According to its own author, narrativity the new synthesis (originally published in 1986) was the book with which he inaugurated his departure from the strictly academic format. Since then Manuel Cruz has been a public philosopher. along with fernando savater he may be one of the spanish philosophers who most?public use of reason? he exercises. However, this illustrated imprint does not make him a man alien to his present. quite the opposite. his philosophy requires him to think without turning his back on contemporaneity. Its plain writing does not remove any complexity from the problems it raises, while it sheds important light on us to unravel what is real and to shake off the pure sensation of perplexity in the face of a "complex world". It would be unfair to place this book under the philosophy of history label, not only because at this point it lends itself to misunderstandings, but because the problems that cross here raises go far beyond the search for some rationality of the event or the nature of knowledge of that same event. the problems fold to the same subject. It is not an easy question if one thinks that at the time the structuralist approaches made this an impossible category. A text, any text, has to be measured with reality, not with our prejudices regarding it. Going to what is of interest here, can a book like the one that follows, written before the Berlin Wall fell, a time of global terrorism began, migratory processes increase exponentially, or the first great economic crisis of the era of globalization (to point out just a few milestones in recent history) be useful to understand what is happening now? the best thing will be to invite the reader to pass into the interior of the book. perhaps the exercise holds some surprise. Like verifying that the world we inhabit continues, in the face of so many interested proclamations, looking very similar to the world we inherited? With these questions and provocations, the philosopher stresses the reading of a new edition of what he, in private, acknowledges to be his most beloved work.