A new essay on Alexandre Deulofeu re-claims the scientific method of his predictions.

Enric Pujol co-ordinated the essays published together in a book on the theory of the mathematics of history published by Brau Edicions.

Alexandre Deulofeu is still a little known historian.

Eva Vázquez. Figueres.
While the terrific full works of historian Alexandre Deulofeu (Armentera, 1903 — Figueres, 1978) are being rescued, which were mostly self-published in the fifties, Brau Edicions has just published a critical survey on the predictive theories of the man who was a chemist and mayor at Figueres. The book has been systematized by another historian, Enric Pujol, and it contains contributions by Jordi Casassas, Francesc Roca and Juli Gutièrrez Deulofeu, the grand-son of the peculiar theoretician of the mathematics of history. The goal of this work is to appraise a scholar who was «all but vulgar and had a huge resourcefulness», according to Pujol, and to save the exact political predictions he obtained through his method from the anonymity, the scholarly world is today reducing them to.

The same as Francesc Pujols, Jaume Miravitlles or Marià Rubió i Tudurí, Alexandre Deulofeu belongs to the group of researchers who constitute the invisible college: people who, away from the regular schools, meditated in a worthwhile way on the long-lasting historical phenomena, and worked out, in the particular case of Deulofeu, risky prophetic lucubrations which Time has finally confirmed, even if such a feverish dedication, and so much sharpening of his predictions have not worked to have his task known or even accepted.

This is one of the evaluations which Francesc Roca, professor of economical policy at the University of Barcelona (UB), explains in his essay in La Matemàtica de la història. The cyclic theory of Alexandre Deulofeu (Brau Edicions), which increases the bibliography that in the latest years has been dedicated to recover the ideas of this historian from Empordà, starting with the miscellany published by the Institut d’Estudis Empordanesos on the occasion of the author’s centennial in 2003, and after that the compendium on his main theory, which was published that same year by Llibres de l’Índex, written by his grand-son, Juli Gutièrrez, an indefatigable broadcaster of the ideas of that chemist, who, as the story goes, did not read the newspapers because the calculations of his theory allowed him to know in advance the news which came in the papers.

Even if this new book on Deulofeu’s theories springs from an inevitably vindictive claim, Enric Pujol, co-ordinator of the book and author of one of the essays, explains that he has been guided mainly by a will to submit an unprejudiced review, untempted neither by apology nor by restraint. The idea is to establish Deulofeu’s thinking in the Catalonia and Europe of his time, singled out by wars and the conflict between capitalism and communism, and to point out this theoretical connection. This was clearly in line with the postulates of Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. The similarity between Deulofeu’s thought and that of these other formulators of the cyclic character, and therefore predictable, of history, make up the main part of Enric Pujol’s essay. Jordi Casassas, professor of contemporary history at the UB, on the contrary, examines the political and cultural framework in which the scholar from Empordà developed his work. Francesc Roca, on the other hand, reassesses his predictions, such as the ones concerning the re-unification of Germany, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, or the Asian drive, without giving up the critical analysis of his method. Finally, Juli Gutièrrez projects his grandfather’s theses up to the present time and, especially, up to the prediction that 2029 will be the end of the trusteeship of the Spanish state over Catalonia.