Caridade, meritocracia e redistribuição: a tríade histórica da política social e da extensão rural brasileira

This article is a theoretical essay that addresses the historiography of the political institutionality of the Brazilian rural extension, highlighting the similarity with the events alluding to the evolution of social policies since its birth in Western Europe. It presents the chronology of events related to rural extension through binomials proposed by Rodrigues (1997), namely: assistentialist-humanism, productivist-diffusionism and critical-humanism; vis-a-vis the residual-charitable, meritocratic-particularist and institutional-redistributive phases present in the typology of Titmuss (1958), known and usual, which takes into account the relationship between public and private and the degree of redistribution of protection systems to explain the historical evolution of social policies. In the final considerations, it presents a comparative picture of homogeny, highlighting the characteristics that bring the evolution of social policies closer to rural extension policies.