CIS - Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas

Professor Juan Díez Nicolás, with perseverance and continuity of more than five decades, with coherence and admirable exemplarity, has demonstrated that the meaning of his life has been the social sciences. Certainly his biography shows us other important facets. But all of them revolve around his fundamental and first-time vocation: that of a student of man and society, that of a social scientist. And it is from this self-conception of a sociologist that he will play other roles, academic, political or business. Because Professor Díez Nicolás has been general director, undersecretary, university rector, businessman, and all of this with the brilliance, rigor and integrity that you all know; but without ever ceasing to be a scholar, a researcher, an analyst. His methodological training has always been present in the way of posing and facing problems, such as his particular "phonendoscope" to listen to the Spanish social and political reality, constantly formulating hypotheses to explain it.

But orchestrating in practice the complex organization that carries out research is not an easy task. And even less so if we go back to the early 60s of the previous century when Professor Díez Nicolás, upon his return from the University of Michigan, designed and launched (together with Professors Salustiano del Campo and Luis González Seara) the Institute of Public Opinion, institutional background of the current Center for Sociological Research. There you could already see, in addition to his scientific-technical preparation, his organizational creativity and research teams, his capacity for generous listening and support for the people he directed. I remember those founding times of Spanish sociological research as one of great intellectual effervescence and interdisciplinary richness. The broader political context could be authoritarian; but the intellectual climate of the Institute of Public Opinion was one of complete freedom. To a large extent this was possible thanks to that open, interpersonally welcoming disposition, which, like a good cosmopolitan, Professor Díez Nicolás already showed. Epistemological, methodological and ideological pluralism was an immediate experience in the day-to-day discussions of the research.

That same pattern of institutional creativity will become a distinctive feature of his political career. Thus, when he was appointed General Director of Social Planning, in the Ministry of Planning and Development, he designed said general direction as if it were a Faculty or Institute of Social Sciences, asking for collaboration from people of very different ideological orientation, but vocationally committed to the sciences. social.

And when in 1973 he founded and launched the National Institute of Educational Sciences, he began a series of pioneering research in the sociology of education, in which young researchers participated who would later become top specialists in this field.

Professor Díez Nicolás observes a similar mode of action when he serves as Undersecretary of the Ministry of the Environment, where, putting his training in Human Ecology into play, he will introduce innovative measures for its protection.

The constant underlying this institutional creativity is, and the conviction that social science and its discourse introduce, a principle of rationality in the direction of human affairs, including those in which acute conflicts of power and conceptions of the world occur. . Professor Díez Nicolás has experienced politics from sociological knowledge, being aware that this knowledge has an origin in the interests and values of the society that fosters it and a critical and constructive destiny of that same society. And if the idea of a "pure" social science is already an extemporaneous idea, its practical dimension should be expressly assumed. This is not only an epistemological question; It affects the very sense of professional identity of social scientists. At this point, once again, the career of Professor Díez Nicolás reveals to us in advance key aspects of the relationships of the social scientist with his own society and his role in it.

A unique project, expressive of the generosity of Professor Díez Nicolás, is having promoted and assumed the direction of 60 studies of national scope, whose data files, ready for analysis, he makes freely available to his colleagues to serve as a basis. empirical evidence of their research. No less than 60 surveys with different monographic topics, from national identity to moral development, youth, etc. A large number of publications refer to the use of these data, which reveals the impact that this project has had on the development of empirical-quantitative research in Spain, and also abroad.

But this is a small part, limited to a few years, of the hundreds of studies that Professor Díez Nicolás has directed and carried out throughout his professional career. In reality, he has never stopped being in charge of a Sociological Research Institute, public or private. in a permanent process of auscultation and analysis of the Spanish social reality. All this mass of information, systematically programmed and structured, has allowed him to develop not only a broad and at the same time precise knowledge of Spanish society, but also that depth and clarity of vision of what needs to be done that we call wisdom, "phronesis." Aristotelian (prudence). Which is not the nomological-deductivist explanation, but the founded and concrete analysis of concrete reality.

I know the intellectual career and university commitment of our professor since the early sixties, and I can attest that his vocation is the University, making a country by doing a University.

We are faced with an all-terrain sociologist, who moves safely and effectively through different subfields of Sociology, from demography and human ecology, through political sociology, cultural sociology or social psychology.

His extensive and extensive written work, in national and international publications, shows us this variety of topics, almost always focused on the empirical basis of his research. In recent decades, the issue to which he has devoted himself most intensely has been the study of values, playing a central role, together with Professor Ronald Inglehardt, in one of the lines of comparative research with the greatest international prestige and impact," The world study of values.

With his history of persevering, innovative work, open to cooperating and sharing, Professor Díez Nicolás has been laying the necessary foundations for the development of Spanish sociology and thus placing it at the level of his time.