Early career

He fought in the Spanish Civil War in the Republican faction. After the war ended, he continued his studies and got a Ph.D. in Law and another in Philosophy. He held a Chair of Professor at the University of Murcia from 1948 to 1953, and at the University of Salamanca from 1953 until 1965. Afterwards, he worked as a lawyer and occasional professor at Princeton University, Bryn Mawr College and the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan.^[1]

Writer

As a writer, he authored over 30 books, and translated important works such as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In 1978 he was chosen to write the preamble to the Spanish Constitution.

Politician

He founded the Popular Socialist Party (social democrats) in 1968 and was its president until 1978, when it merged with the larger Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. In 1979 and 1982 he was one of the members of that party elected to the Congress of Deputies.^[3]

He was elected Mayor of Madrid after the polls of 3 April 1979.^[4] As a candidate from the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, he was the first leftist Mayor of Madrid after four decades of Francoist government. Reelected in 1983, he would remain in office until his death in 1986.^[1]

During his time as Mayor of Madrid, in addition to his support of the cultural changes of the Movida Madrileña, he promoted or finished many improvements to the city such as the traffic tunnels by the Atocha railway station, the development of incentives to use buses and other mass transports, the cleaning of the Manzanares river, the main market of the city (Mercamadrid) or the reorganization of the Districts of Madrid.^[5]

Death

He died in Madrid on 19 January 1986 from a cardiac arrest aged 67.^[6] He was interred at cementerio de la Almudena two days later.^[7]