Ser intelectual y ser joven, en Madrid, hacia 1930

If the Spanish intellectuals of the end of the century crisis saw themselves as the positive correlate to the negative mass, and the members of the 1914 generation identified themselves with a selected minority destined to lead the masses, the young intellectuals coming into public life between 1925 and 1930 (between the «annus mirabilis» of the Spanish vanguard and the political agitation before the fall of the dictator) recognized that their encounter with the people had been motivated by instinct, according to some of them, or by a higher force, according to others. Yet, since the fall of the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship, those intellectuals (namely Espina, Diaz Fernandez, Zambrano, Gimenez Caballero, Ledesma Ramos or Alberti), even though they had collaborated in the same journals and shared a common challenge (What is literature for?), moved by the conviction that their literary talents should be at the service of ideas, they chose divergent ways: in defense of the new liberalism, of fascism, or of communism.