority”, the rejection of individualism and the belief that small élites, superior to the “mass”, should show the Nation its way. Obvious as well in the first integralist party as in its postwar successor, Goffredo’s longstanding loyalty to that far-right movement tends to be disregarded by his admirers, thus wiping out decades of the jurist’s political activity.