With De physis a polis (1975) he went back to Pre-Socratic thinkers, while at the same time he played a leading role in the emergence of the island of Ibiza as a countercultural focus in Spain at the end of Francoism and the democratic awakening, by founding the disco Amnesia (1976).

The same that for his followers means independence of criteria or the cultivation of free thought, is considered intellectual impertinence by his detractors, and has sometimes caused the rejection of certain academic circles that have accused him of professional intrusion, for example, after the publication of the Epistemological manifesto appeared as Chaos y Orden, Premio Espasa de Ensayo in 1999.

[12] The son of the former (and grandfather of Escohotado), also named Vicente, was one of the first scholarship holders of the town to study law,[13] and when he had already published an extensive history of theater in verse, La teatrada (1925),[14] along with several books of planhs and songs, he went from being a solicitor to mayor of El Escorial.

[16] He was head of Dionisio Ridruejo's secretariat during his time as director general of Propaganda, directed Radio Nacional from 1941, won the main journalistic awards (including the Mariano de Cavia prize) and was press attaché in Brazil from 1946 to 1956.

However, the intellectual status quo of the Faculty of Philosophy led him to disappointment and, consequently, he followed the advice of his father Román to study a career with more professional opportunities:[19] Despite having spent a good part of the two summers in holding cells, required by the university militias, because "he had turned the tent into a seminar of Marxism and disobedience",[20] his lack of military spirit did not prevent him from taking steps to enlist with the Vietcong[21] in their war against the United States.

He then decided to prepare for competitive examinations compatible with leftist commitment —which excluded those of Diplomat, a career to which he seemed to be naturally inclined due to his father's example and his training in languages and general culture— and finally joined the Official Credit Institute (Spanish: ICO) in 1964 to manage the service of Fusión y Concentración de Empresas during five years of economic prosperity.

He then began to publish, in addition to giving practical classes or seminars in the faculties of Politics and Philosophy, where he developed a relationship with colleagues such as Carlos Moya, Eugenio Trías Sagnier and Felipe Martínez Marzoa, and discovered somewhat younger authors such as Savater, Azúa and Echeverría.

United in one way or another by the world that May '68 and Woodstock heralded,[22] also a breeding ground for anarchistic nuclei such as that of Agustín García Calvo, they all formed part of an improvised "tribe" whose reasonable sector continued with their studies, while a more radicalized wing rediscovered terrorism, and others like Escohotado decided to lead a life far removed from consumerism, embracing in passing what came to be called "the sexual revolution of the 1970s".

[19] With the same blueprint he wrote his doctoral thesis, The Moral Philosophy of the Young Hegel, which, presented in 1970, annoyed part of a tribunal that received it as an "apology on Marx's mentor, a Protestant on top of that", provoking on several occasions the absence of the quorum required to grade the work.

Essay on the philosophy of religion of Hegel (Revista de Occidente, 1972)—, the small academic uproar was followed by the inclusion of the work in the Index of heretical texts, at the same time that it won the New Criticism prize, a short-lived award.

[19] Academic obstacles made the later Marcuse, utopia y razón (Alianza Editorial, 1968), a book focused on examining the compatibility of Marx with Hegel and Freud proposed by one of the founders of the Frankfurt School, whose synthesis was very attractive for that precise moment, appear earlier.

In those days, Ibiza offered peasant houses (Spanish: casas payesas) designed in accordance to ancestral techniques, without electricity or running water but very cheap, which their new inhabitants turned into a sort of monastery, as devoted to the collective life and orgiastic traditions as those of the Middle Ages.

But it includes parallel analyses on Mesopotamian ritual prostitution —which commanded virgins to remain on the temple steps and give themselves to the first man who put a coin in their hand—, or the conflict between decency and freedom imposed on Roman women, since only those registered as harlots enjoyed the status of adults; the rest were considered minors under the tutelage of a male, from the cradle to the grave.

The founding of Amnesia provoked only the first frictions with the local police, which would culminate in 1983 with his prosecution for involvement in cocaine trafficking, accused of directing "the hippy mafia" from the cover offered by his status as a writer and teacher —Escohotado had re-entered the National University of Distance Education (UNED) as a part-time assistant in 1980—.

[42] After analyzing different manifestations of each, Escohotado comes to the conclusion that condemning voluntarily requested services between adults, or publicly expressing forbidden thoughts create crimes of only supposed victim, where the offense does not fall on someone of flesh and blood, but on some auctoritas of religious origin that declares itself an offended party even though it has not participated in the incident.

Betting, in his own words, on "the pharmacological enlightenment, which presents this field as one more object of knowledge, where the quintessence of danger is concentrated in ignorance", Escohotado composed a chronicle aimed at meticulously documenting the matter:[19]He lists many examples: wine terrified Greco-Roman civilization, which led to severe prohibitions against its consumption; drinking coffee was punished with mutilation and hanging in Russia and Egypt, as was tobacco in Persia; Paraguayan mate was rejected by the Vatican as a satanic vehicle....

Perhaps the most outstanding general concept of the work appears in the first chapter —"Magic, pharmacy and religion"—, when the author draws conclusions from the analogy between phármakos, ("drug") and pharmakós ("scapegoat")— Greek terms coming from the Indo-European pharmak-, proposing two divergent modalities of the sacrifice, core of all the rites instituted to purge guilt.

His first essay is dedicated to the anonymous Victorian My Secret Life —years earlier Escohotado had translated and prefaced[51] an abridged edition in two volumes of the twelve published at the time—, according to Jaime Gil de Biedma "the most extensive and prolix report ever written on the erotic experience of a human being of the male sex".

Escohotado takes up issues dealt with in Whores and Wives, such as the many ways of experiencing carnal love, passions such as domination, lust, or jealousy, and equates human institutions such as marriage and prostitution, even though the former is sanctioned by laws and morals, and the latter is pushed into the shadows of the clandestine, maintaining the thesis that the one is fundamental for the other and vice versa.

Escohotado returned to research in the strong sense of the term with Chaos and Order (Espasa, 1999), when he discovered that Mandelbrot's fractal geometry was an alternative to Euclid's idealization, and Prigogine's dissipative structures a restatement of the second principle of thermodynamics.

It also allowed him to confirm the inadequacy of determinism, one of the oldest intuitions:[53] That neither the Nobel Prize in Chemistry received by Prigogine, nor the Fields Medal —its equivalent in mathematics— not awarded to Mandelbrot, have prevented their absence from Spanish curricula —where they continue to be systematically ignored not only by high school students, but also by those taking doctorates in the exact sciences, Engineering, Physics or Chemistry—, led Escohotado to affirm:[54] Chaos and Order criticizes this "guild infallibilism" from different perspectives, arguing that we are beginning to glimpse reality, after centuries of trying to adapt it to the ideal of some theological or atheistic faith, precisely thanks to the understanding of phenomena of self-organization.

The dogmatist tries to do so by reducing, abstracting, or forgetting what is convenient in each case, but according to Escohotado this implies opting for the vicious circle to the detriment of the virtuous one —using Wiener's expression in his Cybernetics—, "by disregarding the signals of the medium as the clock does, sensitive only to its winding, in contrast to a permanently fed thermostat".

Dazzled by the discovery of the figure of Carl Menger, father of marginal utility, he concentrated on studying economic theory and history, "as an incantation not to lose his own self-esteem entirely", and wrote a hybrid between a diary, working notes on the Austrian School, and research tourism, published as Sesenta semanas en el trópico (Sixty Weeks in the Tropics) (Anagrama, 2003).

"[65] However, the first thing he discovered in studying the matter was the need to go back to Sparta and Plato, on the one hand, and on the other to the Essene sect —which interpreted the sixth commandment as "thou shalt not trade"— later converted into the Ebionite ("povertist") creed and finally into the manifesto expounded by the Sermon on the Mount.

Contextualizing both lines meant for him to carry out an investigation on the origins of the slave society, breeding ground for the birth of the messianic redeemer —a "lamb that washes away the evils of the world" whose novelty is to be a scapegoat that also assumes the Restitution or revenge of "the last over the first"— , prefiguring the progress through civil war posed later by Marx as the law of social development.

This process is rejected and supported at the same time by numerous communist sects, and it culminates in the peasant wars of the Renaissance, while the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation converge in leaving behind the ideal of peasantry and propose to the good Christian to be far-sighted and prosperous.

He then joked about his destiny to meticulously document one or another variant of fear:[68] In the narrative, he adds to the ideological picture the detail of each economic milieu and the evolution of parallel institutions — the instruments of credit, guilds and unions, the first big companies, the social security systems, the acclimatization of paper money, patent law— and an analysis of the specifics of the political revolutions in North America, England, France, Spain, Germany and Russia.

No history of the communist phenomenon had so far added to the ideological debate the detail of its economic context, the evolution of parallel institutions such as the trade union, big business, property defended by copyright or the various social security systems.

[80] Although the writer was retired, he did not stop receiving regular visits from curious onlookers, fans and disciples, but also from personalities as diverse as the singer Jorge Drexler, José Antonio Matamoros or the president of Real Madrid, Florentino Pérez.

Antonio Escohotado Espinosa died in the early hours of November 21, 2021 at the age of 80 as a result of multiorgan failure (renal, pulmonary and cardiac) at the Policlínica de Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Ibiza surrounded by his loved ones.