Pupil of the national-syndicalist Santiago Montero Díaz, Bueno's philosophical path reached a blend of Aristotelico-Thomist scholasticism influenced by the Catholic School of Salamanca and Marxism–Leninism during the years of the late Francoism.

[2] Gustavo Bueno Martínez was born in Santo Domingo de la Calzada on 1 September 1924.

[7] From 1949 to 1960, he worked as a philosophy professor (and from 1951 on also as a principal) in the 'Lucía Medrano' female high school, located in Salamanca.

He is well known in the hispanophone world for his book España Frente a Europa, in which he presents an innovative philosophy history on the basis of a historical materialist analysis of the origins of Spain, the Hispanic empire and Europe offering a systematic reconceptualization of a series of ideas that are central to Marxism and the history of political thought more broadly.

[13] A main intellectual reference for 21st-century defendants of the legacy of the Spanish Habsburg Empire (as opposed to the Bourbon) jointly with Elvira Roca Barea,[14] he espoused the idea of the Asturian kingdom as an embryonic 'Spain' and as a case of Translatio imperii with respect to Rome (bypassing the Visigoths, as they occupied the Iberian Peninsula, but they would have done it so "with the will to remain in seclusion in it"), pursuing the "imperial city" category for Oviedo, underpinning his main thesis of that of the "consubstantiality" of the process of the constitution of 'Spain' as a characteristic entity of Universal History and the process of its conformation as a Universal Empire.

[15] He supported the political reunification of Hispanic states in the form of a confederation: “The constitution of a Hispanic or Ibero-American Confederation, with a Common Market of around 500 million inhabitants, is, for Professor Bueno, the only alternative that the American peoples, as well as Spain and Portugal, have open to free themselves from the Anglo-American Empire.”[16] Bueno’s philosophical analysis of the idea of empire can be summarized with the following quote: “Universal history is supposed to be the history of the human genus.