The contrast between the notions of technique and politics in the speeches of a bureaucratic elite[A contraposição das noções de técnica e política nos discursos de uma elite burocrática]

This article makes a comparative analysis of the contradictions between the notions of technical and political in the speeches of the directors and staff of the Brazilian National Bank for Economic and Social Development BNDE(S) in two periods: from 1952 to the early 1970s and from 1994 to 2011. The data used to establish this comparison was extracted from a set of interviews conducted in the 1980s with people that worked at the bank during the first period, and a second set of interviews made between 2012 and 2014, with those who were directors of the BNDES in the second period. The analysis shows that there is a transition in the modal pattern of the speeches. Initially the bureaucracy would oppose to the politicians, claiming that they were more qualified than the politicians to make political and economic decisions. In the second period, after returning to a democratic regime, the discourse expressed the tension generated by the simultaneous need to respond to the current democratic govern and the necessity of preserving the values, the historical mission of the BNDES and its technical excellence against political interference. In this second period, the legitimacy of the bureaucrats and of their decisions comes not only from their personal qualification, but above all from the refinement of the techniques employed by them to make political-economic choices. The oppositions found were analyzed according to the critical theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Herbert Marcuse, which allow us to question the meritocratic nature of the economic experts and the neutrality of the science and the techniques employed by them. The article contributes to the study of the relationship between politics and bureaucracy in Brazil through the study of a paradigmatic case that allow us to verify how the relation between the sphere of technique-science and the sphere of politics changed over time and to search for the social foundations of this transformation.