José Nun (1934 – 2021)

Verónica Schild, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Western Ontario

José Nun, distinguished Argentine critical scholar, public intellectual, and charismatic teacher who joined the Department of Political Economy in 1970, died in Buenos Aires on February 25, 2021. Known by his nickname “Pepe” to colleagues and students, he was recruited from Argentina for a one-year stint in 1970 and stayed on as Full Professor under terms that allowed him to return regularly to Latin America until his early retirement and definitive return home in 1993.

Pepe was a larger-than-life figure. Son of Jewish (Lithuanian-Russian) immigrant parents, he completed a Law degree (with distinction) at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (1961), and a diploma in economic development (1962). He then went on to study in Paris. Though officially enrolled at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, where he obtained a Diplome Superieur in 1964 for work on military coups in Latin America, he gravitated to the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes and to sociologist Alain Touraine. His collaboration with David Apter’s project on Latin American modernization at the Institute of International Studies, Berkeley (1964-1966) offered an opportunity to articulate his own distinctive analysis grounded in the specificities of the Latin American historical context, not in the abstract modeling of dominant US-based modernization theories.

In Argentina, Pepe authored and co-authored books that often expanded on his early classic articles still relevant 40 years on; among them, La transición democrática en Argentina (1987), La rebelión del coro (1989), Marginalidad y exclusion social (2001), Democracia: ¿gobierno del pueblo o gobierno de los políticos? (2010, revised 2015), and La política y la democracia en clave argentina (2020). He founded and directed the Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales, Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), and was Senior Researcher at CONICET (1985-2003). As Minister of Culture during the Kirchner government (2004-2009), he initiated Libros y Casas, a program that gifted small libraries to beneficiary families of Argentina’s Federal Housing Plans. Café, Cultura, Nación, a funded cultural initiative, promoted dialogue between intellectuals, artists, and journalists with local residents in bars and cafés in different provinces, as did Casa Nacional del Bicentenario, a museum and cultural centre. They all reflected Pepe’s vision of the democratic potential of culture as an everyday dialogical process.

Pepe’s epistemological grounding crystalized a creative synthesis of insights from Marx and Antonio Gramsci, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and the phenomenology of Alfred Schütz. To use his favourite expression, “this lens” enabled one to capture the specificities of Latin American politics. For those of us who had also been forced to leave our homelands, and who had followed a similar interdisciplinary intellectual path into the study of Latin American politics, his intellectual and ethical-political commitments offered not only a framing, but also a road map to make our way into the often brutal and painful realities of our own home countries. He taught with passion and conviction, dipping into that vast reservoir of anecdotes and experiences which we discovered made him a major protagonist of what would be regarded as the golden moment of an autonomous Latin American social science.

Photo provided by: Ricardo Daniel Rey, Télam