A proliferação dos cursos de direito em alagoas: a história de uma expansão a serviço da razão neoliberal

Abstract

This dissertation analyses the process of expansion of legal education in Alagoas, namely from the beginning of the 21st century until today. The choice of the State of Alagoas and the establishment of the analysis in that period were obviously not inadvertent choices. In relation to the choice of Alagoas, this indicates our attention to the increase in the number of law faculties, and therefore of bachelors in a notoriously poor State, with a large number of illiterate people and that figures among the States with the worst Human Development Index in the country. In relation to the elected period, its choice is related to the fact that in that period capitalism underwent another structural or systemic crisis that was relevant for us to understand how this process took place. The dissemination of law courses finds its most relevant characteristics in the official discourse of quality and the hegemony of the private sector. It is from this context that we extracted the problem that we decided to solve, in order to point out which master of the researched process, whether the search for quality or mercantilization, because these have different and antagonistic desiderata. Dialectic historical materialism was the scientific method that guided us in this analysis, because it allowed us to understand the complex contradiction that is contained in the expansion, which is worsened exactly in the phase of structural or systemic crisis of capitalism. In the light of this method and of the understanding of the concept and role of the state in the face of the crisis of the capitalist system formulated by István Mészáros, we focus on this process that led the state of Alagoas to have from the two law faculties at the beginning of the years 2000 to, in the year 2019, more than two dozen of these institutions. Our general objective was to reveal the predominant driving force of a process that has quintupled the number of law courses: whether the announced search for quality, according to the official rhetoric that is contained in the state documents, or the handing over of this educational sector to the private initiative, this is because, from the theoretical references that we use, it is evident that these two foundations deny each other.