Questões de Vestibular

  Freedom is a general term, like liberty, independence, autonomy, and equality. In reality, freedom cannot be absolute; no one can be completely free. Your talents, family situation, job, wealth, cultural norms, and laws against murder, for example, constrain and circumscribe your choices. And then there is the freedom of others, which necessarily limits yours.

  Broadly speaking, your rights, whatever they may be, define the limits to your freedom. In the Western tradition of freedom, these are your civil and political rights, including your freedom of speech, religion, and association. Some philosophers see these not only as morally justified rights in themselves, but also as the means for fulfilling other possible rights, like happiness.

  The international justification for your freedom is by reference to human rights, those due to you as a human being and object of international conventions. The most basic of all these rights are those defining what governments cannot do to you. In effect, these human rights define what many mean by democratic freedom. Your freedom of thought, expression, religion, association, is basic, as are the secret ballot, periodic elections, and the right to representation. In short, these rights say that you have a right to be free. This is universal: we all have internationally defined and protected human rights.

Rudolph Joseph Rummel. Why should you be

free?.Internet:<www.hawaii.edu> (adapted). 

  The crisis in the Portuguese Empire was already underway in 1807, with some underlying causes found further back in time. It created the conditions for the political split between Brazil and Portugal, a development that virtually nobody imagined at the start of the 19th century. The process that started in 1807 prompted the separation and defined its most lasting results: the emergence of a Brazilian state and nation that would consolidate itself over the next century preserving its distinctive features. The independence process was strongly marked by progressive distancing between the past and the future. In this sense, the self-proclaimed revolutionary nature of the independence process fits neatly into the broader political and intellectual context of the time, full of conceptual innovations.

  The continuity of Brazilian independence is, however, still the most common aspect highlighted by most historians and nonhistorians. It is true that the creation of the Empire of Brazil neither abolished slavery, nor upended social hierarchies for the vast majority of the population, nor modified the highly concentrated nature of land distribution and its overwhelming focus on sustaining an export economy built during centuries of Portuguese colonization. Yet, given the innovations involved in the creation of the Empire of Brazil and their significance in the first decades of the 19th century, the understanding of this history gains depth, complexity, and consistency if one replaces the simple and banal idea of preservation of slavery, social hierarchies, territoriality or monarchy with that of re-creation and reorganization of these elements. If not seen in this light, the history of Brazilian independence silences an array of diverse voices and actors who had been growing increasingly accustomed to participating in politics since the end of the previous century.

João Paulo Pimenta. Independence: Change and

Continuity. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin

American History. Internet:<www.oxfordre.com> (adapted).