Abstract
The purpose of this article is to understand the reception of fascism among intellectuals linked to the Catholic right in the 1930s, with emphasis on the debates held in the magazine A Ordem. We intend to show how – in a contextual analysis of political thought that starts from the need to understand how ideas circulate and are appropriated and against which historical problems they are mobilized – the ideational boundaries between conservatism, reactionaryism, Catholic traditionalism and fascism are very subtle. The emphasis here, therefore, is on the semantic repertoire that the actors mobilize. In the end, the article intends to understand the affinities between these political languages to produce a theorization of reactionary thought in a broader way, which does not only take into account its paradigmatic manifestations of the North, but which is capable of thinking about the right-wing critique of democracy from the experience of reception and circulation of these political languages in the global South.
Brazilian political thought; fascism; reactionary; revolution; illiberalism