ABSTRACT
For Francis Fukuyama, new guru of the right and scourge of the left: ‘There is an unquestionable relationship between economic development and liberal democracy, which one can observe simply by looking around the world’ (Fukuyama 1992:125). Before launching into a tirade about crass empiricism and naive optimism, we must note that Fukuyama goes on to state that this relationship is more complicated than it first appears, and that the logic of development does not necessarily lead to democratization. In brief, in spite of the observed relationship between democracy and development across the globe, and Fukuyama’s conservative Hegelian quest for a ‘Mechanism’ underlying history, he can only conclude lamely that ‘there does not appear to be a necessary connection between the two’ (Fukuyama 1992:125). This can be a useful starting point for my own attempt to explore the relationship between democracy and capitalist development, in general theoretical terms and through a schematic case study of Latin American history in this regard. The first task is to deconstruct the two terms-democracy and development-so as to understand better the possible relationship(s) between the two phenomena.
