Although historians have long considered that the agrarian question was probably the main cause of the Spanish Civil War, no serious study had ever tackled the problem. Now, for the first time, Edward Malefakis, professor at Columbia University in New York, confronts this issue in what is undoubtedly one of the most important contributions to the history of Spain published in the last forty years.In the first part of his book, Professor Malefakis undertakes an analysis of land ownership and the social structure of the countryside in Spain. The second part is a study of the efforts of the Republic to give land to the peasants in an attempt to satisfy the revolutionary impulses of the anarchist and socialist movements, while at the same time affirming its confidence in the basic values of bourgeois democracy.The basic objective of the present study is, therefore, to try to find out why the agrarian reform of the Second Republic failed. Given the enormous importance of the problem of the countryside for Spanish political history, Professor Malefakis' work also constitutes an examination of the origins of the civil war.