Although the following essay was written in the final months of 1987, the concems reflected in it started to be mulled over in my mind some twenty years ago. The student protest movement has as its spatial reference the city of París, and as its temporal reference the month of May, 1968. Yet these protest movements were not restricted to France, ñor did they peter out during that Spring of 1968. It was an intemational movement which in Spain -given our particular political circumstances- began in 1965 and did not come to an end until the seventies were well underway.