Humanism or humanitarianism? Collapse of imponderables in a propaedeutic discussion between Ramon Esquerra and Manuel Cruells

Abstract

This article analyzes the exchange of opinions between the critics Ramon Esquerra (1909- 1938) and Manuel Cruells (1910-1988) about how to understand Renaissance humanism. On this basis, I focus on the first author to examine the implications arising from the act of thinking the interwar crisis, the function of the intellectual, and the cultural processes of the past through the geographical and temporal context in which it is consumed. In light of the narratives of some of the great European thinkers of the time (Hazard, Berdyaev, Benda, Maurois, etc.), Esquerra in his literary criticism projects a concern for the future of Western civilization in the rise of the totalitarian ideologies of the 1930s, emphasizing a critical and moral point of view in front of the materialistic thinking. In this sense, I also consider aspects such as the inheritance of medieval Christianity in the formation of an alleged European conscience and the treatment in the Catalan press of the concept of humanitarianism around 1935.