Abstract
Zambrano's early works are situated in the intellectual milieu in Madrid between the wars. In this chapter it is shown how her early ideas of social subjectivity are connected to her political engagement with the Second Republic and in the Civil War. It is argued that her aim was to find a new kind of social subject that would include different groups in society, while not excluding the possibility of individuality. Her early elaborations on subjectivity were informed by the ideas of a necessary dependency on material and economic circumstances that was discussed by among others Antonio Machado and José Ortega y Gasset. Her own contribution to the debate was the idea of a new materialism, developed in direct relation to the Spanish Civil War and its radicalized poetry.