After the collapse of communism, the world began to think that only one road leads to freedom and prosperity. This road has often been labeled "neoliberalism" or "the Washington consensus." Much of my work in recent years has been devoted to the effort to demonstrate that there is an alternative that, although market-friendly and conducive to economic growth, also enables us both to democratize the market and to deepen democracy. The most important distinguishing feature of this alternative is its insistence on changing, step by step and part by part, the institutions with which we identify market economies, democracies, and free civil societies. We should think of this program as a direction rather than as a blueprint.

The progressive alternative proposed in these writings is "a second way," intended to make "many ways" possible. The "second way" describes a broad gateway of institutional innovations through which contemporary societies must pass if they are to strengthen their capacity to develop the powers of humanity in different directions. Local heresies are not enough to counteract a universal orthodoxy.

These programmatic texts are connected with the antifaltalistic way of thinking that informs them. They are also related to my political activities and proposals in my own country, Brazil. The Brazilian programmatic pieces, represented in the Portuguese-language section of this website, are the most detailed and context-oriented of my writings about the progressive alternative. We must work at every level from the visionary to the practical, from the distant to the immediate, and from the world situation to the local circumstance. Alternatives created within the nation-sate must be echoed by changes in the arrangements of the international order that make the world more open to a pluralism of experience and direction.

The nations of the world have now become involuntarily joined in a single debate. We remain poor, however, in the means to organize a movement of opinion that can cross national frontiers and change our sense of the possibilities. The internet is one such means. Let's use it.