THE CATEGORIES OF SUBJECT AND PARTICULARITY: CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE THEORETICAL CONSTRUCT OF THE RESEARCH ON THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE RELATION IN EDUCATION

Abstract

In the research on public-private relationship in educational policies, theory has a key role, given that it may serve as vehicle to new epistemologies and experience forms. Theory must rest on uncertainty and accept contradition, avoiding a positivist posture. Thinking the public-private relationship in a particular context of the history of capitalism, in which countries have experienced at the same time processes of democratization and privatization of the public, requires deepening the analysis on who are the subjects involved in the policies and what is the content of their proposals. The categories of subject according to Thompson and particularity according to Lukács may then contribute to the research on public-private relationship as from the perspective of historical and dialectical materialism. Thompson develops the category of subject criticizing Althusser, proposing the idea of a subject that is the agent of his own history through the exercise of class conflict. The public-private relationship researcher must interrogate the historical documents in order to find empirical evidence of the materialization of the subjects in the policies. Lukács addresses the issue of the relation between particularity, singularity and universality as a key question of the human thinking, analysing it in several authors, having Marx as an arrival point. This. attributing to proletatiat a revolutionary role, proposes that only in the name of the universal social rights can a particular class claim the universal domain. The movement from singular to universal and vice versa is always mediated by particular.