Liberalism versus "substantive democracy":

the Minas Gerais manifesto and the debates about the authoritarian-corporative state in the final years of Estado Novo (1943-1945)

Abstract

The Manifesto Mineiro of 1943 is usually mentioned as one of the greatest marks of the opposition to the Vargas government, which would fall with the Estado Novo in 1945. This article aims to contextualize the document as signalizing a wider process of the division into fractions of the elites face to the New State project and face to the debates which followed about the authoritarian-corporative state. The text has as an objective to characterize the 2 disputing projects between 1943-1945: the liberalism of the “bound together oppositions” and the “substantive democracy” (corporative, economic, social and syndical) built in the decades 1930-1940, whose institutional marks will be reaffirmed in the democratization of 1945, being the political rights reincorporated to this fact.