THE CONCEPT OF “CIVILIZATION” AT THE CONFLUENCE OF THE POLITICAL AND THE RELIGIOUS

AN ANALYSIS OF HISTORICAL SEMANTICS

Abstract

In Brazil, the lasting links between the religious and the political resulted in a national construct that, during the 19th century, could not dispense Catholicism as an element of social cohesion and the foundation of the political community that was being organized. This process implied profound reconfigurations of the religious in response to the transformations carried out on other planes, as well as in its reciprocal articulations with the political, social and cultural, which were accompanied by accelerated conceptual mutations, expressive of the Brazilian singular experience of secularization. From the point of view of historical semantics, one of the concepts that most strongly expressed the ongoing transformations was that of civilization which, in the ultramontane rhetoric conveyed in Brazil in the second half of the 19th century, assumed a markedly Catholic and anti-liberal connotation, synthesized in the binomial « civilization –Christianity ». Thus, based on the theoretical-methodological tools of the History of Concepts - whose main merit has been to explore the deep articulation between history and language - this article seeks to analyze the semantic trajectory of the concept of civilization in the sociopolitical discourse conveyed in Brazil in the 19th century, in order to explore what happened with the political lexicon in its links with religion. Through such an approach, it seeks to restore to its historicity a semantic configuration – as well as the materiality to which it reports us –, not infrequently taken with a certain naturalness in this country.