Obras completas, 1. Libros (1930-1939)

This first volume of María Zambrano's Collected Works brings together the thinker's first four books, written between 1930 and 1939. Horizon of Liberalism (1930) delves into the roots of politics, seeking avenues for social liberalism. The civic reason with which her thought begins already shows in this book the seeds of her mediating reason. It is Intellectuals in the Drama of Spain (1937) and its subsequent articles up to 1939 that—as a testament in favor of the Republic—open up to a hopefully tragic vision of history, guided by a new model of vital reason. In Thought and Poetry in Spanish Life (1939), civic reason converges with poetic knowledge through the hermeneutics of what Zambrano considers the best Spanish literary tradition of popular wisdom, the novel, and poetry. Thus began the 'Path to Spain,' which would lead to Spain, Dream and Truth (1965; vol. III), conceived as a continuation of this third book. In it, both his cultural critique of European nihilism and the roots of the hope he derived from Spanish poetic knowledge, born from his own political failure, already emerge. This same cultural critique and this model of reason are developed more speculatively in its companion book, Philosophy and Poetry (also from 1939), which, starting from the Platonic division between philosophy and poetry, seeks to mediate between these two forms of knowledge, thus constituting the ultimate impulse toward poetic reason.