Lupo builds a bridge between the ancien regime and modernity: the long nineteenth century, the period between American and French revolutions and the first world war. It was the place in which our ideas and our world took shape. A world whose old character, however, continued to dominate and which preserved all the layers of a millennial history. The spark of industrialization generated new social actors, even if the centre stage remained occupied by groups that were fast becoming anachronistic: aristocrats, landowners, professionals, farmers, artisans. The ideas of liberty, democracy and individual rights were beginning to take root, but old empires persisted or took on new forms. At a time when equality was looked to as the basis for collective life, inequality was justified with equal virulence, in order to protect the hierarchies that governed the working of society. Different, apparently incompatible perspectives overlapped, forming a complex medley whose unravelling continues to be a pressing contemporary problem.