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So my talk today, even for the sake of time, is going to be a presentation of a subject that I began to address in my postgraduate monograph in a very cursory way, because it fell within the threshold of my object. At the same time that I discovered that it was fundamental to the full understanding of this object of mine, which was the formation of the Modern State, I discovered that a methodology to address it also needs to be developed. The theme is the order.

The concept of order is a pain point to begin any explanation and I will not pursue it. Order, in the definition I am going to adopt here, is the systematic interaction of social norms in the Durkheiminian sense, that is, a system of meaningful behaviors within a particular community (which here does not specifically refer to the concept of community over which looks at this whole seminar). Where did I get this definition? From Durkheim’s definition of social fact, contained in The Rules of the Sociological Method.

This ordering, as you can imagine, has a strained relationship with the legal order and any other order which is intended to organize reality, but is also normative. There is a relationship that is pretentious to call dialectic, but to some extent it is. Why?

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It is widely recognized as a truth about the scientific activity that, once the researcher begins to study a topic, he begins to see his object of study everywhere. If this actually happens to you, fellow researcher, this is a sign that you are following the right path. If it doesn`t happen to you, well… Find another object.

My object of study is the eternal debate community vs. society, reformulated by the debate between communitarianism and liberalism in the sphere of the Theory of Justice, as I am trying to obtain a master`s degree in Law. And since I am a die hard believer of the tenets of communitarianism (although the word believer is somewhat mischievously used as pejorative for people that believe without proof, I can guarantee that my belief is full of proofs — but I will not debate them here), I see this unveiling of the communitarian truth everywhere.

As I was feeling kinda sad yesterday, I began browsing my cable TV channels `till Wolverine popped on the screen. When I was younger, I liked comics, but I was never truly attached to the X-men, my heart lying beside Spawn. When I heard about Genosha, Magneto and that kind of “live free or die” thing that always made my blood pump faster when reading about U.S. history in the first (or the second, I don`t know) X-men movie, I became an admirer of the bad guys. Just like Fuzzy Lumkins from Powerpuff Girls, they seemed to be on the right side of history, the side that sacrificed acceptance from the mainstream society for its right to live a form of life compatible with its beliefs.

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