Professor Roger Bartra is a Research Fellow at the University of Mexico (UNAM), an anthropologist and sociologist. He is the author of several books on the Mexican political system, the European mythology of melancholy and the wild men, and the anthropology of the brain.

Roger Bartra is one of Mexico's most important radical (and heterodox) intellectual figures. He has produced major works analysing the country's agrarian and political structures, as well as an extraordinarily original history of the European 'savage' and, more recently, an anthropological approach to the study of the human brain. In 'The Mexican Transition', his latest collection of essays, Bartra redeploys many of the key ideas developed in these works to produce an invaluable analysis of Mexico's contemporary political sphere as it emerges from decades of post-Revolutionary authoritarian rule. 'The Mexican Transition' is not only an original historical account of the emergence of new political agencies and democratic forms in a context beset by narco-violence and corruption, but also a trenchant critique of the various brands of neo-populism that inhibit true radical democratic reform in Mexico, as well as throughout Latin America as a whole. Professor John Kraniauskas, Birkbeck, University of London

• Part I: The Political Transition Chapter 1: The Dictatorship was not Perfect 3 Chapter 2: Mud, mire, and democracy 29 Chapter 3: Can the Right be modern? 42 Chapter 4: The Left - in danger of extinction? 49 Chapter 5: The burdens of the Right 58 Chapter 6: Populism and democracy in Latin America 69 Chapter 7: The Mexican hydra: the return of the authoritarian party 83 Part II: Culture and Democracy Chapter 8: Intellectuals and scholars facing democracy 97 Chapter 9: The labyrinth and its map 106 Chapter 10: Ethnographic sonata in Nay-flat 117 Chapter 11: 1968: Defeat, transition, counter-culture 134 Chapter 12: Memories of the counter - culture 139 Chapter 13: Street life and politics 147 Chapter 14: The shadow of the future