ABSTRACT
The market economy and political democracy appear too many people as two sides of the same coin. Many argue that both limit the absolute state. The breakup of traditional society is usually brought about by authoritarian means. Authoritarian development suffocates and leads to increasingly severe crises. Democracy and development are interrelated because both ideas introduce an integrated and overall image of social change and reject theories of modernization that describe society as a train whose social and political carriages are pulled by the locomotive of rationalization and material progress. There is a direct association between democracy and endogenous development. The link between crisis and authoritarianism parallels that between development and democracy. Yet it is not democracy that produces the crises that give birth to authoritarian regimes, and there are no grounds for describing as democratic the breakdown of a political system that has been invaded by interest groups, parties, or corruption.
