José Luis Sampedro

José Luis Sampedro Sáez ( born 1 February 1917 in Barcelona, Spain, † April 8, 2013 in Madrid) was a Spanish economist, humanist and writer.

Life

José Luis Sampedro Sáez was born in 1917 in Barcelona and grew up in Tangier, Morocco. In 1936 he was recruited by the Republican Army of the Spanish Civil War. During the war he was stationed with his battalion in Melilla, Catalonia, Guadalajara and Huete, Cuenca province. After training as a customs officer in Santander, he moved to Madrid where he studied economics and 1947 with honors. Subsequently, he received a job at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria.

From 1955 he became a professor of economic structure at the Complutense University of Madrid, which he held until 1969. During this time he was also a visiting professor at universities in Salford and Liverpool and was co-founder of the Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones. At times he lived outside of Spain and returned only in 1976 back again. He worked as a business consultant and was Senator from 1977 to 1979 in the first democratically elected Spanish Parliament (specifically, in the Senado (about: House of Lords) ).

Already parallel to its economic life Sampedro published several novels and stories. Since his retirement, he only focused writing to it. He had great success with Octubre, octubre, La sonrisa etrusca and La vieja sirena in the late 1980s. Died in 1986, his wife Isabel Pellicer, with whom he had been married since 1944. In 1990 he became a member of the Real Academia Española.

As a humanist, he often criticized the social and moral decay of Western society, neoliberalism and the dark side of capitalism. For the Spanish edition of the essay outrage! Frenchman Stéphane Hessel (1917 - 2013) wrote the foreword Sampedro. In an interview with the Sunday newspaper Sampedro criticized capitalism in Europe and compared it with the end of the Roman Empire:

"At that time it was the barbarians who invaded the Roman Empire and hollowed it from the inside and ultimately brought down. It was a smooth transition. And today we see again a time of transition from a capitalist society to a technological. There is in science a word for it: entropy. Slightly increases until it collapses at the own weight. "

In Germany have been published with The Etruscan Smile (1989) and The river that carries us (1993 ) from the publisher Herder and The Song of the Siren (2005) when Goldmann Verlag three of his works.

Many media paid tribute to the deceased in obituaries.

Works

Reference Books

Novels

• The Etruscan Smile, Verlag Herder (1989 ), 334 pages, ISBN 3-451-21345-1

• The song of the siren, Goldmann Verlag ( 2005), 729 pages, ISBN 3-442-45768-8

Stories

Other works

• 2005: it Escribir vivir ( autobiography, together with Olga Lucas)
• 2008: La ciencia y la vida ( interview with the cardiologist Valentín Fuster, edited by Olga Lucas)
• 2011: Reacciona