The relationship between civil society and state has dramatically changed in Brazil along the last three decades. Civil society, social movements and participatory democracy literature have engaged in revising its underpinning assumptions in order to build a comprehensive diagnosis of such changes. This article presents a critical appraisal of the trends and theoretical innovations on the state-civil society contemporary Brazilian debate. It specifically examines a recent comprehensive diagnosis that updates some important conventional ideas about the Brazilian civil society. Such diagnosis describes and grasps the meaning of such changes as a historical shift between two moments: from an autonomous to an interdependent civil society vis-à-vis the state. We challenge such ideas from the standpoint of a relational and historical approach of state-civil society relation as mutually constitutive and drawing on an extensive literature review of both recent empirical studies on Brazilian civil society and sound grounded theory building diagnosis. We show that the ideas of the late birth of Brazilian civil society, the non relation between civil society, and political parties and the state during dictatorship, as well as the interdependence between them as a recent phenomena are conceptually and empirically flawed. Overall, we show the analytical benefits of an interactive and relational approach of state civil society interactions and autonomy.
social and state interactions; State; civil society; social movements; autonomy