Florestan Fernandes and the dilemmas of democracy in Brazil

Abstract

This article intends to discuss the notion of democracy present in Florestan Fernandes’ thought between the decades of 1950 and 1960, with the aim of stressing the various grades that it acquires in this period. During these years, his conception of democracy goes from an immanent possibility to society of classes, to the necessity of its assertion to the consolidation of a competitive social order, also considering its denial in a bourgeois order. In Fernandes’ work the question of democracy appears in connection to other themes that were dear to him, and is understood as a way of social organization, in other words, as one of the pillars of society, and not only as a way of political organization. This question, in Brazil, reports itself as a dilemma permeated by hurdels, blind alleys and possibilities.