Comparing political trajectories over the course of a century demands more forgetting than remembering. I will make an attempt here to convert a considerable amount of very heterogeneous analytical material into some "Popperian" conjectures. They may emerge from anywhere within and may be subjected to corroboration or refutation. In other words, this process is precisely the reverse of the one that informs strictly academic tasks. To some extent, I begin my work "from scratch". It may be true that the history of democracy in Argentina is longer than that of Brazil. Nonetheless, this difference does not invalidate comparison. My concise hypothesis is the following: in Brazilian democratic politics, the institutional dimension prevails - institutions, in fact, represent the place in which interactions occur and collective actors take shape. In compensation, within these institutions, both social and political inclusion has been weak. However, in the Argentine case, the inclusive dimension has been dominant, in clear detriment to the one. In Argentine democratic politics, "everyone" was included. In Brazilian democratic politics until 1964, stability was based on exclusion - for example, the exclusion of the rural masses. These hypotheses may be correct or incorrect but in any case, it is important to emphasize that they have not been established ex nihilo, as if coming from nowhere and neither diachronic nor synchronic. Diachronic, insofar as the history of the 20th century is sustained, obviously, in the history of the preceding one; synchronic, because each of the hypotheses or conjectures discussed here are undeniably embedded in processes that are proper to the 20th century, its dramas, struggles, leaders, conflicts, controversies, political administrations, periods of depression and prosperity and hopes; in short, all that makes up the history of the century.
cultural politics; Comparative History; Argentina; Brazil; political language