Luis Núñez Ladevéze

Professional career

He began his professional career as a Civil Law (common law) professor at Complutense University in Antonio Hernández Gil’s department, who was the supervisor of his doctoral thesis in law. He was also Director of the Spanish Parliamentary Communication Cabinet during the presidency of Hernández Gil. In 1977, he obtained the position of Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Journalism in the Autónoma University of Barcelona. In 1978, he finally moved to the Complutense University of Madrid as Senior Professor, where has been Head of the Department of Journalism and Deputy Dean at the Faculty of Information Sciences and Communication.

Luis Núñez Ladevéze has worked as a journalist in different media in Madrid, both television and press: Director of the Investigation Department of RTVE, founder and first editor-in-chief and opinion editor of “Nuevo Diario” and “Diario 16”, editor of the “ABC” newspaper, Executive Director of “Ya” newspaper, where he was in charge of the editorial and Collaborations sections, he was a collaborator-journalist in the literary review section of “Informaciones” and “El País” newspapers.

He collaborated in the opinion-editorial pages of “El Mundo”, “ABC”, “Expansión” and “Gaceta de los Negocios” newspapers. In the latter, he wrote political opinion articles, and theatre and literary reviews. He directed “Doxa” magazine and, at present, is the Chairman of its Editorial Board where he presides over the Editorial Board Communication and is counsellor of a number of Social Science Magazines.

He founded and is Honorary President of the Children and Communication Association (Asociación Infancia y Comunicación, in Spanish), specialised in vulnerable members of the public and new technologies. Its objective is to become a meeting point for researchers to investigate further on the role that media is playing in children’s lives.

Essay

Professor Núñez Ladevéze, in his philosophy essays, has specified the typical hallmarks of secular era democracies. If, in a formal sense, democracy is a procedure to choose and revoke periodically the ruler in a system of liberties, in the 21st century democratic societies confront new situations caused especially by the flows of migrants.

New coexistence conflicts arise because of the settlement of ethnic groups and religious or cultural traditions that are alien or unfamiliar with democratic postulates. The host societies in the global village become multicultural. Frequently, the customs and normative substrates of the supervening identities are not compatible with respect for a person's substantive liberties. When organizing, the newcomer groups, instead of being integrated, are transformed into segregated communities that test or even openly reject the constituent foundations of the democracies which host them.

The convergence of different cultures and ethnic groups in the same society is not a new phenomenon in itself. What is new is the pretension of preserving the identity. In almost all the cases, the cause of conflict is in the rejection of equality and the principles of liberty established in the legal system of the host societies. Principles that presuppose that all political or normative power derives from each person's self-sovereignty, i.e., over your own body and ownership of property regulated on this assumption. There exists the possibility that the disagreements will increase as these communities consolidate within democratic societies whose legal systems are, in some way, incompatible with that identity which tries to be asserted without adapting.

The underlying problem posed by the pretention of preserving identity in democratic constitutions cannot be addressed only through the application of the legal system. What characterizes these legal systems is the liberal principle of respect for identities. For that reason, it would be necessary to modify all those legal dispositions which could result as being disrespectful for immigrants. However, the collision between identities can only be resolved in terms of identity. Analysing the notion of "tolerance", the professor and journalist argues that, in its origin, democracy was not only a procedure for the election of representatives for the government of people, but also an instrument of conflict resolution between related religious identities, derived from a common trunk base.

At the present time, there are now no affinities. Tolerance has to be arbitrated amongst heterogeneous identities, which conceive their religion as a source of law and principle of political legitimation. The reasoning has the goal to demonstrate that the assumptions of liberal constitutions must configure a peculiar kind of specific identity, that professor Ladevéze denominates "democratic identity". Their function is to act as a neutral arbitrator to resolve identity conflicts. The sublayer of democratic identity has to be specific, coherent with the principles of human equality and personal autonomy. Democratic identity is a regulative and arbitral postulate for a multicultural coexistence amongst identities that may be exclusionary. It has to be founded in reciprocal respect, derived from the recognition of each person's moral and political autonomy. It is an assumption that comes from the necessity of establishing a peaceful coexistence amongst diverse and, sometimes, incommensurable identities.

Novel

In 2005, Professor Nuñez Ladavéze published his novel "el impetú del viento" in the publisher Apóstrofe that, according to the critic Pilar Castro in ElCultural.com, is "a project fed with the aim to give a narrative solution to the speculative knowledge about a time of which we are debtors. There is an effort of enormous magnitude to add to the experience of the journalist, professor and author of a long list of non-fiction titles, the one of an author of a novel -historical, legendary?- which unfolds the actions that drove thought and social world in the second half of the 15th century. Such a laudable voyage grows under an amalgam of knowledge seeking to expand the meaning of entanglement and adventure, illustrating -with all of the rigor- the foundations of humanistic culture. Its argument chooses Lisbon as a scenario that took in the nobility, the clergy and the new trade guilds. As protagonists, a ship-owner, certain Count lovers of arts and sciences and a young man, heir of the knowledge and instructions of an enigmatic abbot, librarian of the Counts' palace in whose halls are gathered the cream of Lisbon society."

Ten years afterwards, Luis Núñez Ladevéze published in Amazon "Sphera Nostra. En el confín del océano, la Atlántida perdida" a new version of the novel, revised and with the text adjusted to a narrative adapted to a digital format.

Prizes and Awards • Marco Polo Award (Premio Marco Polo FIJET, 2014)