Celso Furtado e José Medina Echavarría: subdesenvolvimento, desenvolvimentismo e política

Abstract

Focusing the study on the intellectual production of Celso Furtado and José Medina Echavarría, this research comparatively discusses the proposals of those thinkers concerning the theory of underdevelopment (as a particular historical and political formation) and the developmentalist project (a “guided” promotion of development via planning). Thus, we put into question the theses and projects of those two thinkers in the context of debates in the field of ECLAC tradition, seeking to analyze how authors with different methods (historical-structural in Furtado and Weberian rationality in Echavarría) reached the same thematic configuration in the explanation of the problem of development in Latin American trajectories and its transformation, electing as central in the analysis the role of policies and the privileged theme of democracy. Our question is to analyze the similarities and differences found in the theses of Furtado and Echavarría in unveiling the logic of underdevelopment and to understand how, from different angles, democracy appears endowed with fundamental importance in the process of overcoming underdevelopment.