Intellectuals and Democracy (Freedom Spaces)

Abstract

Focusing on the writings of Julián Marías and José Luís López Aranguren, this article follows the cultural change that took place in Spain from the 1960’s onwards. As a result of this change Spanish intellectual horizon abandoned the cultural ideas and values of Franco’s dictatorship and began to accept the work and the thinking of those writers and intellectuals who had suffered attacks and prohibitions from the authoritarian regime after the war. The conquest of certain spaces of freedom by these intellectuals allowed Spanish culture to recover the pulse of modernity. This was, moreover, an essential move towards the regaining of democratic conscience in Spain.