Peter Wagner is Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. His publications include The Trouble with Democracy (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Modernity as Experience and Interpretation (Polity Press, 2008), A History and Theory of the Social Sciences (Sage, 2001), Theorising Modernity (Sage, 2001) and A Sociology of Modernity (Routledge, 1994).

• IntroductionPeter WagnerPart I. Reconstructing the history of Atlantic modernity1. The American divergence, the modern Western world, and the paradigmatisation of historyAurea Mota2. The limits of recognition: history, otherness and autonomyAngela Lorena Fuster Peirò and Gerard Rosich3. On being in time: modern African elites and the historical challenge to claims for alternative and multiple modernitiesJacob Dlamini4. The sublime dignity of the dictator: republicanism and the return of dictatorship in political modernityAndreas Kalyvas5. The Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment: between reform and revolutionAlice Soares GuimarãesPart II. Comparing trajectories of modernity in the South6. Inconsistencies between social-democratic discourses and neo-liberal institutional practices in Chile and South Africa: a comparative analysis of the post-authoritarian periodsRommy Morales Olivares7. HIV/AIDS policies and modernity in Brazil and South Africa: a comparative critical analysisJosé Katito8. Land and restitution in comparative perspective: analysing the evidence of right to land for black rural communities in Brazil and South AfricaJoyce GotlibPart III. Claims for justice in the history of modernity and in its present9. An unsettled past as a political resourceSvjetlana Nedimović10. Injustice at both ends: pre-and-post-apartheid literary approaches to injustice, sentiment and humanism in the work of C. Louis Leipoldt, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and the film ‘Invictus’Riaan Oppelt11. The student movement in Chile 2011–2012: rearming the critique of capitalismBeatriz Silva Pinochet12. Indignation and claims for economic sovereignty in Europe and the Americas: renewing the project of control over productionDavid Casassas, Sérgio Franco, Bru Laín, Edgar Manjarín, Rommy Morales Olivares, Samuel Sadian and Beatriz Silva Pinochet