En torno a la “Historia del movimiento obrero en España”: el compromiso de Manuel Tuñón de Lara con la historia

Abstract

The “working classes” were, and would remain, the most worrying “space” of the reiterated “social sensitivity” of professor Tuñón de Lara. The analysis of the current reality, faced with new technologies, the factor par excellence of the “scientific-technical revolution”, necessarily should meet and focus on the new conflicts that are made explicit. It should be take into account not so much “class struggle” but “social exclusion” which is more serious than the one usually subjugated in the form of unemployment, poverty or status and environmental marginality, much more dangerous when preying on younger generation. Social changes, attached to the economical and political changes after the seventies, continued to be the new concern and the new incentive for Manuel Tuñón de Lara in the years leading up to his death. His diagnosis is similar to the one that, twenty years later, his friend, the historian Eric Hobsbawm –restless and surprised after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of real socialism– offered as a synthesis and as a counterpoint to his constant and well elaborated optimism.