The history of humanity has alwys been characterised by social inequalities, although not at the scale experienced in the past two hundred years. The author summarises the main features of contemporary global polarisation and initiates a social alternative.

Summary of the one-day forum of our journal held on 7 December 1996 with foreign speakers including Alain Lipietz, Peter Gowan and Michael John.

Interpreting modernity as consulting practices to cope with the perpetual change deriving from the capitalist imperative to ceaseless accumulation, it is argued that world hegemonic states create exceptional periods of change which stimulate major constructions of modernity. The nature of these modernities is explored through the creative arts where the hegemon's civil society has been a cultural as well as an economic leader.

By our times, the liberal-social democratic project of emancipation has been exhausted. The modernisation of male-female relation is under way, although this is now related to teh process of commercialisation. The latter has a differentiated impact on certain groups of women.

The last fifty years did not lead towards an equalization between the development levels of national economies. This is not only a consequence of market imperfections, as it claimed by neoclassical economics, but a natural impact of the operation of market mechanisms. The authour explains what mechanisms in the economic relations between developed and underdeveloped countries create uneven development.