Direito, desigualdades e produção de consensos sociais

At the interface of law and sociology, this article aims to analyze how law is inserted into social relations and how it is involved with the problem of violence as the maintenance and exacerbation of social inequalities. It starts from two basic research assumptions: the expanded meanings of the notion of law, as well as the connection between law and inequality (with a focus on the production of social consensus by legal discourse around these inequalities). Along these lines, the development and conclusions of the article are structured methodologically along four lines: (i) an investigation into the extent of the understanding of law, which is not reduced to explicit legal normativity (but rather the way in which meanings attributed to social phenomena are shared and disputed); (ii) the relationship between law, inequality and violence, through an interdisciplinary and sociologically-oriented debate on the problem of expropriations; (iii) the mechanism of the promise and control of time as the basic functioning of the abstraction of inequalities operated by legal normativity; (iv) the discursive construction of consensus, through the law, around social inequality and violence reproduced by the law itself.