It is very different when someone who has experienced it firsthand talks to you about immigration than someone who has not. That is why I wanted to read the essay Class boundaries (Anagrama, 2025), by the Albanian political scientist Lea Ypi, professor at the London School of Economics, author of the now famous book Free. She was able to leave her country under very difficult circumstances, when they were supposed to be free and everything was collapsing after the late fall of communism. From the sidelines, it is easy to theorize and pontificate: only let the legal ones in, hire at the source, return them while still hot... Has anyone seen the 2023 movie Me Captain, by Matteo Garrone?It narrates the dramatic journey of Seydou and Moussa, two 16-year-old Senegalese cousins who leave their hometown, Dakar, to try to reach Italy. It is based on true stories. Pope Francis, impressed, received the two actors who starred in it at the Vatican.

"We don't learn the lessons of history because we don't know what questions to ask." Lea Ypi was in Barcelona this week. I could introduce her as an Albanian intellectual with British citizenship, as a philosopher, as a professor at the London School of Economics, as the author of books such as Books and IndignityIn short, the things their CVs say. But I prefer to emphasize the reasons why her work captivates me: her way of being in the world, the need to give voice to ideas but also to life, to the human condition and its complexity.

Our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers had the subversive dignity to assert their personalities against all odds, to resist being conditioned by men (fathers, husbands, sons), family, social class, race, religion, or nation to the point of determining who they were, of overriding their essence. After Freedom, an essay turned into a surprising autobiography, Lea Ypi (Tirana, 1979), Albanian political scientist from the London School of Economics, now publishes Indignity (Ángulo Editorial and Anagrama), a painful quest into the life of her grandmother, Leman Ypi.

1. The evaporation of social democracy. Bad reason when things are not called by their name. And certainly social democracy, which had played a key role in the balance of European democracies, has been fading, dragged down by the conservative radicalization of liberal democracies. Lea Ipy (Tirana, 1979), professor at the London School of Economics, has long warned of this mutation of European socialist parties and the left in general. In her opinion, it was in the late 1970s that "the traditional social democratic parties moved away from representing citizens from the perspective of class and economic vulnerabilities." And yet, it was by this route that the Spanish socialists came to power (1982), combining ideological mutation with the democratic legitimacy that the Spanish right, partly emerging from Franco's regime, was barely seeking.