Made a Moby-Dick: an Organizational Reading of Paulo Guedes’ Privatist Monomania as a Discursive Strategy of Neoliberal Authoritarian Leadership in Brazil

Abstract Authoritarian leadership is a challenge for organizational analysis. The perplexity regarding how we have accepted its occurrence various times throughout history runs through the thinking of intellectuals such as Adorno, Habermas, Sloterdijk, and Arendt. A complementary way studying it literature. Literature has enormous potential interpreting world and, given creativity authors, can deal with complex themes, characters, events, freedom that, due to methodological rigor, science often does not allow. As organizations are also constituted discursively, textual elements literature give us an epistemological freedom, enabling analyses that address traditional topics, leadership, in another way. This theoretical essay proposes use classic literature, novel Moby-Dick , conduct critical discourse analysis, based on Norman Fairclough, neoliberal-authoritarian monomaniac Paulo Guedes, Minister Economy Jair Bolsonaro’s government. objective demonstrate richness using combined analysis understand phenomena. interpretation will be guided by style character Ahab, ship captain Pequod, who result his obsession hunting giant white sperm whale, Moby Dick, leads vessel tragic end, similar what occurred Brazil hatred toward State present Guedes’ discourses.