Tomás Ibáñez (Zaragoza, Spain, 1944) was smuggled from his native Spain to France by his mother in 1947 to escape the Franco regime. His schooling took place in Toulouse, Marseille and Paris. He obtained the License of Psychology at the University of Paris in 1967. He worked at the Laboratory of Social Psychology of the Sorbonne from 1968 to 1973 and returned to Spain in 1973. He obtained his doctorate in 1980 at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where he was later appointed professor of social psychology, and he taught there until his retirement in 2007. He also served as vice-rector of the same university between 1994 and 1999. He has published some thirty books and book chapters and a hundred articles, with a critical orientation towards the mainstream of the discipline. See, for example, in English, ‘Social Psychology and the Rhetoric of Truth’ (1991) in Theory and Psychology and Critical Social Psychology (SAGE, 1997).
He began his anarchist militancy in 1960 by participating in the creation of the group of Jeunes Libertaires of Marseille, then in September 1963 he moved to Paris, where he was one of the promoters of the creation of the Liaison des Étudiants Anarchistes and of the Comité de Liaison des Jeunes Anarchistes. He is at the origin of the creation of the Circle-A, proposed as a symbol of anarchism in April 1964. He was a militant simultaneously with the Anarchist Federation, the Libertarian Youth, the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth and the Anarchist Youth Group, playing an active part in the fight against the Franco dictatorship. With the participation of the militants of the Gruppi Anarchici Federati (GAF), he was one of the organisers of the first European Meeting of Young Anarchists in Paris in April 1966. He was arrested during the events of May ’68, and his condition of political refugee turned the decree of expulsion from France into house arrest outside Paris. During those years he published around twenty articles, in the Bulletin des Jeunes Libertaires, Le Monde Libertaire and Action Libertaire.
Returning to Spain in 1973, after the death of the dictator, he actively participated in the reconstruction of the CNT and the libertarian movement as well as in initiatives of a libertarian nature such as the creation of the journal Archipielago. He has participated in numerous international libertarian conferences and since 1973 has published nearly a hundred articles and twenty books and book chapters, some of which have been translated into other languages, such as, in English, Anarchism Is Movement (Freedom Press, 2019) and, in Italian, Il libero pensiero (elèuthera, 2007). He is currently a member of Réfractions in France and Libre Pensamiento in Spain.