“A perpetual state of siege”

atos de império and administrative despotism in the First Republic

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2025/84963

This article explores the appropriations of the notion of administrative despotism in early-twentieth-century Brazil. Across the Atlantic world, during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, this idea was used to criticize the expansion of the State through administrative law. The references for despotism varied in time, from the old regime’s absolutism to twentieth-century totalitarianism. In Brazil, the references were both global, such as the notion of oriental despotism, and local, such as the usages of state of siege during the early years of the Brazilian first republic. These appropriations are shown through legislation, legal doctrine, judicial records, and newspapers, in the context of urban and public health reforms implemented in Rio de Janeiro, from 1903 to 1909. The consequences of the distinction between atos de império and atos de gestão for the judicial control of the administration, among other aspects of an administrative law that was especially reformulated to support the reforms, were central for debates about administrative despotism.