La fàbrica de les idees. Política i cultura a la Catalunya del segle XX

2009. Pròleg de Juan-José López Burniol, 318 pp.

Catalonia shares with the rest of Occident the current paralysing uncertainty of the future. The way the general discomfort is materialised in Catalonia is focused on the evaluation of the validity of the project of constructing a national and modern Catalonia starting with the Catalanism at the end of the 19th century. This is not an autistic process, but rather it has been made dearly according to the Spanish political demand and the European cultural dynamics: that is why the disappointment is shared. This book explains, historically (since uncertainty concerns are the result of a deeply historical process), some of the intervening elements in the process and which takes us to the current situation. The book analyses four big arguments: the characterisation of the intellectuals which make the modern ‘factory of ideas’ Catalan work; the approach of its nationalisation and modernisation work and how it was concretised in the Catalan in the Catalan urban network; the contrast of Catalonia with a world which consolidates modern violence, which makes the ideas doctrines of combat and compromises democracy; the possibilities and elements in which the modern and dynamic Catalan identity was built; and the origin of the contradictions which gives this project the most recent evolution, coming from a collapse of the past and perpetrated in the defeat of 1939 and magnified by the great immigrant wave of the Sixties. Without a proper systematisation of the facts and their orderly hierarchy to regain a sense, any lawful instrumentalization of the past will not pass from the coarsest phase of the manipulation of its meaning.