Héctor Quintela González

Jean Cocteau said that his pessimism was but a variety of his optimism. One of these aphorisms was remembered while attending to the interventions of Javier Gomá and Alain Finkielkraut in the Institut Français of Madrid. Perhaps the optimism of the Spanish came to dissipate somewhat more than the pessimism of the French. The diatribes of Finkielkraut, staunch defender of French republican education, directed to the period that covers the last four decades, found in Gomá, apologue of the exemplarity as a pedagogic method and of illustrated cosmopolitanism  - "Being Spanish is the most practical way to be contemporary ", He stressed that day - a question arised:" In what other era would you rather live? ". A question that is certainly tricky when it comes to analyzing the drift of liberal democracies of our times, considering where we were in the past and we are today