Is social democracy in the Third World, and especially in Latin America, at once self-evidently desirable and forever unattainable? The recent record would seem to confirm past experience and suggest that social democracy is at best the tribute that vice pays to virtue and at worst a convenient disguise for intentions that are rarely social and barely democratic. While in the past the label was as likely to be attached to parties of oligarchic origins and conservative preferences as to those who might claim to represent and advance popular interests, in recent years, it has been argued, "parties of the Second International" throughout Latin America "have embraced the neoliberal agenda" in a fashion quite contrary to their electoral promises (Warnock, 1995, p. 6). On what basis, therefore, can the influential Brazilian political scientist Helio Jaguribe claim that not just social democracy but social democracy as a phenomenon of the "mass' is the only sustainable outcome of the process of democratic transition and consolidation which has been underway in the past decade or more throughout Latin America (Castaneda, 1994, p. 133)? Is such a claim likely to prove no more than one further example of that "easy" profession of social democratic aspiration but subsequent failure of execution to which Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the Brazilian legal and social theorist, has recently referred (Unger, 1998a, p. 39)?