This article explores the role that values, and a way of experiencing them, may have to consolidate democracy in Brazil. The first part shows, with the assistance of Charles Taylor, how Habermas's procedural and deliberative democracy accounts for the ideas of reason and self-interest rightly understood, but not for the ''sentiment rightly understood'' - the values which have made it historically possible. The second part examines the great expressivist and non-rationalist configurations which have made up the Brazilian identity - Baroque, Romanticism and Modernism - and how this tradition, and the values which inhabit it, may be worked out for our full democratization and the keeping of the democratic proceduralism itself.
Procedural democracy and moral configurations; Iberism and Baroque; Brazilian cultural tradition