Manuel Sacristán

Manuel Sacristán Luzón (born Madrid, 1925, died Barcelona, 1985) was a Spanish philosopher and writer.

Sacristán, the son of a Francoist collaborator, moved to Barcelona in 1940, thereafter living most of his life in said city. He soon became a member of the Falange Española youth section and studied Law and Philosophy in the University of Barcelona, where he became a member of the cultural section of the Sindicato Español Universitario (the Falangist student union). After a thwarted contact with a clandestine Anarchist group, he and two fellow Falangists were shunned and persecuted by the mainstream SEU officials, resulting in the suicide of one of them and an ultimately ineffectual death warrant on Sacristán.

He subsequently moved to Münster, in Westphalia (German Federal Republic) in order to study Mathematical Logic and the Philosophy of Science (1954–1956). He became not only an excellent logician, but also a convinced reflective Marxist thinker and communist leader. Again in Barcelona, he taught in the Faculties of Philosophy and Economics of the University of Barcelona.

His academic career was fraught with difficulties. His political activity led him to the direction of the underground Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) and he had a leading role in the Catalan university movement. Due to his Marxist ideas, by which he was very influenced after his stay in Germany and which he introduced to Spain, he was expelled from the University in 1965. In 1966 he participated in the formation of the Barcelona Democratic Students’ Union. It was not until after Franco’s death with the restoration of democracy that he was again admitted. After having had to bear a bitter and humiliating period he was appointed professor of Methodology of Social Sciences at the University of Barcelona. During the academic year 1982-1983 he taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. It was in Mexico that he met Mª Ángeles Lizón, from whom he never parted until his death.

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