In Makers of Democracy, A. Ricardo López-Pedreros offers a multidimensional approach to the disputed processes through which particular social actors came to represent the middle classes and the promises of democracy. The author criticizes the usually unquestioned bond between the middle classes and democracy and calls for a pluralization of the ways that we investigate, understand, and write about these powerful problems. López-Pedreros analyzes the transnational formation of middle classes in Bogotá during the 1960s and 1970s, giving attention to dynamics of gender differentiation. During these two decades there was an expansion of US power in Latin America, and in Colombia development programs and social reform initiatives tried to reorganize the relationships between state and society in the context of the National Front, increased urbanization, and political turmoil.López-Pedreros traces how the changes in material and discursive conditions intertwined with the process of subjectivity formation. Based on a wide range of sources, particularly oral histories and various institutional archives that have not been studied within the Colombian historiography, the author uncovers the struggles and negotiations involved in the making of the middle-class subjectivity. In the book we hear the voices and learn from the experiences of three groups: professionals, white-collar employees, and small-business owners. They all benefited from the new reforms and occupied strategic sites in social change initiatives. Precisely because of their key position, these groups engaged in crucial debates about what democracy should be.The book is organized into two sections with four chapters each, an introduction, and an epilogue. In the introduction, the author describes how his work participates in ongoing debates about the making of the middle classes, the history of democracy, and the necessity of deprovincializing Colombian history. The epilogue offers insightful reflections on the ties between middle-class struggles and the peace negotiations in Colombia.In the first part of the book, titled “Conscripts of Democracy,” López-Pedreros introduces a powerful discussion about the “bastard” character of Latin American middle classes and their disputed role in the expansion of US power. He examines carefully how new management theories and social science knowledge produced rich but also contradictory understandings of the people who should be part of the service sector. The author reconstructs crucial debates about labor and service, the role of social scientists, the qualities for being a good public employee, and the material and subjective conditions believed to be required to become a new professional or an entrepreneur. Conscripts of democracy were then all those men and women involved in reorganizing the labor relationships, those who were “charged with bringing about proper democracy for the Americas” (p. 176).The second part, titled “Contested Democracies,” analyzes class subjectivities, social movements, and the gendered petit bourgeois radicalization that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. In this part we learn from the memories of professionals and white-collar employees who at this time were disputing the meaning and political relevance of their intellectual work. Particularly interesting is the dispute about “the right to rule” others and the role of knowledge and gender in the exercise of that right. Here the author offers an insightful review of the dilemmas faced by a famous generation of Colombian scholars including Orlando Fals Borda and Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda. López-Pedreros describes how educating the laboring classes implied the redefinition of gender and social hierarchies as well as the necessity of understanding what types of subjectivities work well in democracy. In this part, the author describes the new associative life of small entrepreneurs and the political debates about the role of both unions and women in these battles for democracy.Attention to the tumultuous political conjuncture and the structural challenges is especially developed in chapters 7 and 8. In these chapters, the author describes the political radicalization of some professionals and white-collar employees who transformed themselves in order to become part of the Left. By focusing on the experience of men and women who embraced being categorized as petit bourgeois, López-Pedreros reconstructs how they participated in or promoted diverse debates about health, public service, and education. The political radicalization of these sectors nourished the Left and the multiplicity of democratic ideas and projects. To some extent, the radicalization of these sectors helped to consolidate the links between the right to rule and specialized knowledge. In these chapters we learn how some state representatives became enemies of the state and how the emancipatory impulses of specialized knowledge turned into disciplinary practices. At the end, the author shows how different actors concur—willingly or unwillingly—in sustaining a “rationality of rule” in which expert knowledge did not defend people from a market-driven society and democracy. This book is a key contribution to the contemporary history of the middle classes, democracy, and processes of political polarization.