The name was coined by José Martínez Ruiz (commonly known as "Azorín") in his 1913 essays titled "La generación de 1898", alluding to the moral, political, and social crisis in Spain produced by the loss of the colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam after defeat in the Spanish–American War that same year.
This "crackdown" was a response to various attempts, notably but not exclusively by the intellectual elite listed below, to introduce some form of liberal democracy both in Spanish academic life and in the wider society.
Several progressive professors were dismissed from the Central University of Madrid for promoting the ideas of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832), a German philosopher who advocated Krausism.
Their work constituted an indirect repudiation of the official instruction of the time, which they had found ineffective, insufficient, and subject to suffocating control by political and religious interests.
The criticism of the "Generation of '98" today from modern intellectuals is that the group was characterized by an increase of egoism, and by a great feeling of frustration with Spanish society and politics.