The  Roots of Populism (2006) Josino Moraes Latin America Economic Researcher www.josino.net email: josinomoraes@hotmail.com The roots of populism in Latin America have to be searched in the crazy figure of   Auguste Comte (1798-1857). His ideas, known as Comte's Positivism, were disseminated all over the subcontinent in the second half of the 19th century. Do not confuse Comte's Positivism with his contemporaneous Logical Positivism, also known as the Vienna's Circle, a quite  strange philosophy. Neither attempt to confound it with  the American Positivist thoughts, a trend of self-help psychology. The victory of his ideas and his religious sect in the case of Brazil was so remarkable that the Brazilian flag - 1889 -  carries the Positivist motto Ordem e Progresso (Order and Progress).  Comte's new religion of humanity did not prosper in Latin America, but his political and economic ideas are still deeply crystallized here,  and added with some new hot ingredients have transformed them into the current populism. Other strong Positivism ideas were the republican dictatorship, hierarchy - "hierarchy is a natural gif" -, aversion to free-market economics, etc. Understanding positivism is a difficult task because its concepts are so obscure and   contradictory. They refer to social engineering, sciences, social physics, etc, at the same time as they attempt to create a new religion, a crazy variation of catholicism. Positivism is probably one of the most mental imbroglios in the human history. Auguste Comte was so insane that he attempted suicide by throwing himself from a bridge over the Siena river in Paris ,and his most important works were written after 50 hours without sleeping. As Ludwig von Mises said "Comte can be exculpated, as he was insane in the full sense which pathology attaches to this term. But what about his followers?"    Comte's positivism ideas spread out all over Latin America countries and it is the main reason of the current Latin America tragedy. How could Chile, apparently and recently, escape from this miserable fate is a mystery to be unveiled in the future. The only country outside Latin America infected by these ideas was Italy and it is not a simple coincidence that the birthplace of Mussolini's fascism was Italy, in 1922. Soon after,in 1933, Hitler took the power in Germany, with some of those crazy ideas. John Stuart Mill wrote that Comte's political philosophy aims at establishing " a despotism of society over the individual, surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of the most rigid disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers" The most concise thought about Comte's ideas was explained by the Brazilian positivist Julio de Castilhos (1860-1903) who stated that the success of a political party was due to "a chief, a  program and a discipline". The current and extremely high oil prices signify an additional help for Colonel Chavez. Besides, his rifle purchases  in the present level of war technology reminds me Benito Mussolini's demential megalomania speech at the beginning of The Second War:"Italiani di Italia e del mondo: abbiamo otto milioni di baionette; nessuno ci fermerà , la vittoria è nostra" (Italians from all over the world: we have eight million bayonets; no one can hinder us, the victory is ours).     Of course, Positivist ideas gave origin to innumerable dictatorships in Latin America in the past - Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in Dominique Republic, Getulio Vargas in Brazil, Juan Domingo Peron in Argentina, etc. The case of Mexico  was masked with elections and the dictatorship of a single political party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Traces of positivism are still alive, taking  for instance  the excessive powers of the local presidencial powers that in fact legislate more than their congresses. Recently, Nestor Kirchnert reached Argentina's record signing 67 decrees a year. In the current "democratic" days, plenty of elections, basically paid  by taxes, the different segments of political nomenklature have found a kind  of a tacit agreement: they can divide their voracity for taxes among themselves in peace.