

The aversion to power is as instinctive and healthy as it is childish and naive. We want to be free individuals, and yet we know that someone must call the shots. Someone must lead. We must somehow organize ourselves collectively. Ideally, we delegate the power to command to the most qualified, right? But now we've settled into a populist critique of intellectual and academic elites: experts are under suspicion. How can this be? The mantra of a general rejection of politicians, of all of them, also dominates. Are they all the same? It's another way of denying power. So, how do we do it? Behind the crisis of democracy, there are these phenomenal confusions that feed on an endemic foundation of libertarian spontaneity—in Catalonia, we have historical experiences—a tendency fueled today by reactionary anti-system forces. The primary rejection of power, always latent, the fruit of a healthy skepticism, is paradoxically leading us headlong into new forms of personalistic and authoritarian government. The phenomenon is global. The Minotaur always floats.
We Catalans have had a conflictive relationship with power for centuries. We want it and we hurt. Historian Jaume Vicens Vives's vision is well-known: "Catalonia's decline began precisely when the Minotaur was pushing upwards, taking the form of authoritarian or plurinational monarchies." He emphasizes that we were then trapped in the beautiful medieval pact as a measure of political balance. "And from there, it seems, comes a sensational historical disappointment: that of a people who find themselves without the will to power." A people who, in turn, are saved by their "will to be," by their sense of continuity and belonging. And a people who, riding the "dualism between measure and sensuality," have repeatedly resorted to revolt or revolution, with a particularly dramatic 19th and 20th centuries. We have begun the 21st with the failed Trial. Power generates both attraction and repulsion in us. And so we are, in an eternal restart.
It's shocking. The Vicens Vives of News from Catalonia (1954) seems to speak to us from the most rabid present. (The work has been reissued as the inaugural title of the collection Catalan classics of political thought, promoted by the Generalitat itself through the Institute for Self-Government Studies and the Ramon Llull Institute; it has also been published in an English edition). Vicens Vives says: "All the forces of renewal that we have accumulated over the centuries, sometimes as primordial solutions for our own and Spain's righting, we have consumed them with the flames of impatience, with the madness of rapture, with the blinding of all or nothing, with the intemperance of being;" As Josep M. Muñoz notes in the prologue to the new edition of the book, if as a historian Vicens Vives had emphasized that pactism was harmful to us, as an essayist it became his own, he made it ours.
Can we be any other way? Do we want to be any other way? The three-quarters of a century since he wrote his seminal essay have seen the rebirth of an autonomous power with a bittersweet aftertaste. Once again, when we have sought to take self-government further, we have been on the verge of losing it. Once again, we have underestimated it. Will we ever achieve a sensible synthesis between the "will to be" and the exercise of power? These are not, precisely, times conducive to compromise. Polarization reigns everywhere.
And yet, at least in a historically hostile arena, finance, in the midst of a phenomenal battle, we have just experienced a success. Banco Sabadell has resisted BBVA's takeover bid. Yes: this time, power stays at home. Vicens Vives, the man who in 1958 promoted the creation of the Círculo de Economía and gave a legendary inaugural lecture on the captains of industry, would be satisfied.