Félix Aguirre visiting researcher at U. Complutense de Madrid
24/10/2024Félix Aguirre has been invited to be a visiting researcher at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid
The CIESAL researcher’s study links his social science background with public health policy design
CIESAL researcher Félix Aguirre has been invited to be a visiting professor at the Department of History, Political Theory and Geography within the Complutense University de Madrid’s Faculty of Political Science and Sociology. The period of research will run from December 2024 to February 2025, during which Aguirre will focus on writing an article on Fabian Socialism which he hopes to submit to a mainstream journal by the end of the first half of 2025.
The so-called Fabian socialists shaped a very peculiar and eclectic version of social democracy, which emerged in London in 1884, when the first Fabian Society was formed, an initiative that ended up being decisive in understanding British political culture, both academically – they created the now prestigious London School of Economics – and politically, as they were crucial in the founding of the British Labour Party that currently governs the United Kingdom.
Professor Aguirre’s relationship with Fabianism is long-standing and dates back to his doctoral research in the mid-1990s. Since then, the researcher has been investigating the intellectual foundations that made possible the emergence of a clearly liberal, individualist and gradualist-inspired version of socialism, in terms of how they conceived ideology, anthropology and governance. The work that now takes him to Spain will result in his fourth publication, following several articles he has authored that have appeared in various mainstream journals between 2017 and 2021.
The current relevance of Fabianism is due to the fact that the Fabians were pioneers in the design of the first ‘welfare’ policies that years later would prove key to the recovery and take-off of the European economy after the Second World War, and to the fact that this tradition is now recognised as an early version of what we now understand as care policy, an issue that we are now trying to incorporate as part of the so-called ‘fourth generation rights’ and which opens up a very interesting debate in the design of good public health policy, which in turn is one of the central concerns of CIESAL.
The project will be funded by CIESAL, through an annual grant available to its researchers, and a small fund awarded by the Faculty of Social Sciences of the UV, where Aguirre is a tenured professor.