This study aims to examine the concept of democracy in the works of Celso Furtado produced in the context of crisis of developmentalism (1961 – 1964). Historiographical works devoted to appreciate aspects of nationaldevelopmentalist discourse recurrently denote the marginalization, or even the absence of reflections on democracy, the institutions and the Brazilian political regime among authors who share this political thought. In the early 1960 s, Furtado was dedicated to writing articles and giving lectures with eminently political subjects that were compiled and published in two books – A Pré- Revolução Brasileira (1962) and Dialética do Desenvolvimento (1964). We argue that, from the analysis of the centrality and the semantics imputed by the author to the concept of democracy, it is possible to take it as an interpretative key to better understand the meaning of these works as speech acts and the moment of crisis of some Brazilian social thought paradigms.