Preface; Introduction: personal networks, political strategies and the making of democracy; Part I. Personal Networks, Political Traditions and State Policies: 1. Unquiet hearts: the primitive world of the first political men; 2. The burden of hopes and hatreds: ideological traditions in clandestine circumstance; 3. Oligarchic unity and working-class divisions: a political economy of El Marco de Jerez; 4. Political clans and capitalist planning: a political economy of Francoism; Part II. Syndical Practices, Social Struggles and Political Protests: 5. The vertical syndicate: the mainstay of Franco's corporatist strategy; 6. The workers' commissions: the national picture compared with the movement in El Marco de Jerez; 7. Wage contracts, labour conflicts and political protests: the syndical practices of the labour movement; Part III. Political Practices, Repression and Strategic Responses: 8. The revolutionary paradox: the changing political line of the Spanish Communist Party; 9. A place in the struggle: personal networks and political practices in El Marco de Jerez; 10. The other side of darkness: the repressive practices of the Franco regime; 11. Contingent connections: the relationship between the workers' commissions and the Spanish Communist Party; 12. Fighting with two faces: the strategic combination of legal and clandestine spaces; Part IV. Political Strategies and the Democratic Project: 13. Democratic transformation and the transition to democracy: the political project of the labour movement, 1955–85; 14. Corporatist strategies and the transition to democracy: the institutional terrain of the struggle; 15. Personal networks and political strategies: Spanish civil society in the struggle for democracy; Bibliography; Index.

"...Professor Joe Foweraker takes an interesting and insightful, yet controversial, look at how events and events at the grassroots of society helped lay the foundation for democracy." Thomas D. Lancaster, Bulletin of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Studies