Based on the comparison between the Spanish and Chilean authoritarian experiences of the 20th century, this article investigates the conditions of possibility that allowed the dictatorships of Franco and Pinochet to lay the foundations for a re-founding of the social, political, and economic structures that previously ruled their countries, following a pattern —debated in the social sciences— of modernization without democracy. It is concluded that such historical possibility, without being inevitable or necessarily based on a prior project, lies, on the one hand, in the restructuring of the conditions of social and political reproduction against which the forces that originate such authoritarian regimes initially react, and not in the political defeat of the resistance that is organized against them; as well as, on the other hand, in the socially exclusive nature of the exit political pacts with which both countries move towards democracy.