Between the absolutisms of the 17th and 18th centuries and the democratic variants identified after World War II, there remains a conceptual haze that hinders an understanding of the period's political and institutional history. With the oligarchy viewed sometimes as the seed of democracy and other times as a vestige of autocracy, the period remains vulnerable to subjectivisms. The current article presents a different, trans-locally valid analytical model for the oligarchic system and attempts to demonstrate how the history of the Second Empire and First Republic of Brazil would appear in a preliminary approach using the general model.
representative system; oligarchies; First Republic
