Revolution in populism: anticolonial developmentalism in Brazil’s populist republic

In recent years, there has been a surge in studies of populism and developmentalism. However, little attention has been paid to the ideas of Latin American thinkers who grappled with these phenomena during the Populist Republic, a democratic period of Brazil’s history that spans from 1950 to 1964. This article reassesses the writings of Brazilian philosophers Roland Corbisier (1914–2005) and Álvaro Vieira Pinto (1909–1987) published while they were affiliated to ISEB, a research centre created in Rio de Janeiro in 1955 that was closed down with the military coup d’état of 1964. Corbisier and Vieira Pinto advanced a revolutionary populism, which mobilises the people in order to bring about a national revolution, and an anticolonial developmentalism, which identified imperialism as the major obstacle to development. Analysing their works together supports three arguments that are usually overlooked: (1) Latin American developmentalism was not an uncritical reproduction of Western conceptions of progress and modernisation; (2) the distinction between dependency theory and developmentalism is not as sharp as some intellectual historians have portrayed it; (3) in countries affected by neocolonialism, populism may initially have salutary effects on democracy, but in the long run it often becomes undemocratic.