Manuel Castells, born in 1942, is a distinguished representative of the late-twentieth-century progressive European intellectual. Of Catalan origin, having fled the Franco dictatorship, he was trained as a professional sociologist in France and taught for more than a decade at the University of Paris (Nanterre) between the 1960s and the 1970s, with more short-term academic appointments in pre-Pinochet Chile and in Montreal, Quebec. In the late 1970s, Castells moved to the United States, where he is still a professor of communication, technology, and sociology at the University of Southern California, after having taught city and regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley from 1979 to 1993, where he is now professor emeritus. In recent years he also obtained a research professorship in his ...