Abstract
The article shows a conceptual tool for observing the State’s historic action in Brazil. This concept is based on the analysis of the State’s capacity to define territories and actions through its institutional discourse, which has a power of legitimation. In this way, the text demonstrates that the social sciences need to collect the injunctions between public narrative and the “means of production in definition” which are made in State’s speech. The analytic thought of modernity is the theoretical basis of this study. By means of a historical and theoretical synthesis of Lula’s government and its developmental discourse, the paper explains that ideas about region and development are parts of a genealogy of classification ways produced by the Public Machine. Thinking about these elements means to guide analysis tools in political sociology.
Keywords:
Means of Production in Definition; Discourse and State; Economy of Symbolic Exchanges