The works by Perdigão Malheiros, Tavares Bastos and Joaquim Nabuco built up a set of ideas about social changes, at the end of the XIX th century, which were significantly meaningful and revealing of a particular way of conceiving the country and its social, economical, political and cultural conditions valid for that moment. These scholars's reflections led, inexorably, to the themes which had as a fundamental guide the modernization of the country, the abolition of slavery, the proclamation of the Republic and the constitution of the nation. The problem of the transition and the changing was explicitly and/or implicitly set intrinsic to all these questions.
Brazil; social and political change; conservative set of ideas; abolition; republic