(Expand and correct this book) It has been like planting the thorny cutting of the same rosebush that has previously been pruned; in this labor of intellectual gardening I have cut away many stems which seemed to me withered or bent: dogmatic expressions, arbitrary qualifiers, excessive adjectives, and affirmations that I no longer agree with. I have resisted the temptation of adding new ideas to the original stem of the work; I have left the structure of the book intact. But I did allow myself a graft, an insert especially prepared for the 1992 English-language edition, where it was published as a postscriptum at the end of the book. In the present edition I have decided to include it at the beginning of the book, as an introduction. I also added a new final chapter about the imaginary networks of political terror. This is a book on political theory dealing with subjects that continue to be important at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It greatly pleases me to be able to confirm this fact and to realize that I was actually foreseeing a political problem that has become a fundamental aspect in today´s world: the confrontation between democracy and terrorism and the diverse expressions of otherness. The book offers a theoretical interpretation of the connections between the dramatic expressions of terrorism and the political mechanism of legitimacy in current democracies. It demonstrates how the theory of imaginary mediations is a useful instrument for dissecting political systems and thereby understanding how they function. -Roger Bartra