Democracia contra as patologias da liberdade: poder e dominação em Franz L. Neumann

This article presents Franz Neumann’s conceptual framework present in the text "The Concept of Political Freedom", whose main purpose is to differentiate power and domination. For Neumann, political theory should consist of a reflection on the effectiveness of freedom in legitimate forms of power, which are characterized by ensuring the realization of human freedom. Freedom, in the author's view, is composed of three elements, the legal, the cognitive and the volitional, which allow to identify six pathologies of freedom that result from excessive appreciation or depreciation of each of its elements; respectively, autocracy and legalism, fear and naturalization, alienation and voluntarism. With the use of this conceptual apparatus Neumann analyses specific political problems such as the McCarthyism in the 1950s United States of America.