TOBIAS BARRETO'S COMPETITION FOR THE FACULTY OF LAW OF RECIFE (1882): AN EVENT THAT CHALLENGED THE STRUCTURES?

Abstract

This article intends to focus on what is the most notable event in the legal career of Tobias Barreto: his competition for substitute professor at the Faculty of Law of Recife, held in 1882, seeking to measure, from the sources and the specialized bibliography, the impacts of this contest for the  Brazilian and Recife legal establishment at the end of the nineteenth century. The most appropriate way to apprehend the processual character of modern history is the reciprocal clarification of events by the structures and vice versa", Reinhart Koselleck outlines, however, that this tension will never be resolved when a certain manifestation of historical time is apprehended (KOSELLECK, 2006, p. 139). This is what we intend to explore concretely in this paper. It is concluded that Tobias Barreto's main intellectual contribution was his intransigent struggle for the formation of an "intellectual climate" (LIMA, 1957, p. 236), of a university mentality more accustomed to scientific debate and research, which did not occur, as will be seen, without flagrant contradictions and paradoxes of Tobias himself and his thunderous intellectual and personal petulance.