Republican Commitment and International Denunciation of Franco's Dictatorship. Luis Jiménez de Asúa and Argentina, between Restitution and Expatriation

Abstract

Luis Jiménez de Asúa is a unique intellectual personality of exile in whom the ideas and qualities of the Spain that expelled him and the Argentina that took him in were fused. A leading protagonist of the Second Spanish Republic, the reflection of the American nation with Hispanic roots whose institutional system oscillated from democratic and liberal to authoritarian, he operated in a penetrating way in his own impulse to react against dictatorial forms and to political action, within socialism, as well as in a sustained feedback of that discourse in university circles and in exile. That connection between Spanish and Argentinean characteristics radiated and mutually fertilised each other from the 1920s until his death in 1970, Jiménez de Asúa being a persistent transmitter of republican values. The search for paths and affordable alternatives for Ibero-America was both a way of returning to identities that could be shared, and a delay of possibilities, which did not frustrate him, and to this he devoted his public life, largely through principles and political and social norms of Law, clinging to testimonial preaching.