A series of studies, fragments, on a century of culture and politics in contemporary Spain are gathered here, whose guiding criteria would be to show the positive path of complex continuity linking the Free Institution of Education (1876) and the current democratic Constitution ( 1978). In the middle of both, after the plural traces of the best dialectic of the Enlightenment, would be the generation of 98, more literary, and the 14, more scientific, determinants in 1931 of the Second Republic. On this frame of reference, a special treatment is made in these pages of some of the main contributions, in that way, of the intellectual opposition to the dictatorial regime imposed as a result of the civil war. Transition, then, to democracy and homologation with Europe. From then to here, in the face of global hegemony in the last decades of the fundamentalist and ultraconservative reaction (Wojtila, Thatcher, Reagan or, later, Ratzinger and Bush), what, as a response, is largely addressed today is that the (oligarchical) sovereignty of the market does not substitute, subordinate or annul the (democratic) sovereignty of the State: that is, of the social and democratic State of Law that is insisted upon in this book? it is precisely what our Constitution prescribes.