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Salustiano del Campo, the sociologist who led the introduction and institutionalization of modern scientific sociology in Spain, dies at 93.
Madrid, 26 July 2024
Noticia
- Salustiano del Campo was born in February 1931 in La Línea de la Concepción, a land to which he always felt very attached.
Salustiano del Campo durante su mandato al frente del IOP
After studying law and political science in Spain, he trained as a sociologist at the University of Chicago, where he was an assistant professor. Upon his return to Spain, he presented his doctoral thesis, "The Spanish Family in Transition," which received an extraordinary award. In 1962, he won the Chair of Sociology at the University of Barcelona, and in 1967, he also won the Chair previously held by Enrique Gómez Arboleya at the Faculty of Political, Economic, and Commercial Sciences in Madrid. He headed the Department of Sociology from 1971, promoting the creation of the first Faculty of Sociology, serving as Dean from 1977 to 1980.
He was one of the founding promoters of the Institute of Public Opinion (the predecessor of the CIS), of which he was CEO of the Governing Council (since 1963) and Director from 1967 to 1971.
In 1979, he was elected to the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and from 2003 to 2010, he served as president of the Institute of Spain. He directed the UNESCO Dictionary of Social Sciences, an institution for which he chaired the Spanish Commission for Cooperation, and was also the Spanish representative on the United Nations Commission on Population.
Author of fifty books, manuals and reports on Sociology, he directed the liberal political weekly El Europeo during the last years of Franco's regime and the beginnings of the Democratic Transition, also promoting and directing various academic Sociology journals (the Journal of Social Studies, the International Journal of Sociology, the Spanish Journal of Public Opinion, Annals of Sociology, etc.).
The Department of Sociology, which he directed for three decades, was a paradigmatic example of a breeding ground institution, from which emerged not only the main impetus for the creation of the first Spanish Faculty of Sociology, but also more than twenty professors of Sociology, four ministers at different stages of Spanish political life, and a good number of senior officials and leaders of various political parties and academic institutions.
The seeds you planted will live on. Rest in peace.
