"Critique of Thomas Flory's "Judicial Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

It is a pity that Thomas Flory in his Judicial Politics in Nineteenth-Century is so dominated by traditional historiographical assumptions concerning Empire that his principal thesis seriously misinterprets and confuses even his own evidence. Flory's examination of functions and personnel (p. 665) of professional magistracy, which is perceived as exercising a crucial brokerage (p. 665) between the ministry and landed support (p. 683), is based a number of assumptions concerning Empire: (a) that power and status in Imperial Brazil were held by the empire's landowning (p. 685), which was also its socially privileged (p. 682), and that because members of judiciary did not basically come from this group relatively few could claim elite status as a birthright (p. 680); (b) that national government, characterized as the monarch and his ministers (p. 665) or as synonymous with a political party (and central government or political party other, p. 669) did not of itself constitute center of power but took initiative from political party in office; (c) that from 1820s two political parties acted on ideological premises (p. 666) with Conservatives being reactionaries (pp. 668 and 674) and Liberals reformers in favor of democracy (p. 666)

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