Abstract

Examining the case of the Northeast, this work seeks to discuss more profoundly the nature of the modern State in Brazil and the political sense of planning which envelops its actions. It proceeds from the principle that the question of the “Two Brazils” — which while no longer a polemical point in purely economic analysis —continues as a controversial element in the treatment of the national political question, especially with regard to the Brazilian State. Thus, the ideas that the formation of the bourgeoisie State in Brazil carne about through an ambiguous coexistence with an oligarchic, conservative and anti-industrial State is a tradition that serves merely to confuse our understanding of the particularities of the constitution of the modern State, social classes and regional social movements. Therefore, the recovery of the idea of unity in the study of the formation of the State appears as a suggestive approach for rediscussing primordial aspects of the national and regional political question and for understanding certain basic elements of the capitalist transformations which, in evidence in the Northeast since the end of past century, have assumed sharper contours during recent decades.