Historia personal de una desmesura: los “foessas”

Abstract

This was a very ambitious sociological investigation. In those days it was very influential because it marked a new style to make empirical sociology. It was made by an independent team without any link with other institutions. Practically all the collaborators of the team in 1970 were students and, a generation later, many had become Sociology professors. The method integrated, for the first time in Spain (with only the antecedent of the first FOESSA, in 1966), survey data with the so-called “secondary data” (statistics, documents, etc.). The line of research was very descriptive. Perhaps it could not be another form, considering the lack of basic studies on Spanish social structure. Survey analysis was accomplished with computer (then personal computers did not exist) and the statistical one with a table calculator, that today could be a museum piece. The work system was very intensive, with an uncommon dedication. Each chapter had several versions, which supposed a considerable effort. Remember that the typewriter had not been surpassed yet. A new aspect of this investigation was that it went beyond the academic world, to a diverse public in which there were High School teachers, students in their training period to become civil servants or journalists, among other groups. An unexpected event surrounded by a certain golden respectability the work of the investigators. Chapter 5 (Political Life) was taken by the censorship off the printed volume. The volume was distributed with that mutilated form. Years later a part of that chapter was translated into English and included in a volume compiled by Stanley Payne. The news of the censorship of chapter 5 caused that numerous copies of the original one circulated. In 2000 I published the chapter as appendix in my book The end of Francoism. Personal testimony. One of the central hypotheses of the study was that the intense economic changes of the sixties were going to bring a necessary political alteration in the direction of a democracy. Thus it was.