Political Grammar of Debt Market Governance

Project Stream 6 · Cristiano Moita

Recent times of polarization have drawn attention to the clash of rationalities, which often intersect not without friction–rubbing against each other, merging, or mutually rejecting one another. Law gains prominence in this clash due to its potentially mediating role between these conflicting rationalities. Among various approaches, a promising path lies in the investigation of deep disagreements, where such clashes appear to affect the constitutive norms of different rationalities, including the legal rationality. The solution through argumentation, as the activity of providing reasons, seems to face significant obstacles. What, then, is the task of law, as a normative-discursive practice, i.e. as a grammaer, in the face of this challenging scenario? This project attempts to respond to this question by suggesting an approach that investigates the normative conditions that enable its argumentative structure. We will examine how this unfolds in a landmark Brazilian issue involving tensions between the economic and political systems, as expressed in the dilemma caused by the increase in interest rates: controlling inflation and a record explosion of public debt vs. rising inflation and managing debt.