ABSTRACT
This article offers a genealogy of Álvaro Vieira Pinto’s philosophy of development and argues that populism and democracy can interact in complementary or antithetical terms. A contextualized reading of Vieira Pinto’s work indicates that populism strengthens democracy when it resists neocolonialism and expands popular participation. However, populism goes against democracy if it adopts an exclusionary conception of the people that denies pluralism.
KEYWORDS:
Álvaro Vieira Pinto; populism; democracy; philosophy of development; Brazilian intellectual history