José María Maravall (1942) served as Minister of Education and Science in the first two governments of Felipe González (1982-1988). If Ernest Lluch, in the first executive, approved the General Health Law, the Madrid sociologist laid the foundations for educational transformation with laws such as the right to education, university reform or science. Without these two names, the democratization of Spain after the recovery of democracy cannot be understood.
On the occasion of its eightieth anniversary, the former secretary of organization of the PSOE and MEP, César Luena (1980), and Juan Carlos Sánchez Illán (1969), professor of Journalism at the Carlos III University of Madrid and author of the excellent Prensa y política en la Contemporary Spain (Tecnos, 2022) dedicate a tribute biography to him, as they clarify. The reader will not find any criticism in the volume, with a prologue by Maravall. Sometimes the explanation of the same anecdote is repeated, which weighs down the rhythm.
The book by Jordi Gracia, Javier Pradera or the power of the left (2019) is also cited too much, to the point of giving the impression that the volume has been written in tow and detracting from the work itself, especially the thirty interviews. Except for Felipe González, who has made it a tradition not to participate in the volumes dedicated to his former collaborators.
This, however, does not make it less interesting. The book goes to the point and comprises three major stages. In the first we find a Maravall in training in Paris, Madrid and Oxford. Son of the historian José Antonio Maravall, a disciple of José Ortega y Gasset, the progression of the biography until the end of the seventies shows the ease with which the sons of a certain position obtained scholarships and contacts that allowed them to navigate academic positions abroad that were forbidden to most. The laborious career of Lluch, son of a family of craftsmen, serves as a counterpoint.
In the second block, Maravall returns to Spain, lives an epiphany when he sees Felipe lecture and establishes contacts with other young academics with a political zeal such as Javier Solana. The sociologist, a felipist from the first hour, before the PSOE won the Moncloa, he already knew that he would occupy a portfolio. When he came to Education, his politics contributed to others, through meritocracy, having the same opportunities as him. He fought with the right, the Church and the lobbies that resisted a more universal, less private and more secular educational system. He won his particular tour de force and started the second legislature, but did not finish it. Like Lluch, he assumed that the minister who approves a major law is so burnt out that he can rarely apply it. The hundred long pages on this six-year term are unavoidable reading.
Next comes the pearl. Through the correspondence from the archive of the González Foundation, the role of Maravall in the making of policy in those first two governments is explained. Speech maker, electoral debate adviser, promoter of manifestos in support of the president, plumber for the renovation of the PSOE against the guerrilla sector, an essential contributor to the modernization and social democratic adaptation of the party and government positions. Also minister Enrique Barón coined for him the characterization of “court advisor to the president.”
The volume closes with a block dedicated to the return of the sociologist to the university, having rejected the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Presidency, to leave another relevant legacy as an academic, but never moving away from politics. Professor of Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón, Maravall is one of the voices of the old guard of the PSOE that has publicly supported Pedro Sánchez. In that he has little to do with his former adviser.
C. Luena López and J.C. Sánchez Illán. The strength of social democracy. José María Maravall, biography of a reformist politician and intellectual. Tirant lo Blanch. 298 pages €23.75
