This book challenges the pessimism that has so marked, and impoverished, social theorizing about modern social life. Modernity has often been dark and debilitating, but it has also generated hope for a better life and extraordinary reforms and liberations, from the creation of hopeful democracies in the face of dangerous dictatorships to feminist transformations of patriarchy, struggles against imperialism and racial domination and the stubborn but persistent reconstruction of pivotal institutions.