Whether in libraries or in front of a computer screen, intellectual labour tends to be a solitary enterprise accompanied by bouts of creative anxiety. Yet it also has a collective dimension, as we sometimes outline our preliminary ideas and intuitions in classes, circulate our drafts amongst friends and colleagues to hear their reactions, or submit them to the criticism of our peers at workshops and conferences. I have been fortunate enough to have had readers like Marta Lamas and the group of friends that met monthly in her house in Mexico City to discuss our work for over five years – Roger Bartra, Roberto Castro, Bolívar Echeverría, Fernando Escalante, Benjamin Mayer, Nora Rabotnikof and Ilán Semo. I also benefited from other readers, more scattered around the world, like Willem Assies, Margaret Canovan, Juan Martin and the anonymous referees of the journals that published earlier versions of these chapters. I thank them all for their generosity, although Nora deserves a special acknowledgement, as she was patient enough to read the drafts of several chapters, sometimes more than once, and to point out in her ever so subtle way some of the weaknesses in my arguments.

José Carlos Rodríguez, my friend, colleague and fellow traveller in Paraguayan political activism in the 1980s, is in many ways my intellectual alter ego. He revised virtually all the chapters, and while at times we had major disagreements, especially with regard to the interpretation of populism, his critical gaze helped me identify and work out many half-baked arguments and inconsistencies that otherwise would have made this book weaker than what it is.