El reverso de la utopía / The Reverse of Utopia
Journalistic Work , 2025
Alfaguara
Pages: 784
"That, understood in extreme terms, freedom and equality are allergic options to each other cannot mean that we are condemned to injustice. Rather, more simply, it means that we must renounce utopias, extreme options."
"Despite the fact that Latin America, Israel, and Iraq are distant places, with cultural and political histories that are hardly comparable, it is not so difficult to find an invisible thread that connects them. [...] That period of ideological tranquility that seemed to have arrived with the fall of communism proved to be an illusion. History remained alive, more than ever. Islamic radicalism, nationalism, and populism have not ceased in these years to be serious threats to freedom and democracy. These ideals have unfortunately drifted further away. Latin America did not become an oasis purged of all modern vices, nor the region where a humanist and libertarian socialism would emerge. On the contrary, it is the politics of the rest of the West that has ended up resembling that of Latin America: the demons incubated in the reverse of utopia—fanaticism, nationalism, sectarian hatred, populism—are on the loose and now threaten all of humanity."
From the preface by Carlos Granés.