Order and Legitimacy: Political Thought in National Spain [1 ed.] 0765802457, 9780765802453

Citation preview

Order and Legitimacy

Political Thought in National Spain

Order and Legitimacy Prands Graham Wilson H. Lee Cheek, Jr., M. Susan Power,

Kathy B. Cheek, and Thomas J. Metallo

editors

(KTUVRWDNKUJGFD[6TCPUCEVKQP2WDNKUJGTU 2WDNKUJGFD[4QWVNGFIG 2CTM5SWCTG/KNVQP2CTM#DKPIFQP1ZQP1:40 6JKTF#XGPWG0GY;QTM0;75# 5RXWOHGJHLVDQLPSULQWRIWKH7D\ORU )UDQFLV*URXSDQLQIRUPDEXVLQHVV %QR[TKIJVlD[6C[NQT(TCPEKU #NNTKIJVUTGUGTXGF0QRCTVQHVJKUDQQMOC[DGTGRTKPVGFQTTGRTQFWEGFQT WVKNKUGFKPCP[HQTOQTD[CP[GNGEVTQPKEOGEJCPKECNQTQVJGTOGCPUPQY MPQYP QT JGTGCHVGT KPXGPVGF KPENWFKPI RJQVQEQR[KPI CPF TGEQTFKPI QT KP CP[ KPHQTOCVKQP UVQTCIG QT TGVTKGXCN U[UVGO YKVJQWV RGTOKUUKQP KP YTKVKPI HTQOVJGRWDNKUJGTU 0QVKEG 2TQFWEVQTEQTRQTCVGPCOGUOC[DGVTCFGOCTMUQTTGIKUVGTGFVTCFGOCTMUCPF CTGWUGFQPN[HQTKFGPVKHKECVKQPCPFGZRNCPCVKQPYKVJQWVKPVGPVVQKPHTKPIG Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2004051642 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilson, Francis Graham, 1901Order and legitimacy : political thought in national Spain / Francis Graham Wilson ; edited by H. Lee Cheek, Jr. ... [et al.]. p. cm. Rev. and expanded ed. of: Political thought in national Spain. 1967. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 0-7658-0245-7 (alk. paper) 1. Political science—Spain—History—19th century. 2. Political science—Spain—History—20th century. 3. Spain—Politics and government. 4. Legitimacy of governments—Spain. 5. Conservatism— Spain—History. I. Cheek, H. Lee. II. Wilson, Francis Graham, 1901Political thought in national Spain. III. Title. JA84.S7W54 2004 320'.0946—dc22 +5$0 JDM

2004051642

For Bill, Dana, Liz, and Jennifer Braun; Rick, Ashley, and Carson Cheek; Catherine Power; Joyce Metallo; Mary Ann Braun; Angie Apple; and Howard “Red” and Ann Cheek

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction H. Lee Cheek, Jr. and Thomas J. Metallo

xi

Foreword to Original Edition (1967) Francis Graham Wilson

xvii

Part 1: Political Thought in National Spain 1. The Resurgence of Spanish Tradition

3

2. Juan Donoso Cortés: A Diagnosis of Crisis

23

3. Jaime Balmes: The Christian Philosophy of History

43

4. The Great Restorer: Menéndez Pelayo

61

5. José Antonio: The Revolutionary Passion

79

6. Ramiro de Maeztu: Critic of the Revolution

99

7. Spain: A European Example

113

Part 2: An Anchor in the Latin Mind 8. Intellectuals: Latin, Liberal, and Aristocratic

133

9. Order and Legitimacy

159

Index

183

Acknowledgments Support from the Earhart Foundation, Wilbur Foundation, and Lee University was of great assistance to this project. Sean Busick, Steve Ealy, Tim Goodman, Bob Paquette, Clyde Wilson, Tim Sifert, George Carey, Carey Roberts, Constantine Gutzman, Gary Gregg, James McClellan, and Jeff Nelson inspired us by example. Our continued dependence on the wise counsel of Dr. Harry Bayne on several fronts aided the overall effort. Dr. James Wilkins of Lee University helped translate some of the French passages; Dr. Paul Gottfried of Elizabethtown College refined our rather crude German translation efforts; and Dean Terry Cross and Dr. Don Bowdle of Lee University’s School of Religion greatly improved our Latin and Greek translations. Thanks to Dr. Robert Rawdon Wilson for permission to republish all of the materials in this volume, and for encouraging our attempt to reintroduce his father’s scholarship to the rising generation. One of the greatest blessings of being a teacher is to be graced with the presence of outstanding students. The enterprise that resulted in this volume was greatly augmented by the labors of nine Lee University students—Chris Castleberry, Robert Flowers, Bob Waycott, Jason Bell, Emily Noble, Josh Bell, Tiffany Andrews, Brad Sagraves and Allen Jervey. We look forward to the impact they will have on the world in the years to come. Robert Waycott was of special help to the editors in all aspects of preparing this volume for publication. At Transaction, Dr. Irving Louis Horowitz, Dr. Michael Henry, and Ms. Mary Curtis were unfailing in their support of this project. Mary Ann Braun and Howard “Red” and Ann Cheek continue to offer their support and that makes our work possible. Special thanks are also due to siblings, Bill Braun and Rick Cheek.

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Introduction H. Lee Cheek, Jr. and Thomas J. Metallo This volume is part of an ongoing effort to reintroduce the scholarship of Francis Graham Wilson to a wider popular and academic audience. A growing body of readers is rediscovering Wilson’s tremendous contribution to the study of politics and humane learning, as well as appreciating his more principled framework for understanding the history and political environment of the West. For Wilson, as he suggests in chapter 1, the rationale for this particular collection of essays was self-evident: “Americans should be interested in the parallels of politics in Europe. It may well be that as the multifaceted crises of American society come more to their painful head, the experience of others in turning back the revolution against order and tradition, against religion and stability, and for the preservation of an intellectual culture, will acquire pointed and passionate relevance. In the end, the American must know the history of Europe. He must know its national traditions and the systems of thought that have flourished there.” And among the countries of Europe, Spain had most successfully maintained its inherited way of life, according to Wilson. Unlike many other European countries, Spain always possessed at least a remnant of political thinkers who possessed a vision of a moral political order, focused upon the idea of subsidiarity (or localism) in political and religious concerns. These individuals are central to Wilson’s assessment of Spanish politics. At the heart of the Spanish political mind was the notion of subsidiarity as a means of dividing public authority and perpetuating the republic, and the concept was dependent on the virtue of the citizenry within the smaller subunits of the regime. The older notions of autonomy and mutual accommodation among communities—diversity and liberty in action—were regularly weakened by unfortunate influences. If a stable mode of popular rule was to be recovered, the community must be protected against efforts to incorporate its stake in society and politics into a political structure that would diminish the community’s most salient qualities. The preserving and protecting of an organic system of popular rule required accepting the natural diversity of the communities that formed the larger society, while enjoying the increased liberties that resulted from this diffusion of authority. xi

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For Wilson, the most salutary attribute of Spanish politics was found in the assemblage of smaller groupings of the citizenry within the larger society in communities; and it was in the smaller association that the most important aspects of moral, social and political life were nurtured. These communities served as the primary mode of participation and were essential to the regime’s survival, and—as Wilson observes in chapter 1—Spain was blessed with “a cultural localism impregnated with tradition, and founded on the wide distribution of small properties. In such societies there is sturdy resistance to the ideological anarchy which separates rather than unites.” After all, a rightly ordered community consisted of highly autonomous parts or divisions cooperating together for the welfare of the whole. The societal realm described in Order and Legitimacy should be understood as the extension of the smaller community units, represented by regional associations that serve as examples of how the larger society could be organized and political authority diffused throughout Spain. In other words, Order and Legitimacy represents a profound assessment of the nature of politics and the search for order, especially in the context of Spain, but in the United States as well. Throughout his life, Wilson argued that the West’s contribution to political and social thought was established upon an articulation of the necessary limitations of that existence. With Aristotle and the inherited tradition, Wilson believed human life was essentially political and social. Moral and spiritual development necessitated interaction, restraint, and reinforcement that were most acutely experienced in a society constituted to embody these elements. The ethical life could not be sustained outside of a community in some variety. While not rejecting a role for self-interest within the community, Wilson’s political thought recognized the constant tension between the need for some degree of societal unity and the needs of the individual. In the Spanish political and social experience, Wilson found the appropriate model for balancing personal restraint and liberty. Order and Legitimacy is both a critique and a defense of Spanish politics and political thought from within the larger Western and Christian traditions. Wilson’s long and successful career as an academic was marked by careful scholarship, and Order and Legitimacy also demonstrates his devotion to serious inquiry. However, unlike his previous work, which often received the highest degree of acceptance by his scholarly peers, the essays in Order and Legitimacy are representative of Wilson’s effort to explicate those personages he viewed as most constructive and enduring in Spanish political life—the defenders of Spanish traditionalism. For Wilson, neither Spaniards nor Americans could afford to neglect this inheritance of political order, as he notes in chapter 1: Certainly one of the driving values of the study of Spanish traditionalism is the sense of comparison that it should produce in the mind of an American. Almost, we might say, Spain is at the other end of the scale. Much of such difference arises from the variance

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between the Anglo-American and Hispanic traditions of religion. Spanish Christians seem to have taken unity and devotion much more seriously than Anglos. State and Church form a continuity between the present and eternity, and the idea of our “separation of Church and State” has not been comprehensible to the Spanish mind.

And like his contemporary and friend Eric Voegelin, Wilson also feared that the West—and especially Spain and America—could suffer the consequences of what Voegelin described as “theoretical illiteracy,” a failure to translate one’s social and political tradition to subsequent generations. To this end, Wilson prepared the first seven essays in this volume for publication amidst many personal and professional obstacles. After the volume was published in 1967, and the reputation of the effort had spread, Wilson reflected on his project in a letter to Carlos Manzanares, Consul General of Spain: I was, practically speaking, unable to get it published except in the most economical manner. As there is little interest in Spanish thought in America, especially during the period since the [Spanish] Civil War, and not much interest in the “Golden Century” except in literature. There may be some few passages that will seem unduly critical, but perhaps not.1

Wilson’s devotion to Spain, and more importantly, Spanish traditionalism, remained central to his scholarship throughout the second half of his life. Even though he was reluctant to provide an extensive commentary on the Spanish Civil War, he was naturally more sympathetic to the Nationalist cause. However, he believed there were widespread differences of opinion about many aspects of the conflict on one hand, and on the other, he acknowledged there was no shortage of atrocities on either side. He possessed, nonetheless, serious reservations about the Republican government’s rise to power, and once in office, the militant posture the Republicans assumed in most matters. Among his many other concerns was the influence of the former Soviet Union upon the Republic, and for the most part, Wilson’s assessment has been vindicated by contemporary scholarship.2 Part 1 of this tome, which includes chapters one through seven, is a revised version of his earlier work, Political Thought in National Spain, published in 1967. Chapter 1, entitled “The Resurgence of Spanish Tradition,” is a plea to consider the continued importance of the Spanish tradition for modern politics. In Spain, Wilson found the consummation of the traditionalist mission: “Government should act in moderation, and it must respect the independence of society (where tradition as judgment or principle has its life). Morality is the judge of history. Historical experience is never in and of itself good, since it may violate the moral principles upon which a society should be based.” Tradition, if affirmed, can engender a greater appreciation of the “symbols of the past” to aid future generations. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are devoted respectively to assessing three eminent Spanish traditionalists, Juan Donoso Cortés, Jaime Balmes, and Menéndez

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Pelayo. Donoso, who lived during one of the most turbulent times in Spanish political life (1809-1853), was a man of letters, a journalist, and a diplomat. Stressing the consistency of Donoso’s thought against his critics who claim he moved dramatically from liberalism to traditionalism, Wilson argued that it was Donoso’s attachment to the Church, the monarchy, and ordered liberty that made him an exemplar of Spanish traditionalism. For Donoso, when a civilization faced a crisis, it could rely on tradition for the insight needed to resolve the predicament. In Jaime Balmes (1810-1848), Wilson suggested, traditionalism received the erudition necessary to allow it to be considered seriously in the marketplace of ideas. Balmes’s comparative work on the nature of Catholicism and Protestantism and his writings on political economy remain of great importance today. As a Catholic priest, Balmes offered Christianity as a force for social and political freedom before Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum; and in presenting the larger Christian tradition in this manner, Balmes provided a means of inculcating the virtues necessary for a stable, self-restrained mode of social and political life. In Menéndez Pelayo (1856-1912), Spain was blessed with a defender of its technological and legal traditions against the counterrevolution of Spanish liberalism. For Menéndez Pelayo, the heart of Spanish traditionalism was found in its intellectual and literary traditions. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 contain studies of central figures from the period of the Spanish Civil War. Of all the essays in the collection, the most challenging to existing research is Wilson’s interpretation of the life and political philosophy of José Antonio (1903-1936), a founder of the Falange Española, and a leading figure in the syndicalist movement, which for José Antonio was a communitarian alternative to purely market-based economic mechanisms. Like many of his contemporaries, José Antonio viewed himself as a defender of the “natural hierarchies of communities, the family, the Church, the municipality, the syndicate, the cultural region, and the new state” that would succeed the Second Republic. For these reasons, Wilson rightly viewed José Antonio as part of the patrimony of Spanish traditionalism. As a counterbalance to José Antonio’s political activism, the intellectual vitality of Ramiro de Maeztu (1875-1936), with his celebration of the “values and order of life” that had created and sustained Spain, could not be neglected, according to Wilson. As a member of the famous “Generation of 1898,” a celebrated group of intellectuals and writers, Maeztu came to hold all ideological political movements in disdain; as a Spanish traditionalist, he concentrated on defending the Church, the monarchy, and the honor of Spain, describing his Spanish version of traditionalism as Hispanidad. According to Wilson, Maeztu feared that the ideological movements, including the socialists and communists—and liberals—had abandoned Spain and that such efforts had to be confronted. For Maeztu, traditionalism was not synonymous with conservatism. Unfortunately, he contended, conservatives were often “skeptics,” unable to affirm political order and the originality of Spanish politics. In this regard, conservatism was as problematic as the

Introduction

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ideological movements. In the final essay in part 1, “Spain: A European Example,” Wilson provides a commentary on events in Spain after the Spanish Civil War. Chapters 8 and 9 form part 2 of the volume. These essays are taken from an unpublished book length manuscript, “An Anchor in the Latin Mind,” that Wilson had completed at the time of his death in 1976; the original manuscript is in the possession of Professor Robert Rawdon Wilson of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and it will eventually become part of the Francis Graham Wilson Papers collection in the University of Illinois Archives. Chapter 8, “Intellectuals: Latin, Liberal and Aristocratic,” surveys the inevitably crucial role assumed by intellectuals in American and Latin politics. Latin thinkers, Wilson argued, possess advantages others do not—a political realism that could be reinvigorated: The Latin mind is not necessarily liberal or conservative, and it may be either Catholic or anticlerical, Christian or pagan. For one thing, the defeat of ideologies means the possibility of recovering Latin realism in the treatment of politics and its separation from cultural and literary achievements. Such a recovery would mean a condemnation of the return to romanticism, the romanticism of the fascists or the more current romanticism of the liberals or conservatives in the world of parliaments and congresses. The failure of the romanticisms of the twentieth century reaffirms that the greatest of Western secular continuities is Latin and classical intellectualism. It may be clear that the mandates of technology, the age of technicism as Spengler once said, have superseded the aspirations of ideology, but it is also clear that the mandates of technology cannot be the mandates of the Latin, classical, and humanistic mind.

Wilson also assesses Miguel de Unamuno, George Santayana, and José Ortega y Gasset as representatives of both the perils and promise of the Latin intellectual in politics. The concluding chapter, “Order and Legitimacy,” is an engaging defense of the authenticity of Spanish and Latin politics against the claims advanced by modern devotees of political legitimacy. Wilson also thoughtfully surveys the Spanish and Latin achievement in politics: electoral and participatory attributes of popular rule suffer as the result of the tendency to identify the majority as those who vote in a particular election while disregarding the range of responses necessary to adequately canvass the citizenry. On the other hand, confusing the governmental structure established by such a deficient majority with the more commodious “government of the whole” provided by a more comprehensive and inclusive notion of democracy and legitimacy—one that appreciates a role for autonomous groups, a diversity of interests, and a decentralized power structure—impairs the constitutional infrastructure in terms of its ability to facilitate popular rule. More importantly, the spirit of restraint so essential to the Spanish and Latin political traditions will suffer a devaluation as well. For Wilson, the recovery of Spanish traditionalism was dependent upon a return to the self-understanding of the ordering principles of Spanish politics

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and society. Such a project could not be accomplished without revisiting and expounding the original principles and experiences of the greatest sources of Spanish traditionalism for a new day. Wilson’s affirmation of a Spanish traditionalist inheritance during his lifetime encouraged a return to authentic popular rule and a greater appreciation of Spanish achievements in politics and the moral life. By assisting in the republication of this volume, with the addition of previously unpublished materials, the editors hope to encourage renewed interest in Wilson’s scholarship and the Spanish political tradition. Notes 1. 2.

Francis Graham Wilson, Greenvale, New York, to Carlos Manzanares, Counsel General of Spain, Chicago, Illinois, 28 November 1967. Francis Graham Wilson Papers, University of Illinois Archives. See Radosh, Ronald, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

Foreword to Original Edition (1967) Francis Graham Wilson This short volume is a study of the more enduring approaches to political thinking in Spain during the last generation. It consists mainly of essays on some of the most important figures in the restoration of Spanish tradition. The names of Donoso Cortés, Balmes, Menéndez Pelayo, José Antonio, Ramiro de Maeztu, and other conservatives and traditionalists may not appear at all in volumes devoted to the politics of the Spanish republic and the war. But that they are the foundation for the thinking of the Nationalist regime can hardly be doubted. However, Spanish thinkers have become tired of “ideology” and they want, instead, the economic and technical development of Spain. “The end of ideology” is one of the cries of men like Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, a notable contemporary critic. There have been three major trends in Spanish conservatism. There first was the nineteenth-century defense of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the landowners—a conservatism formulated mainly in resistance to the infiltration of French liberalism. The second form has been the restoration of tradition, which was the groundwork of Nationalists in 1939. Now, a generation after victory in “the Crusade,” as the war is commonly called, a new attitude which might be called a sober concentration on technology and economic advance has made its appearance. It affirms that though tradition must remain, especially the Christian and monarchic tradition, there are more sober and mundane tasks to be undertaken. The progress of Spain must be considered first of all. The new conservatism will be based on technological achievement. One must remember that Spanish politics has been deeply involved with the whole current of European ideological controversy. The efforts of fascist and Communist movements to gain all of Europe explain much that has happened in Spain. But in addition there is the fact of universal economic depression in the 1930s. Anarcho-syndicalists tried to effect their revolution in agriculture simply because they had a chance: the virtual destruction of the market and thus the inability of employers to pay decent wages to Spanish agricultural labor. Revolutionaries, however, pretended that the evil lay alone in the greed of the landlords. The Communists moved in, hiding behind the popular front, pretending that the defense of the “democratic republic” was their only aim. xvii

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One can only marvel at the disintegration of the Spanish government in the period just before the outbreak of the war; its leaders seemed like puppets pretending to play the game of politics and ruling. As Dr. Gregorio Marañón concluded, the resistance to revolutionaries does not come from liberals, but from more conservative forces in politics. Some liberals seem prone to suicide because they would rather have the extreme left than anything connected with the right. The adoption of the new Organic Law of the Spanish State in December 1966, is the attempted beginning of a new era of political consolidation. There is a restatement of the principles which emerged from the national revolution and the civil war. These principles were first stated in a series of Fundamental Laws, the earliest of which was the Fuero del Trabajo (the Rights of Labor) in 1938. A fuero is an ancient Spanish term meaning right, a liberty, a fundamental and inviolable right, as well as the precedent and case law of a society. This law was followed by others, such as the Fuero de los Españoles, in 1945, the law of the creation of Las Cortes Españolas (the Spanish parliaments or courts) in 1942, the Regulations of the Cortes in 1943, the Law of the Succession of Chief of State in 1947, the Law on the National Referendum in 1945, and the Fundamental Law on the Principles of the National Movement in 1958. Further, the principles of the National movement (the former Falangist movement) have been included in the new Organic Law of 1966. It remains the formalized yet official ideology of the Spanish nation. In a central sense all of the fundamental laws (which remain in force except as modified) proclaim that Spain is a Catholic State; it is one in which national syndicalism and traditionalist thought (which are discussed later in this study) are accepted as the fundamental doctrines of Spain. All Spaniards are recognized as members of regional and natural entities, corporations, or syndicates, which are the foundation of participation and representation in the state. The National movement is, thus, a public creed, or a public orthodoxy, which affirms the Catholic tradition of social justice, and the new ruling of the Vatican Council on religious liberty, under which the state is to safeguard morals and public order. The ancient, even medieval principles of functional and group representation in public life, are generally preserved. The new Organic Law is, thus, a continuation rather than a break with the past. It provides in detail for a succession of Head of State, who may be either the restored king or a caudillo like Franco. Separated from him is the President of Government appointed by the Head of State, and there is under him a Council of Ministers. The powers of the important Council of the Realm are stated, the National Council is affirmed as the leader of the National movement, the structure of the Cortes Españolas is continued on the basis of family, group or professional, and regional representation, and organs for the public administration are specified, as are the courts, the National Defense Board, the Council of State, the National Economic Council, and for municipalities as “national entities” in the National Community. Of special importance is the appeal against

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the violation of right (contrafuero) to the Head of State, Council of the Realm, and a widely based commission to study the question involved. In a Supplemental Declaration the syndicalist structure of economic society is stated. Provision is made for a Regency and women are excluded from the throne (the Bourbon principle of succession to the throne is retained). Married women may vote for the provincial representatives of the family who are elected to the Cortes. Relations with the Catholic Church are regulated by concordat and a further revision of the Fundamental laws is contemplated. There is no epilogue in sight for the struggle over Spain. Republicans in exile wage an intellectual battle against Franco and the Regime, but it is unlikely that any restoration of the Second Republic will take place. The exiles ask for a new Spanish democracy, one that would be more socialist than capitalist. They may even be willing to have elections conducted by the army. Jose Luis Aranguren has come to the conclusion that one must surrender the myth that the people must be ready for democracy before it can be established. No, one must plunge into the democratic whirlpool and see what happens. The Carlists do not want a monarchical restoration since this might at the present juncture eliminate the chances of their pretender for an indefinite time. Republicans in general want some sort of parliamentary restoration. One can only wait until the creation of wealth and its distribution in Spain has become much more efficient than it is at present. At that time politics may become quiet enough to be orderly.1 Note 1.

A remarkable illustrated history of Spain has been edited by Juan Vicens Vives, Historia social y económica de España y América (5 vols., Barcelona: Teide, 19571959). This history has a particularly powerful presentation of Spain in the nineteenth century.

Part 1 Political Thought in National Spain

1 The Resurgence of Spanish Tradition I Americans are not greatly interested in Spain. Certainly not as a serious subject of inquiry. Even Catholics who might be sympathetic with the trials and aspirations of Spain will indulge in absurd caricature. For instance, a writer in the Catholic World recently summarized the situation as follows: “Spain is the culture of Islam and the mystery of Christianity cloaked in pagan myth and wisdom. It is Loyola and Lorca; it is the Inquisition and the Passion of our Lord; it is the ultimate in life and death. And in 1936 this crazed chariot of Spanish history screamed to a cruel and monstrous halt.”1 But the Spaniard himself has done much to simplify and spread the caricature of Spanish life. Llorente stresses the “well-known inquisitorial profile” of Spain; Las Casas slandered the Spanish colonial achievement in America; Goya blackened the countryside and peopled it with monsters; Gautier and Merimée saw only “gypsies, tambourinists, and generous bandits with knives in their belts.” Unamuno deepened Spanish wounds and in exile poured out resentment against the dictatorship of General Primo. Lorca offered symbolic or poetic proof of Celtiberian barbarism. Américo Castro explained the Spanish past on the basis of Jews and Moors. Other countries have a more fortunate symbolism.2 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, in the great history of Spain which he has directed, provides a notable essay in the introduction on the “two Spains,” from the earliest times to the latest, when the nineteenth-century quarrel has become the twentieth-century quarrel over the restoration of tradition. Both are Spains of the intellectuals. One Spain is a great European society—with notable Spaniards who are at the same time notable Europeans. The other Spain is the Spain of the liberals, of the early days of the Second Republic, who sought in Europeanization the destruction of the Church, and the secularization of Spain in accord with the positivist tradition of French intellectual life. Still, it is a most complicated issue from the North American point of view, since nearly all of the political movements in Spain have been anti-capitalist and in some measure socialistic in mentality. To some of the “old Republicans” 3

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General Franco has carried forward the socialism of the Second Republic, perhaps even farther than the leftists of a generation before had contemplated. Those who favor a free market system may say, as well, that there is little basis in Spain for the understanding of capitalism, for in fact Spanish political literature has little or no economics in it. Spanish academics follow statist American economic policies, and Keynes and Marx seem to be the only economists in the Spanish university. It would seem almost by paradox that what interest in Spain there may have been has diminished as the Spanish language becomes more commonly spoken in the United States. Before the Spanish-American War, Americans seemed to accept the idea that the New World was discovered by Columbus under the flags of Spain. But in recent years the idea that Columbus was an Italian has gained some ground and the Italo-Americans seem to have taken over the “day of the race,” as those of Hispanic culture say when they celebrate the discovery of America. Furthermore, it is difficult indeed to get Americans interested in Hispanic-American affairs, and there is little sense of comparison between our version of Anglo-Saxon tradition and Hispanic and Hispanic-American patterns of culture. Whatever may be said about the lack of interest of Americans in Spanish affairs may be said in measure of Europe in general. A sense of nationalism and of a national tradition (witness Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address in 1837) leads one away from a sense of comparison. For as they said in the Middle Ages, comparisons are odious. By its nature almost, a tradition, which is a deposit of “truth” from the past, tends to make the mind parochial. And this is true of all, even of the intellectuals whose interest may range widely in history, and through many lands and systems of belief. What many Americans seem to have affirmed is that we are truly different from Europeans, even though our various heritages may be traced eastward. Language and religion are barriers, and the American Catholic is not disposed to see a parallel between the Catholic order of life in America and Catholic traditions either in Europe or in Hispanic America. While many have tried to believe that Spanish as a language is easy, a little contact with verbs, idioms, and manner of speaking has soon convinced such a person that perhaps after all Spanish may be as hard to learn as French or German. The crux of the matter, intellectually at least, may be this: Is there a system of parallel courses in the evolution of national experience between the old countries of Europe and the new experiments of the Western world? Thus, if there is no parallel in political experience, America can ignore the political and cultural history of Europe. The “fall” of Europe in the twentieth century tells Americans nothing about either their past or the possibilities of their future. It involves patterns of national behavior, though there is clearly no reason to assume a deterministic view of history. For both the Spaniard and the American, history is not predictable; it is made by men; it is a mystery to us as it was to the Greeks and as it always has been to the Christian. Since the French Revolution,

The Resurgence of Spanish Tradition

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leftwing thinkers have usually leaned heavily toward the deterministic in the study of behavior. What comes closest to American thought is the doctrine of progress, the doctrine that finally in some sense and somehow there will be betterment, and a kindlier life for all. Human evolution and Providence conspire together to produce the future that we wish to have. In a hard, logical sense one might say there are no real parallels, just accidents and semblances, and the illusions of intellectual magic that revolutionaries love to demonstrate and use to bewilder their enemies. But are there no real patterns that are inevitable and no determinism in the course of a national history? With Ramón Menéndez Pidal may we not say that while history does not repeat itself, the men who make history are always the same in what we call their human nature? Now any country in Europe—including Spain, of course—has a long history that may reach back as far as the artists who painted their pictures in the cave of Altamira, and it is continuous for the European. But for us the remnants of prehistoric villages are not continuous with the settlement of Europeans in North and South America. However, our tradition with its variations is as old as that of the Europeans, including the Greeks and even their predecessors. There are similarities in political and cultural history, at least from the kaleidoscope of the forms of government in Greek and Roman civilization. A Christian, I think, will say that the similarities in behavior arise from within the man and not from mysterious external or unknown forces; they arise from human nature and the patterns within the mind and the viscera of human beings. His intelligence, his consciousness, is what makes the phenomena of man, and in his dealings with other men he may do many things much the same as in times before. But he may not, because he may be taught virtue, his intelligence may be educated, and he can, indeed, avoid the stupidities of yesterday. Still, if there are similarities, is it possible that one country like Spain, with beautiful, bitter, and glorious historical experiences, may suggest the course that a country like ours may follow? In a concrete sense Spain has turned back the socialist and Communist revolutions. Spain has through its anguish restored the force of its tradition in contemporary life. In America there are an incredible number of leaders and pseudo-leaders who hope for the socialist revolution.3 Then, what must one say of the history of popular elections, political parties, and parliaments or congresses in Europe during the last century and a half? Does the mass of American voters suggest that something similar to the European experience, all the way from political parties to fascist mass movements, is on the way in America? The passion for centralization, and the hostility toward limitations on government, may suggest a problem similar to the grimness of European politics during the twentieth century. Or, it may be that even if the socialist revolution is turned aside, the bureaucracy leading the “admass” of human beings (the masses who respond to the stimuli of mass communication either in politics or commerce) will supply the pattern of po-

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litical society in the future, a pattern that is strangely alike some that have occurred in the past both near and remote. The presupposition of this study is clear: Americans should be interested in the parallels of politics in Europe. It may well be that as the multifaceted crises of American society come more to their painful head, the experience of others in turning back the revolution against order and tradition, against religion and stability, and for the preservation of an intellectual culture, will acquire pointed and passionate relevance. In the end, the American must know the history of Europe. He must know its national traditions and the systems of thought that have flourished there. Certainly one of the driving values of the study of Spanish traditionalism is the sense of comparison that it should produce in the mind of an American. Almost, we might say, Spain is at the other end of the scale. Much of such difference arises from the variance between the Anglo-American and Hispanic traditions of religion. Spanish Christians seem to have taken unity and devotion much more seriously than Anglos. State and Church form a continuity between the present and eternity, and the idea of our “separation of Church and State” has not been comprehensible to the Spanish mind. If one separates the two, the Latin liberal has contended, one must destroy the Church. But in contrast, even in England before its reformation one might say that while obedience belongs to the King, his soul is his own. And when it was announced in 1964 that American moviemakers were planning to film a version of Don Quixote, a Spanish critic noted such an effort was bound to be a failure, since Americans would not tolerate an ugly Don Quixote. The European might come closer to doing a good “western” movie than we would in doing so complicated a character as Don Quixote. A comparison between American patterns of thought, religious or literary, should give us a more profound comprehension of ourselves. II Let us consider for a moment Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Could an American have written it? Not Emerson surely, for the Prudent Man of the Flowering of New England seemed to counsel cheerfulness, and forgetfulness of the morrow. Emerson seems to tell us that we may win the battle against existence, while the Spaniard is overborne by the sense of commitment and the sadness or tragedy of existence for all. Does this mean that Spaniards are more realistic than Americans? Americans are favored, indeed, with greater wealth; we are more casual with children, since we know there are ahead of every child numberless opportunities to do what they may want to do. In education one may fail and start again just as many times as one may care to. Not so for the Spaniard, for the Spaniard will tell you he is a poor man and that his children must, like all men, swim against the stream of destiny. Education has been a

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desperately serious business for the Spaniard, even in the Golden Century when the children of the aristocracy were taught to study many hours each day in the mastery of humane learning. No doubt, the Protestant might say that for the Catholic, life is a valley of tears, a preparation for the heavenly banquet; on the other hand, the Protestant, if he believes himself predestined of the Lord, he may overlook the tears and seek the more pleasant efforts of the present. A philosopher should say that here we are dealing with attitudes toward form in life and life in time. For Americans history has been short; our children have not played on the roads that Roman legions built, or drawn water carried by aqueducts designed by Imperial engineers. Our history does not in our minds extend even back to the colonial period, except for the scholar and for some who may live deliberately in the shadow thrown by great events of other centuries. But the Spaniard, and for the Southern or Latin European especially, history has lasted a long time, so long indeed that one counts it not by the mere shift of states and forms of government, but the rise and disappearance of cultures and languages. Some have said that Spain is not really a part of Europe, and others have said, considering the revolutions of other parts, that Spain is by definition what is left of Europe. Attention to history breeds a conception of the universal in one’s own past, and it evokes in the imagination some form of a philosophy of history. Some person said of Spain that it has had no Reformation, no French Revolution, and no Industrial Revolution, and thus one assumes its greatness for the future, if not for the present. However, the Spaniard looks for the universal in his history. He may cite the year of Spanish greatness and confidence, 1492, in which the capture of Granada occurred, the expulsion of many Jews, and the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. The achievements in the New World are matched by the dramatic successes of the Spaniards in turning back the imperial march of the Reformation. The vastness of life under Charles V or Philip II tends to dwarf the imagination in its successes and failures. Universality in Spanish achievement makes of every Spaniard a Cid and a Don Quixote, and sometimes a Don Juan with a side-glance at the Celestina. The great conflicts remain in these literary symbols and every Spaniard lives with a destiny that makes him some sort of a champion. Modern ideology seems strangely narrow when one considers the universal implication of the great Spanish literary symbols. Whatever one’s ideology, the overriding literary symbols of the West make their imperishable appeal. The career of many a Spanish intellectual has been marked by his return to the Church and to the tradition of Spain as symbolized in its history of valor. The creatures of great fiction have difficulty in learning about national frontiers. Almost everyone in the West knows of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and the windmills. People follow the travels of Don Quixote in Cervantes’ imagination today across the southern landscape of La Mancha, just as Americans have visited the playgrounds of Huckleberry Finn, and others have sought out the

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haunts of Hamlet and Macbeth. For Americans, the greatest of the historical symbols are not literary, but the strange, brooding battlefields of the Civil War. Standing on these heroic spots one can turn silently to his own historic commitment, and either rejoice in victory or sorrow in defeat. And some speak of the “myth” of Abraham Lincoln, to whom is erected a Greek temple on the bank of the Potomac River. Because we are derivative and colonial, it is natural that we should use the symbols in literature and history that we have drawn from Europe. We do not have characters of tradition like Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust. We cannot, like the Spaniard, be a little of Don Quixote or Sancho, or Don Juan, or the Celestina, and achieve a greater Casticismo or Hispanidad than before. Nor do we have alone the comic hero that strides across the rest of the world, like Davy Crockett or Paul Bunyan, or the characters of the “tall tales” of the Western frontier. Europeans have picked up the horse opera, the sheriff and his posse ride across France in pursuit of malefactors, while the European army officer may read Zane Gray’s account of battles of small detachments a lonely land, and the struggle between Indians and white settlers. In more serious thought, we have taken our institutions from the spread of European culture to the West. Our religion has sprung from the struggles of the Reformation, though the rise of American Catholicism speaks of a greater sympathy for the Spanish loyalty to his faith. Our land, our language, our liberal arts, our basic ideas of government, and our systems of artistic and creative expression are grounded in the history of Western Europe, in which each country like Spain is both a sharer and a creator. The symbols of which we have spoken are indicators of much that lies behind. Traditions—the truths and the institutions, the mores and the folkways— are in themselves symbols of the remote origins of civilized life as we have defined it in our practical order of being. We, like the Spanish, must go back to the origins of culture. If we get back to a time when painted savages fished and hunted along the banks of the Thames, we must not stop, for behind them are the vast stretches of Roman and Greek intellectual achievement. Then we shall also discover, as the Spaniard knows, that the West is grounded on Greek philosophy and literature, on Jewish and Arabic wisdom and Revelation, and on Roman law and the Roman structure of public order. The transmission of Christianity to the West was through men who were formed in the vast achievements of Greek and Latin tradition. The union of the American in the culture of the West must be like this—a most profound searching out of the symbols of the past. But what is tradition? It is something handed down, not merely ways of doing things, for example, folkways, but judgments about the proper nature of human relations. The folkways are a kind of husk which contains the meat of tradition, though one may well argue that the shell is as necessary for the existence of tradition as inner significance. “Traditionalism” is not simply a

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conjunction of dogmas or formulas for use in politics because they may contain solutions for issues. For the anthropologist, tradition may be equivalent to primitive, peasant, rural, old-fashioned or static, but it may likewise be a sort of base line to be used for the purpose of measuring change. It is simply a methodological postulate and it expresses no judgment of better or worse. It is a starting point to measure change and integration in a cultural system. Such a view is not in common use in political discussion, for tradition in the discussion of political ideas means that there is an existing body of judgments or truths that have come down to the present. It is a kind of deposit of political faith. Those who defend tradition say that it is a system of civilization, closely adapted to human nature because it is created by time and experience, which in its effectiveness excludes utopia. Its strength is to engender and maintain in society moral habits and sentiments; it creates propitious conditions for healthy customs and vigorous social and political institutions. It starts from the proposition that stable government among men may exist only if there is some identification in the conscience between the sense of liberty and the acceptance of a reign of law. But adherence to tradition means a profound attachment, not a superficial one, to a community of faith. Traditionalism, which is conservative in its nature, nourishes the autonomous customs and institutions of corporative life. Historically, rationalistic individualism has tried to substitute for such organized order the more naked and direct relation between the individual and the state. Traditionalism with its stabilities in both society and government thus tends to be critical of erratic or unpredictable individualism. It is out of European traditionalism that much of the criticism of Rousseau’s democracy and English classical economic liberalism has arisen. It is normal that the traditionalist should favor local government, a cultural localism impregnated with tradition, and founded on the wide distribution of small properties. In such societies there is sturdy resistance to the ideological anarchy which separates rather than unites. Stability in existence creates roots, which engender gentle sentiments and healthy customs. These in turn crystallize into beneficial institutions which support that which has given rise to them. Mostly, it is not the concrete proposal for legislation or the solution of a problem, but the spirit, the symbol of the inner meaning or truth, which distinguishes regimes, and which particularly would distinguish the traditionalist or conservative order from the idea of order which is involved in a revolution. Though it is true that conservatism and traditionalism are not identical, traditionalism is probably the most meaningful word for the conservative position. One must bear in mind, of course, that conservatism and traditionalism can be revolutionary in intention and action as they were against the Second Spanish Republic, but the revolution in this case would have as its meaning the restoration of tradition.4 May we not say that the conservative is a man of a special type of imagination? The present has arisen from a past he can understand, but he judges it by

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metaphysical principle and through an empirical sense of order. He imagines the future as the product of the past, as the growth of a system of order, while his enemy, the revolutionary, is a creature of disorder. In the past, present, and future there has been some realization of what order strives for, but he judges it, like Burke, on principles that are operative in time. Principle is not to be properly separated from the order of life, and the order of life is the order of principle. He is dedicated to the search for a future that emerges from a valid past. In Spain, as elsewhere, the great struggles of Western tradition have taken place. But they have been sharpened, and they are dramatic and lucid to the American who understands such things. In part these struggles have been the struggles of conservatism, its birth, growth, indeed its creation. The victory at the moment is to those who hold with Mediterranean and classical answers to profound questions, and this restoration is of course a victory for conservatism. But the victory points to battles for both Spaniards and Americans.5 In a formal sense, these struggles have been the transference of classical tradition to the modern setting, as in the work of St. Isidore in projecting ancient learning to the Spain of his day. In politics, it has been the inheritance of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and the creation of new political institutions suitable for an emergent Europe, but it includes the liberty of the juridical protection of the individual. In another sense, as part of society, conservatism has been the constant restoration and projection into the future of the Christianity of the past. And we will observe this tension at a later point in the book when the struggle between Guizot and Balmes is examined. For Americans the danger is in rejecting all philosophy, and in affirming that America’s past is irrelevant for Americans today.6 Let us consider further the meaning of conservatism. With a little hesitation a Spaniard will agree that traditionalism is conservative, but it is the true conservatism, and it does not cover all varieties. A Spanish word of contempt for the doctrine was conservadurismo because the conservador was one who preserved his duros, that is, one who watched after his pesetas. On the other hand, it is quite clear that traditionalism is the more popular word, and today in Spain only the liberals make a general use of the term “conservatism” and then it is one of contempt for the failure of conservatives to have any “social intelligence.” Withal, however, we must agree that conservatism, whether or not as a political party, has been a complicated experience for modern western man. Ideological definitions are never easy, but there have been such things as conservatisms, and if we would state a general definition to cover all situations it must be a kind of average, or model, or design which in detail might not be identical with any particular conservative movement. Conservatism evolves, and sometimes it has force and sometimes it has but little of a program to offer. From the Spanish point of view, there have been two main European branches of conservatism. One branch has been what a traditionalist would often consider the true conservatism, that of the Anglo-American countries, including of

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course the British Dominions. The other type of conservatism is found in countries which have evolved under the influence of the French Revolution, including Germany. The British type of conservatism has exemplified in recent generations a salutary moderation and tolerance in its politics, so much so that factions have seldom been able to draw a following. It has been the conservatism of continuity and gradualism, that is, change and reform in accordance with the temper, tradition, and regional sensibilities of the nation. Latin conservatism, so the argument runs, has been a response to Latin liberalism, which has been a sustained but ineffective attack on the religion of the people. In turn, when the Latin conservative has benefited by the seizure of Church property, his conservatism has been hard and greedy. In the later twentieth century in Spain there was, it is said, little difference between the liberals and the conservatives who were in fact “liberal conservatives or conservative liberals.” But in the development of the French Revolution, the Spaniard would suggest, there are other heirs than just liberalism and its counterpart. The temper of politics today seems to be equalitarianism-socialism and this may be seen as a logical development of the “ideologies” of the French Revolution. In Anglo-American countries there has been, until quite recently, a leveling up but not much leveling down, and as Ramiro de Maeztu argued, the Anglo-American businessman has shown what a sense of responsibility for the use of wealth can be. On the other hand, the Latin attack on the bourgeoisie has been bitter, indeed, and to the Latin revolutionary the slaughter of the upper classes has been more of a virtue than a sin. A generalized view of conservatism today suggests a number of ideas. Today’s conservatism does not have much to do with de Bonald, de Maistre, Maurras, or with Barrès. It is differentiated from the figures of the early nineteenth century because they have seemed dated, and from those later ones who sought to use the Catholic Church without having any belief in its teachings. Rather, there seems to be a kind of joining of some nineteenth-century liberals, like Acton and Tocqueville, with the modern conservative temper. More and more there is among conservative intellectuals a conviction of the necessity of founding conservatism on a philosophy. Most conservative thought seems to be a symbiosis between Plato, Aristotle, and Christian philosophy, scholastic and otherwise. Eric Voegelin’s Order and History is surely one of the notable modern examples of this trend. To the extent there is a Christian philosophy in conservatism, there is in it the acceptance of a transcendent order as a truth and therefore a criterion, an orthodoxy, or a judgment of the prudential order that exists in a society. Out of a political past in which the experience with government has often been disappointing to say the least, the conservative spirit has in the Western world become attached to certain maxims or principles which go to help make up the prudential judgments of the conservative tradition. With Burke, it is said that there must be a religious foundation of civil society, and the recognition of

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a divine intent. One must look on human nature as a composite of the good and bad and thus regard the future behavior of an individual either in or out of politics with some skepticism. Government should act in moderation, and it must respect the independence of society (where tradition as judgment or principle has its life). Morality is the judge of history. Historical experience is never in and of itself good, since it may violate the moral principles upon which a society should be based. No government can effectively legislate into existence a full equality between men, and all governments should respect the private property of individuals rightly gained (and robbery, of course, may be either by a government or by private individuals). One may list other maxims of conservative prudence or wisdom, but there is no occasion here for such an extended discussion. However, it is quite possible to think of conservatism as a theory of the community, or a theory of how a society should be ordered. In the creation of any community, as from the classical time on, the greatest of the moral values in the political order is liberty. Such liberty may be identified with a city, with an individual, or, as in Tacitus, with the ancient Roman republican constitution. Every community reflects its judgments of truth when it is mauled by a tyrannical government. On its policies there are many prudential judgments, or judgments of the virtue of wisdom, which attempt to show its conception of what a human being may be entitled to in life. But, in any case, in the West we must say that the conservative spirit in politics has been more a drift or tendency of attitude than it has been a set of fixed policies that all governments should enact into law. In the Spanish community there has been a centuries-long struggle between centralization under the sixteenth-century monarchy and under nineteenth-century liberalism. The centralized society exemplifies then, as in Spain, a search for a community that is more intense and difficult than in America. There is in the centralized society a greater affirmation of the regional tradition of language or politics (as for example the spoken Catalan in Catalonia and political Carlism in other regions like Navarra), and there is also a more firm adherence to regional traditions and institutions (fueros) which have signified responsibility and autonomy.7 But many liberals have been unimpressed with either the social structure or the political centralization of Spain. José Ortega y Gasset wrote España invertebrada (1921) to argue that neither regions nor social groups formed together what might be called Spain. Catalan and Basque nationalism was purely artificial. It had been cultivated mostly in the twentieth century. At the same time, he might well agree with Enrique Gil Robles that the true social groups in a national organism did not exist either. Robles had said: “Without groups there is no people because there is no organism, but only atoms, dust that is walked upon by the powerful, when there is no uprising in furious and destructive actions of the hurricane of revolution.”8

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III Religion is always central in the contrast and similarity of national cultures. This is true even when there has been a repudiation of religion, as in LatinSpanish liberalism. Surely, this rejection of Christianity was central in the rise of liberalism in the French Enlightenment, or in the creation of English liberalism through Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and many others.9 Anti-clericalism itself suggests the centrality of religion in a tradition, just as much as the affirmation of religion, whether Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or otherwise. For Alexis de Tocqueville, religion was the basis of American democracy. The thinker hostile to religious truth, and pragmatic in his soul, can hardly accept this when, by definition, democracy is defined to mean the overcoming of religious consensus. If there is a sense of identity in religion, there is cultural closeness, as between Protestant countries from the time of the Reformation, and separateness in the conflict between Catholics and non-Catholics. In our time, the Christian has often urged that the struggle against Communism should bring all religiously minded people together. Still, even the threat of the worldwide conspiracy of the Communists does not bring people together in defense of their own order of existence. Religious conflict has done much to shape the modern world, both by positive attraction and by negative repulsion. There are two black legends, the leyendas negras. One is the legend of the black purposes of Spain in the New World (which was invented it seems in Holland), and the other is born of the hatred for the United States to be found in Hispanic America. Is there not hatred of the American ideal of work and individual responsibility, which Ramiro de Maeztu saw as central in the United States when he mounted his criticism of Rodó’s thesis that the Latins are Ariel and the Americans are Caliban? The Latin with his belief in the ideal of the artes liberales, the ideal of the gentleman and the scholar, the man of learning and leisure, is much closer to the past than is the American intellectual or professional man. The American may enjoy the artes serviles almost as much as he enjoys the profession to which he gives the better part of his life. Americans often reciprocate by discussing the fanaticism of the Latin leader, or the turgid leftwing rhetoric of the Latin revolutionary mind. As long as the socialistcommunist interpretation of economic life has the aggressive vigor it has today, there will be the black legend of America. As long as Spain is Catholic and the leaders of many Latin American states are anti-clerical, there will be some version of the first black legend in the revolutionary propaganda south of the border. IV For the Spaniard the great age was the age of the baroque. It involved a national concentration of power, economic maturity as measured by that age,

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and a style of life in which the ruling order was powerful and effective. It was life in the stoic mode, with disputation concerning Seneca—a Spaniard—and the application of the Christian principles of personal virtue to the immediate political and economic order. Man was considered not so much an entity as in the Renaissance, but as a free-willing part of an organic or hierarchic order, with a clear perception of personal existence in the deeply loved dynastic state. And it was often stated in the style of Baltasar Gracián, that notable Spanish moralist of the baroque. Still, it appears that the baroque was governed by dedicated men who were unable to prevent steady economic, political, and military decline during the seventeenth century. There was absolutism which was oppressive and incompetent. Political writers continued to concentrate on the exhausted issue of the education of the virtuous and prudent prince. The literature of moral perfection in the king, the writings of Gracián, Quevedo, Diego Saavedra Fajardo, and others, are more familiar in Spanish literature than in politics. But what they wrote was essentially conservative; it was against resistance to tyranny because resistance is destructive of good order; there should be councils of wise men and submission to divine and natural law or to Providence; there should be an increasing recourse to reason of state and the theories of Machiavelli and the Roman Emperor Tiberius in the actual practice of good government. In its subtle way the baroque was not Machiavellian in theory so much as in the forms of its practice. But that systems of government, including the baroque, were unable to sustain the power and the wealth of the state, is one of the more profound lessons of that age of greatness. The depth of a sense of dedication does not measure the results of public policy. With the Spanish-Gothic spirit of the baroque, argued Oswald Spengler, a more energetic style of life was spread over Western Europe. The Spaniard felt within himself a mission, not an “I,” but “it is.” He was either a priest or a soldier, and he served both God and the King. Only the Prussian style of life had such a fierce self-denial in its being. In Alba, a man with the most profound sense of the necessity of the fulfillment of his duty, we can find a related Prussian spirit. Spaniards and Prussians alone rose against Napoleon. But there in the vast and moody San Lorenzo de El Escorial the modern state was born. The great systems of interest politics of dynasties and nations, cabinet diplomacy, war as a planned action in the midst of a multitude of crossing interests, all this came from baroque Madrid. And Bismarck was the last statesman in the Spanish style.10 With us in America there is much in common. There have been two world wars in the century, and other lesser ones, a vast program of international aid and diplomatic interests among allies and among those we wish to make into allies, and the failure of policy to achieve the ends at first proclaimed. There is an increasing secrecy and closeness of political decision within a bureaucracy that has permanence and tenure, behind an anonymity that cannot be pierced.

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The increasing concentration of power in the chief executive, the decline of local authority and its corresponding democratic spirit, all this and more suggests that the world of today has much in common with the world of the baroque, but without the style of life that was common to the Spaniard. Many leaders have ceased to believe in a religious foundation of the state. Our legal system seems increasingly geared, as was the civil law, to sustain the power of the government against the criticism of those who might represent regional and particular interests. In spite of much talk about the backward peoples, there is little lessening of the impact of social and economic inequality on the daily life of the citizen. More than one critic of our time is beginning to feel that the vast political efforts of the mid-twentieth century will have none of the political force we hoped to give to them. Just as the Spaniard combined a sense of power with a fierce energy in missionary work, so we have combined a sense of international power in our diplomacy with a dedication to the elevation of the economic status of the rest of humankind. But it has been said that the United States may for want of proper statesmanship stand where Spain stood in the year 1600. V We live today in the age of economics. Ora et labore is the Benedictine symbol, but today it is largely just labor without prayer that is central in the behavioral analysis of politics. Here we have one of those areas of interpretative battle which is sticky indeed when it comes to crossing the cultural lines from one man’s history to another. The Puritan and the Anglo-American have been known for their enthusiasm for work, for their willingness to judge a man by his habits of work and sobriety of life. Rodó made the comparison between the Latin Ariel and the Puritan Caliban, but Ramiro de Maeztu said this was all wrong, since what the Latin needed was more attention to his work and less idealization of leisure.11 The ancient distinction between the artes liberales and the artes serviles was that the gentleman was a man of study, of knowledge, and refinement. He did not work manually, for others worked for him. He did not consciously accumulate capital, since his life followed the aristocratic pattern of urbane living, so often pictured, but with special force by Werner Sombart in his fascinated gaze or the decadent aristocracy of the Italian Campagna. The predominant classical ideal, the Greek, the Roman, and many others was not of work, but of self-cultivation, self-discipline, self-sacrifice, attention to duty, and, as Walter Bagehot said, the enjoyment of tradition. Alberti, Defoe, and Benjamin Franklin presented to succeeding generations the bourgeois ideal of hard work, frugality, simplicity, and piety. Leisure was of little use for the purpose of turning a groat. Was there not some value in the classical ideal of the liberal arts? Did not the Spanish ruling class of the Golden Century, because of its fierce determination

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to become educated, because of the discipline of study imposed on its children, provide a basis, though not a permanent one, for the imperial greatness of Spain? And did not the New England ruling order demand an effort in study that far transcended their insistence on work? For, unhappily, study was not leisure in the ancient and classical sense of the gentlemen; study was still work in the sight of God, for whose worship and glorification we live upon this earth. Maeztu had no trouble in uniting the Puritan ideal of work and capital accumulation with the ideal of Spanish culture, for the Spaniard could practice his charity as well by dutiful work as by prayer. There was much of the Catholic and Christian view of life in the Puritan establishment of colleges, foundations, fellowships, and the building of churches. Still, among Catholics, theology has retained its firmness and form; it has remained doctrinal, apologetic and didactic, while, among the Puritans, theology gradually ceased to be truth. A creed became an aspiration that all might love, but it did not express for the late Protestant the precise truth of the divine economy which it expressed for the Catholic. In the Spain of the twentieth century, there is a dynamic movement toward industrialization, for the accumulation of capital, and for the growth of the productivity of labor which will enable better wages to be paid and a slow but certain elevation of the standard of living. A Catholic industrialization of Spain may go parallel with the realization of the liberal arts ideal of the gentleman in America under the sponsorship of the descendants of Puritans and Anglicans.12 VI The interpreters of a culture do not just happen. They are “formed.” Is not this the most important of questions? Who makes the intellectuals—the writers, artists, and leaders of politics and religion—in a modern society? We are never quite sure just why a period of crisis and civil strife has come, but these men who have been “formed” for such times leave the written material for the analysis of their behavior. In 1937 in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, Gregorio Marañón, a great physician, historian of science, and a noted writer on the liberal side of politics, wrote an article which is likely to remain one of the short classics of the war. It was called “Liberalismo y communismo: reflexiones sobre la revolución española.”13 It was first published in the Revue de Paris in December 1937, then in La Nación (Buenos Aires) on 3 January 1938, and in Punta Europa in the summer of 1960. It has been read probably as much as anything on the war, and the reason is simple: a great liberal, Marañón, tells what has been wrong with the liberals in Spain, and a fortiori, the errors of the liberals in other countries than those of a Latin culture. In effect, the liberals have a suicidal impulse: they support repeatedly antiliberal causes. They illustrate the proposition, I might say, that those who will not learn from history are destroyed by it. Because of English and American

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success with democracy and reformism, they seem to think that the copybook maxims of liberalism, such as are found in John Locke, or the French thought which dominated the Constituent Assembly at Cádiz, will enable politicians to create the future. But it is a future that is utopian; it is one which tries to escape from time and history. Or, it has been said that the liberals of the twentieth century are bent on repeating the errors of the nineteenth century by which they were destroyed. In 1909, the liberals supported the “red tinged” violence of the tragic week in Catalonia, and always they have projected themselves toward the left at whatever cost. Their petulant and excessive self-confidence prevented them from doubting their superiority whatever may come, and they have seen only the conservative or anti-liberal black and the “red,” which in the end has no love for the liberal in his half way station. In Spain, as elsewhere, the liberal welcomed the revolutions of 1848, of 1871, and, of course, the Great Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Any leftist revolution has seemed better than any version of capitalism, any set of bourgeois institutions, or any belief in a conservative or traditional and frankly religious order of society. What Marañón saw was what he thought was a mistake without equal in history: the liberals became converted to sympathy with the Communists who gained increasing power and influence rapidly in Spain in the struggles in 1931 against the monarchy. Socialism was sympathetic, of course, but the liberals might have prevented the destruction of order and liberty under the Second Republic, a disintegration which made the uprising against the Republic a certainty at least a year and a half before it happened. Marañón said—and one may put aside for the moment the later nationalist documentation—that the Communists’ confidence in their ultimate victory was clear as early as May 1931. They planned to take over in October 1934, because of the increasing influence of the Rightists and because of the trouble in Austria. But Marañón insisted in print at the time that unless the Popular Front accepted a strong nationalist basis for its actions, there would be an uprising against it. Indeed, it was the lack of national patriotism from 1931 to 1939 that gave the nationalists much of their support. For example, Basque separatism drove vast numbers to the support of General Franco. But it was also clear that the Spanish Republic became steadily more Communist. The liberals and the socialists were reduced to impotence by a few Communists who acted according to discipline and according to plan. When Marañón left Spain after having served liberalism so long, he was denounced even by his fellow liberals as an enemy of the people.14 But why all of this? Our author insists that the liberals have shown an infinite credulity of anything evil about the right and anything good about the left. The liberal has an enormous fear of not appearing liberal: he does not want to be called unintelligent, an enemy of the people, or a person who is not a lover of the modern, for example, the utopian future. And there is another curious and bitter paradox about the Spanish Civil War which arises precisely from these predilections. The propaganda for the Loyalists, for the Republic, was excel-

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lent outside of Spain, but inside Spain it tended to drive the populace over to the side of the Nationalists. The Russian propaganda screamed throughout about the use of African troops in Spain, the Moors, and this was forceful in the United States. But the Spaniards had fought along side of the Africans long before and ever since the capture of Granada in 1492; the Moors were Spaniards by law and by loyalty. But to the Spaniards the increasing consciousness of the regime of Russian Communism was something different. Thus, it became apparent gradually that if the Republic won the war the Russian Communists would stay in Spain and would rule it in the future. In one sense, it can be said that a regime of anti-democratic oriental Communists was pitted against an anti-Communist and anti-democratic defense of “Europe.” For the Spaniards could see a difference between the invasion of the French under Napoleon, the French who struggled desperately not to leave, and the assistance of German and Italian officers, men, and materiel. The Russian Communists were like the French early in the nineteenth century: they had come to stay—and through Spain—to conquer the whole Latin world. Because of the role of the liberals in the rise of Communist influence, Marañón believed they had completed their mission for several generations. Donoso Cortés thought much the same in the middle of the nineteenth century, and he was a good, if early, prophet of the course of the European crisis. So the issue moved into the period after 1939. Many of the liberals became supporters of the restoration of Don Juan, since a liberal monarchy in the 1960s would liquidate the victory of the Nationalists over the Republic. The enemies of the Masonic order said that the Masons were monarchists because a failing liberal monarchy would again bring the Republic. And the traditionalist would say, Plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose.15 He would move a little closer to the philosophy of Carlism—for God, for Country, and for King. The forces for liberalism in the modern world are great, indeed. The United States exports its foreign assistance (“Potomac Liberalism”), the common market brings great pressure on Spain, the British Labor party and moderate socialists on the continent try to wear a liberal mask to hide the ancient sympathy for the extreme left. Moreover, the trend toward “liberalization” in contemporary Spain seeks to identify itself with the liberal monarchy. But this monarchy tries more and more to be a spokesman for traditionalism, while many of its supporters believe the “restoration” will end traditionalism itself. For more than a century and a half we have been struggling at the awful and biting edge of ideological warfare. In 1848 Europe was shaken throughout by the revolutions, which somehow did not bring the promise of the new age, anymore than did its continuation in the Commune of 1871, or the 1931 revolution and Second Republic in Spain. At the same time the English forgot about revolution in the Crystal Palace Exposition, and the Americans were busy creating industry and moving westward in the settlement of the continental United States. But just as English liberalism turned collectivist or Tory, as Herbert

The Resurgence of Spanish Tradition

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Spencer said in 1884, so American liberals brought socialism into the “liberalism” of the twentieth century. And they have drawn large numbers after them. Michael Oakeshott has quoted the first issue of Vauvenargues’ Réflexions et maxims, No. 221, that great men, in teaching the weak to reflect, put them on the route to error.16 There are extremes at both ends of the political spectrum, and the problem seems obvious: What is the ground on which both the conservative American and the traditionalist Spaniard may stand? And the answer would also seem quite clear: they must both stand on their own traditions. It must rest on the proposition that history is made by men who have freedom to make it, by accident, and by situations. Because there is principle, history is made by asserting that we can prophesy the future and have a knowledge of it because we are determined to make it in the image of truth.17 Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

Gregor Roy, “Behold a Pale Horse,” Catholic World, Volume 200, Number 1,195 (October 1964), p. 67. (Editors’ Note: The article is a review of the major motion picture by the same name. It should also be mentioned that Wilson was wellacquainted with the journal and had previously been a contributor. See Wilson, “The Revolution in the Social Sciences,” Catholic World, Volume 190, Number 1,135 [October 1959], pp. 9-14.) See Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, Pensamiento español, 1963 (1964), pp. 226230. Mora is one of the younger and remarkably competent Spanish literary and intellectual critics. (Editors’ Note: For Wilson, the importance of symbolism in relationship to politics was greatly influenced by his association with Eric Voegelin. See “Francis Graham Wilson: An Appreciation [1901-1976],” in Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal, ed. H. Lee Cheek, Jr., M. Susan Power, and Kathy B. Cheek [New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001], pp. 7-19; Robert L. Paquette, “A Pioneer American Conservative,” Intercollegiate Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 [Fall 2002], pp. 56-59; and H. Lee Cheek, Jr., Francis Graham Wilson [Wilmington, DE: I.S.I. Books, 2005].) Editors’ Note: Wilson’s extended commentary on the social and political views of American political leaders is contained in his unpublished manuscript, “Congressmen With the Pen” (University of Illinois Archives). For a related assessment, see Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). See Rafael Gambra Ciudad, “Aspectos del pensamiento de Salvador Minguijón, Revista international de sociología, July-September, 1959, No. 67. Michel Debré is credited with saying the depolitization of the national is a major imperative. This is traditionalism, indeed. See Samuel P. Huntington, “Conservatism as Ideology,” American Political Science Review, LVII (June, 1963), p. 459. Among the most powerful defenders of traditionalism and regionalism (including Carlism in numerous instances) are Juan Vásquez de Mella, Regionalismo y monarquía. ed. Santiago Galindo Herrero (1957); Antonio Aparisi y Guijarro, En defensa de la libertad, ed. Santiago Galindo Herrero (1957); and Enrique Gil Robles, Derecho político según los principios de la filosofía y el derecho cristianos (2 vols., 1899, 1902). But see, especially El tradicionalismo espãnol del siglo XIX, selección y prólogo de Vicente Marrero (1955). Probably the most brilliant of the purely philosophical defenses of tradition in Spain is found in the work of Father Manuel García Morente, Ideas

20

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Order and Legitimacy para una filosofía de la historia de España (1957); and Idea de la hispanidad (1961). Socrates spoke to the son of Pericles of the restoration of tradition. One must restore the ancient customs, but we must also practice them. See Xenophon, Memorabilia, trans. E. C. Marchant (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1923), III.v.14 (p. 197). The literature on Western European conservatism is quite extensive, except in regard to Spain, which may justify this inquiry. Who can deny that Americans who take ideas seriously have a strong nostalgia for Europe, liberals for the Europe of liberalism and socialism, and conservatives for the Europe of the great tradition, the great center of civilized existence. Naturally, the liberal contends he has the center position, and Spanish liberals are no different than Americans in this. See Julián Marías, Los españoles (1962), pp. 121 ff. Francis G. Wilson, “The Anatomy of Conservatives,” Ethics, LXX (July, 1960), pp. 265-281. Enrique Gil Robles, Tratado de derecho político según los principios de la filosofía y el derecho cristianos, Nota preliminar de José María Gil Robles (3rd ed., 1961, 2 vols.), I, p. 342. This work has been regarded as one of the best of legal and juristic statements of the principle of Spanish traditionalism. In this sense, there is a meeting between Ortega the liberal and Gil Robles the traditionalist. See Louis I. Bredvold, The Brave New World of the Enlightenment (1961). If one should pick an issue that is central in all of Western conservatism, it would be consideration of the Enlightenment, which, it must be admitted, was firmly grounded on English liberalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Certainly, the divide among Spaniards ascends to their attitude on the eighteenth century. Spain declined either because there was too much devotion to the eighteenth century or not enough. The thread of this argument runs through nearly every topic considered in this study. The eighteenth century influence was not wholly French, but broadly European, including an Italian influence. Charles III, for example, was deeply influenced by the Italian Enlightenment in his days as king in Naples. See Vicente Rodríguez Casado, La política y los políticos en el reinado de Carlos III (1962), pp. 47 ff.; also Melchor Fernández Almagro, “Del antiguo régimen a las Cortes de Cádiz,” Revista de estudios políticos, No. 126 (November-December 1962), p. 11. Oswald Spengler, Preussentum und Sozialismus (1921), p. 27. Beginning in the period of seventeenth-century decline, and in much of the literature on how to restore Spain, there is criticism of the Spanish aristocracy for not engaging in useful labor. The eighteenth century is particularly rich in this regard. Charles III wanted the aristocracy to engage in business, to go to work. Feijóo at that time, and Balmes in the next century, discuss the same theme. Charles III made efforts to create a new aristocracy from the middle class which would learn how to run the government and the economy. Actually, such ideas were an integral part of the reformist crusade of the century. See Vicente Rodríguez Casado, La política y los politícos en el reinado de Carlos III (1962), pp. 170 ff., for example. Not all classical thought held manual labor in contempt or unworthy of the gentleman. Consider Xenophon’s treatise Oeconomicus in which Socrates discusses approvingly the idea of work for a gentleman. Editors’ Translation: “Liberalism and Communism: Reflections on the Spanish Revolution.” See Diego Sevilla Andrés, Historia política de la zona roja (1954), passim. Editors’ translation: “The more things change, they are no longer the same.” Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962), p. 1.

The Resurgence of Spanish Tradition 17.

21

On the contemporary British philosophies of history, see the articles by Ved Mehta, “Onward and Upward with the Arts: The Flight of the Crook-taloned Birds—I,” New Yorker, December 8, 1962, pp. 59-157; “Onward and Upward with the Arts: The Flight of the Crook-taloned Birds—II,” New Yorker, December 15, 1962, pp. 47-129. But Mehta has since published Fly and the Fly Bottle; Encounters with British Intellectuals (1963). Since the end of the Civil War, there have been numerous examples of the intensive study of traditionalism in Spain, in part at least because it was a term that carried with it an aura of political respectability. Among the historic figures that have been used are Diego Savaadra Fajardo (Obras completas, ed. by Angel González Palencia, 1946); Miguel Batllori, Gracián y el barroco (1958); and Padre Feijóo. See Luis Sánchez Agesta, El pensamiento político del despotismo Ilustrado (1953); Vicente Rodríguez Casado, La política y los políticos en el reinado de Carlos III (1962); Joaquín de Encinas, La tradicíon española y la revolución (1958); Marcial Solana, El tradicionalismo político español y la ciencia hispana (1951); Melchor Ferrer, Domingo Tejera, y José F. Aced, Historia del tradicionalismo español (28 vols., Sevilla, 1941); Hans Juretschke, Los afrancesados en la guerra de la Independencia (1962); Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, Ortega y el 98 (1961); and Rafael Calvo Serer, España, sin problema (3rd ed., 1957). Most of these works cited are traditionalist or conservative, but it is obvious that on such an issue as the nature of Spanish tradition, the bibliography is almost endless. It should be clear as well that it is impossible at this late date to assume that Carlism has a monopoly on the word “traditionalism” in Spanish politics. However, a hundred thousand volunteers for the Nationalist cause enlisted from among the Carlists, while other traditionalists, such as the Renovación Española and Acción Española did not, according to the Carlists, produce so much as a battalion of volunteers. For a massive bibliographical apparatus on modern Spain, see Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, Evolución de la las ideas sobre la decadencia española y otros estudios de crítica literaria (1962). This volume is rich in material both in defense and in criticism of scholarship on the Spanish tradition.

2 Juan Donoso Cortés: A Diagnosis of Crisis1 I Juan Donoso Cortés, the Marqués de Valdegamas, died in Paris on 3 May 1853. For four and a half years he had been recognized as one of the most controversial and acclaimed critics of the European revolutionary movement, as a defender of the Catholic Church against liberal and revolutionary criticism, and as one of the most able parliamentary orators and diplomats of the time. A few years after his death his name was all but forgotten. A hundred years later, in 1953, there was an extensive revival of interest in his work in Western Europe, and the ensuing scholarship forms an impressive bibliography. Though in his day he was regarded by many as a Cassandra, Europeans immersed in crisis in the twentieth century have not discounted the prophetic quality of his insight.2 Donoso became, to those who were impressed with his thought, a rare example of the blending of the geometric spirit and a sense of delicacy, which, as Pascal noted, constituted intelligence. He was also a mystic and a prophet, whose mysticism and prophetic power was based on an understanding of St. Augustine, Bossuet, Giambattista Vico, and numerous French writers. Donoso’s imaginative analysis of political crisis has, no doubt, stood up better than the more optimistic thinkers of a hundred years ago. But it is a fact of note that there is practically no Hispanic-American bibliography concerning him, and perhaps the reason is clear. An ardent Catholic conservative, a passionate defender of the Spanish monarchy, a sharp critic of liberal French thought, a man who was hostile to the republicanism of the New World, and, indeed, one whose European-focused conservatism hardly touched the issues of order characteristic of Hispanic America, could hardly appeal even to the conservatives in America, and certainly not to the liberals. Still, it must be cited in passing that a lecture about Donoso was given by Francisco Elías de Tejada at the University of São Paulo in 1949.3 23

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Though Donoso paid little attention to the Golden Century of Spain, and though he wrote and spoke at a time when the Spanish Empire largely had been lost, scholars today see Donoso in an intellectual succession from the great Spanish jurist-theologians and political writers of the sixteenth century. Like Vitoria, Suárez, Mariana, Ribadeneyra, and others, who were concerned with a Christian political theory in Spain, Donoso continued their labor in the nineteenth century. In another aspect, Donoso helped to formulate the ideas of Spanish political traditionalism, which is still part of the Spanish conservative order of life. But his formulation of traditionalism seems to rest primarily on a concern for nineteenth-century clashes among Catholic thought, liberal thought, and the rising revolutionary movements of socialism and Communism. The traditionalists, like Donoso, accept the classical arguments for a restrained monarchy as part of a hierarchy of natural, social groups. Parliament should represent classes and social forces, corporations and unions, agriculture, the clergy, and intellectuals drawn from the universities and academies. According to Alois Dempf, Donoso’s ideal, like that of the later traditionalists, was a society composed of natural and hierarchical communities. Though Donoso’s famous Ensayo, to be examined later, shows no clear political position, he is surely for the organic against the individualist society, the latter being the summation of liberalism at the time. The resurgence of interest in Donoso has coincided with the resurgence of traditional Spanish political thought.4 Donoso was not the only one, of course, to see the depth of the mid-nineteenth century crisis. Engels, speaking for the Marxians, urged that in the Revolution of 1848 the bourgeoisie and the proletariat faced each other over the barricades for the first time, and he added the implicit prophecy that this would occur many times more. Tocqueville saw that “a time of troubles” had descended on Europe, and Amiel, the Swiss philosopher of Geneva, confided to his Journal Intime the course of disturbance in French civilization. Burckhardt and other historians, as well as the words of Nietzsche, might also be cited. But Donoso was one of the first to insist that the crisis was general, that it was not to be cured in a short time, that liberalism was failing, that the leftwing socialist or Communist movements were the proper heirs of a disintegrating liberalism, and that the crisis itself involved the more profound questions of religion in relation to social values. The socialists, Communists, and anarchists—as they were somewhat indifferently called—had little patience with the forms of parliamentary government through which the middle-class liberals sought to govern. And Donoso, a man whose veneration of the Spanish monarchy was deeply religious, finally came to the conclusion that neither monarchy, nor parliamentarism, nor the middle class would put order above the disorders of the critical time in which he lived. Slowly, and clearly with reluctance, he was led to support “the crowned dictatorship” of Napoleon III as one of the ways

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through which a decision against the general European revolutionary conspiracy might be attained. Crisis leads men to exaggerate ideas and consequences, and one may say that Donoso, as a Spaniard, suffered from the vices he attributed to his countrymen. Writing from Dresden in August 1849, to Count Raczynski, the Prussian ambassador in Madrid, Donoso insisted that every novelty is admitted to Spain without delay and that every idea thus admitted is pushed to the final limits of exaggeration. According to Donoso, the historical character of Spaniards is colored by the habit of exaggerating everything, including the virtues and vices, the big things and the little. Perseverance was magnified into seven centuries of war against the Arabs; the hatred of races to the expulsion of the Jews; and religious sentiment to the invention of the Inquisition. Donoso believed that socialism alone remained to be pushed to extremes, and that in Spain this would take place.5 Donoso’s writings and speeches from January 1849 to his death were read throughout Europe, and by leading statesmen, including Metternich, Bismarck, Napoleon III, and others. In his time, the violent sense of crisis did not seem unreal to many sober minds in Europe, though, of course, one would concede that it was the conservatives, and those who feared the revolution, who gave him respectful attention. II Donoso was born in the midst of the War for Independence against the French in the Valle de la Serena in Extremadura on 6 May 1809. With his death in 1853, he had lived through one of the most turbulent periods in Spanish history, and, indeed, of modern Europe. In his youth, after the war and the restoration of Fernando VII, liberalism and sympathy for the French Enlightenment had begun to revive. The Constitution of Cádiz of 1812 had been set aside with the return of the King, and by his acceptance of the “Manifesto of the Persians” proffered to him in Valencia. He ruled then as an absolute monarch, yet he did not make fully the expected restorations of past institutions. A whole series of attempted uprisings and Pronunciamientos foreshadowed the liberal victory in 1820, but also it foreshadowed the victorious three-year war which followed for the restoration of the power of the King. The struggle in the Court has been recounted on many occasions, the liberals in general giving one account and the traditionalists another. The King was surrounded by constant conspiracies of people associated with the Court. But the great event was, indeed, the exclusion of the King’s brother Don Carlos from the succession by repealing the Bourbon principle of the Salic law of male succession, which had been the public law of Spain from soon after the accession of the Bourbons in 1700. By the Pragmatic Sanction of 31 March 1830 he restored the old law of succession of Las Partidas, which in effect made his

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daughter, by his fourth and last marriage, the successor to the throne as Isabel II. Fernando VII died in 1833, Isabel succeeded, and the Carlist Wars began by the revolt of the traditionalist supporters of Don Carlos. Carlism has continued even today in the support for later pretenders and for the traditionalist principles of God, King, and Country. For Donoso Cortés the Carlist Wars had hardly subsided when the revolutions of 1848 hit Europe thunderously, including the revolt in Rome against Pius IX. Donoso was a supporter of Isabel and the Queen Mother, María Cristina, with whom he went into exile when Isabel was declared of age. It seems he was primarily a liberal in this period, but with various explanations he turned back to the Church, though he continued to use a number of French ideas of the conservative variety. It is the Catholic and conservative Donoso whose reputation as a critic of the revolution spread all over Europe. His critics point to the overlap of liberalism and conservatism in his political thought, and notably the fact that in his earlier time he was not a defender of the right of the Church to hold its property. However, it seems clear that Donoso did not derive any personal benefit from the confiscation of Church property under Mendizábel. In the defense of public order, he was driven away from devotion to the parliament. He restated much of the great tradition of Spain, but he left out some of its most important aspects which relate to the sixteenth century. It is probable he was entirely unconnected with the numerous attempts at golpes de estado (coups d’état), but apparently in whatever he did he was never on the wrong side. His private connections are difficult to determine at certain times.6 His family, probably distantly related to the great Conquistador, was Catholic, yet greatly influenced by French liberal ideas.7 In his youth he was brought under both influences, though it would seem that until the uncertain point at which he began to return to the Church, the liberal influences prevailed in his thought and in his choice of friends.8 From 1820 to 1828 he studied in various schools, many of them in a moribund state, owing to the French invasion and the wars fought in the Peninsula. He studied at the Universities of Salamanca, Caceres, Sevilla, and Madrid. From 1829 to 1832 he was a professor at Caceres, having secured his position through liberal support. He was married, but he soon lost his wife and child. His political career began when he submitted to Ferdinand VII his Memoria sobre la monarquía, and secured as a result a post in the government service. In his support of the monarchy at this time, Donoso rejected the Carlists as the great danger to the state, though he also repudiated the liberal revolutionaries.9 Such a position placed Donoso among the moderates, a liberal to be sure, but one who rejected the revolutionary implications of much of the thought imported into Spain from France. He was elected as a deputy in the Cortes in 1837, and he followed at the same time an active career as a political journalist. When María Cristina, the Queen Mother, was forced into exile, Donoso went with her as her personal secretary, and lived as a voluntary exile from 1840 to 1843. On the occasion of the royal

Juan Donoso Cortés: A Diagnosis of Crisis

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marriages of Isabel II and her sister, Donoso was awarded his title of nobility, becoming the Marqués de Valdegamas in 1846. The great turning point in his public life was the Revolution of 1848, though the turn against liberalism and socialism and his return to the Church had deep personal roots as well. Some indications of change occurred in the late 1830s, though it is generally admitted that the death of his brother in 1847 had a profound effect on his religious views. Upon his return to Spain, he was re-elected to the Cortes, and for a few years he moved between his positions as Spanish ambassador, first to Berlin in 1849, and then to Paris from 1851 to 1853, and as a member of the Spanish parliament. In November of 1851, he was chosen a member of the Spanish Senate. His final letters demonstrate the possibility of a return to public life in Spain, though events there, as well as in Europe generally, made the life of a member of parliament distasteful to him. Donoso’s European fame rested on his Discurso sobre la dictadura, delivered on 4 January 1849; his Discurso sobre Europa, given 30 January 1850; his Discurso sobre la situación de España, delivered 30 December 1850; and his Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo, first published in June 1851.10 Amidst his activities as a political journalist, and his public and official services as a person welcome both in the Court and among the liberals, he was called upon to give his Lecciones de derecho político from November 1836 to February 1837, in the reformed Ateneo Español.11 It was a period of political confusion and crisis in Spanish affairs, and the Ateneo was an extremely important center of discussion among liberal leaders. Most of the critics of the Lecciones believe they had a considerable effect on Spanish thought about the constitutional situation, and certainly they sustained in eloquent fashion the necessity of a moderate system of public policy. One might even argue that at this time Donoso had demonstrated his conservative and traditionalist inclination, and that his utterances are prophetic of the principle of compromise between liberalism and Catholicism in the Latin countries that began to be worked out later in the century.12 If compromise were possible, crisis and revolution had also to be faced and surmounted by a government worthy of the name. It is his optimistic view of history, his confidence in the organization of public law, the possibility of overcoming extremes in political sentiment, and his attachment to reason and intelligence—in a secular sense—that distinguish his lectures from his later and more pessimistic concept of the course of European politics. Likewise, at this time, benevolence toward France, including the revolution of 1830, and toward England, were discernable elements in his political thought. Donoso was still concerned with the problem of Spanish public life, the monarchy, the Carlist wars, and the violent extremes to which political opinion had gone in his own country. In his later thought, the crisis was more than Spanish, for it was European and total in its implications.

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III The “new” Donoso slowly emerged during the next few years.13 His positions in politics, such as his defense of stronger monarchical powers for Isabel II and the re-enforcement of the power and independence of the Senate through selection by the royal authority, indicate that a change was taking place. It was the essence of representative government that one branch of the legislature should be named by the throne. His criticism of the French liberal intellectuals grew more caustic and his defense of Christianity more vigorous; but at the same time he turned to traditionalist, Catholic, and conservative French thought. De Bonald had considerable influence on him. He began to feel, in 1838, that Spain was moribund, and that there was neither a conception of truth among the political parties nor any real power in the government. In the Spanish political chaos, it was not unreasonable, perhaps, that he defended a law on the state of siege and the right of the government to collect taxes if the Cortes refused to pass the proper laws. Thus, when the Cortes took over the guardianship and education of the young Isabell II, and María Cristina was forced to leave Spain, it was not unnatural that Donoso should go with her, having been a passionate defender of her rights as Queen Mother. In exile in Paris, he continued to see the unpredictable results of popular voting, and his clear consciousness of conservatism as a political spirit emerged. He referred to conservatism as a continuous transaction or compromise between order and liberty, and between the rights of the people and the rights of princes. In his history of the regency of María Cristina, probably in 1843, Donoso declared that revolutions are the greatest of crimes: pero yo tengo la flaqueza de creer que todo lo que es nuevo es en política y en moral falso y peligroso, y en religión, falso, peligroso y absurdo.14 After his exile, and again in the Spanish Cortes, Donoso defended the right of the clergy to a suitable living, and he turned against foreign influences on Spain, either diplomatic or intellectual, but he did not reach a point at all similar to the modern Spanish insistence of the glories of the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It should be observed that in discussing Spanish sovereignty, he declared it was vested in the Cortes and the Queen. Lex fit consensu populi et constitutione Regis.15 The implications of the ancient doctrine of the consent of the governed, as stated by San Isidoro, were not developed in his parliamentary speeches. He seemed to wish now merely to avoid the extreme metaphysical consideration of the idea of sovereignty. And he insisted that Spain had always been a religious and a democratic monarchy. The revolution in Rome, the revolution in France in 1848, and the general European revolutionary conspiracy forced Donoso to the belief that concession was impossible, that no compromise or middle way could be achieved, and that the crisis in Europe was too profound to be cured by liberal devices.16 The crisis had become in his mind the absolute fact of political life. He returned to his enduring guides: St. Augustine, Bossuet, and Vico.17 While he was writing

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the Ensayo, he was also as a member of the Cortes, making speeches which resounded through Europe, bringing the praise of those who opposed the revolution and the hatred and blame of the revolutionary liberals and socialists. The speeches in the Cortes were, of course, directed primarily to a Spanish audience and they discussed Spanish issues, but they were in reality excursions into history, philosophy, theology, and the general state of Europe. Even those who had no sympathy with the strong Catholic views he expressed could appreciate the force and brilliance of his oratory against the revolutionary disorganization of European society. Donoso’s Discurso sobre la dictadura was delivered on 4 January 1849. It was precisely a defense of the suspension of constitutional guarantees and the use of executive power by General Narváez, then at the head of the government. The majority of the Cortes supported the action of the government. If we would protect society, Donoso insisted, there are times when the law fails and we must resort to a dictatorship; legality, in a formal sense, has its limits. Though Donoso said he could never be a dictator, he felt he could understand dictatorship and the circumstances that put dictators in power. There are times, then, when dictatorship is a legitimate government; when the invasionary forces of sickness in society become concentrated in political associations, the forces of resistance must be concentrated in the hands of one person. This statement was true, he thought, for every society, from the institution of Greek ostracism to the Roman dictatorship, including the existing French Republic. In England, however, Donoso did not think the dictatorial power was exceptional, since it is always present in the power of parliament, and the only limit is England’s political prudence. In this speech, and in others, Donoso made references to the divine government of the world, and these references were usually greeted with derisive laughter from his political opponents. He believed that the revolutionary movements beginning in 1848 and extending through Europe were God’s punishment of society. According to Donoso, there were deep, providential causes for the revolutionary tide. When the progressives said that revolution has come from misery and tyranny, they were wrong; revolutions are the diseases of rich and free peoples. No revolution has come from people who are enslaved, and opulent aristocrats are a more disturbing force than the downtrodden. Donoso believed that Spain had been infected with unsound ideas from France, and that the internal situation left the political, religious, and monarchic questions unsolved. Externally, in Donoso’s opinion, Spain stood between the contrary forces of France and England. The great European ideas have been French; Charlemagne formulated the idea of a Catholic society; Voltaire suggested a philosophical organization of Europe; and it was in fact the mission of Napoleon to spread the principle of the revolution. Against these French trends, it has been the providential function of England to balance the disruptive force of the French. Donoso also believed that without England, France would con-

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vulse the world, and without France, England would force the world to vegetate. By a strange turn of recent events, however, France has been preaching the idea of the status quo, and England has been sympathetic toward continental revolution. Here is a great English error: If the English support the revolutionary parties, the French will direct the revolution. The English do not know it, and certainly the continental left does not, nor the French, but European society is marching toward a great and critical despotism, a despotism founded on the decline of religious sentiment among the Western nations. As a broad generalization, Donoso insisted that when religious spirit is low, the tide of political repression runs high, and when the religious spirit is high, political repression is less important. Liberty is—for Donoso Cortés—a product of Christianity and religious unity. Thus, with the Reformation, the power of the state developed an inclination toward repression, as it was given a new surge forward by the absolute monarchy, permanent armies, the growth of police forces, and administrative centralization. And the new means of communication, such as the telegraph, had but aided the growth of the power of the state. If there should be a religious revival, political despotism will contract, but such a revival is unlikely. Instead, Donoso felt that we should prepare today for a gigantic universal despotism that will be widespread because of the new technologies, such as steam power, railroads, and the telegraph. Therefore, one thing and one thing alone can save the world from despotic government as it has been announced by the revolutionary movement of 1848. It is not mere rights and political guarantees that will do this, but only a revival of religion. Individuals return to the faith, but seldom can a whole people be expected to become again religious. For Donoso the political conflict of Western Europe had become a battle between good and evil, and in the depth of his pessimism he insisted that only the ideal of a Catholic civilization could be defended. Throughout history men have attempted to avoid revolution either by resistance or by concessions; now the issue is resolved for concession had failed, as the events of Rome and the plight of Pius IX showed. Resistance was the only possible course to meet the crisis. Liberty has died in the turbulence surrounding the overthrow by minorities of legitimate constitutional and majority governments. There is now, he thought, no choice between liberty and dictatorship, but only between the dictatorship of insurrection and the dictatorship of government. Donoso would choose the latter.18 IV Donoso’s fame in Europe was based primarily on his Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo, published in June 1851. His labors as a diplomat and his political speeches in the Spanish Cortes added to his distinction, but the conflict over the Ensayo was little short of violent. Naturally, both the liberals and the leftwing revolutionaries heaped upon it their

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sharpest scorn, but Catholics were, themselves, profoundly divided. The “liberal” Catholics were beginning their campaign to achieve what in the twentieth century, under the leadership of men like Don Luigi Sturzo, came to be called “Christian democracy.” In France, some Catholics insisted that defense of the monarchy, or its restoration, was the only proper solution, since there could be no compromise with the republic and the revolution; but others were separating the issues—the republic was one thing, the Church another, and a social program to meet the issues of industrialism was necessary. Though Donoso submitted his work to the Pope, and it was not condemned, it is still true that the trend of Catholic thought on social questions was slowly, but forcefully, moving in the other direction. Jaime Balmes, and not Donoso, was the prophet of Catholic social action in Spain.19 What Donoso did not see, and what the great leaders in Catholic social thought in the nineteenth century did see, was that there is a Christian theory of reform, and that such a theoretical insight may be a proper and prudential solution for the moral, social, and industrial problems of the modern world. On the other hand, the affirmation of a Catholic view of history and the place of Christianity in social life is surely a thesis that was needed in Donoso’s time. Subsequent events have in measure validated the Spaniard’s insight into the crisis he critiqued. It was a moral crisis that men faced; it was philosophical and spiritual, and it was not a political game of secular chess.20 At the outset, Donoso agreed with Proudhon that all of our political questions finally become theological. It is true because theology is the science of God that includes all possibilities. Under man’s freedom, however, history had been largely a struggle among religions. In the West the new theology was Catholic; it was in principle a complete system of civilization; and in a truly Catholic society neither despotism nor rebellion are possible. As Donoso looked at the new movements of thought, especially of the liberals and the socialists, he witnessed a denial of God, of Christianity, and of the principles of human solidarity to be found in Christian thought. The new sophists had arrived, but the revolution comes hard after them, and with the revolution the reign of the executioners. A new liberty of discussion had brought all things into question, but it had not cured the radical impotence of human reason to designate error; liberty of discussion had become the foundation of all modern constitutions. The real question for Donoso is whether human nature is fallen and sick or is it sana (healthy)? Can men be completely rational with their own natural power? If men are not able to reach certitude or truth, then discussion itself becomes absurd, and if men are in nature sick or sinful, they cannot be certain of their conclusions. Freedom of discussion thus produces its own denial under some new system of domination. In contrast to the inevitable confusion of secular thought, Donoso offered his interpretation of the Catholic solution: in history there is a possible redemption for each individual, liberty is ennobled by its religious basis, and

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truth is reached through the teaching authority of the Church. The Cartesian doubt does not produce truth, because doubt only generates doubt, and skepticism produces skepticism, but truth can be derived from faith and science.21 Only with Christian truth came the idea of a total human society, a solidarity of all men, and a society in which there are no barbarians perpetually at the gates. One can neither explain man without grace, nor society without providence. Guizot’s reason, for example, is admirable, but he has not seen that civilization in Europe is Catholicism itself— and men like Marat and Robespierre were cynical and bloody tyrants, the incarnation of vanity with its ferocious instincts. For Donoso, liberty is not simply the right to choose between good and evil. Liberty consists in the faculty to understand and to love, and perfect liberty consists in understanding and loving perfectly. But since God alone can understand and love perfectly, he alone can have perfect liberty. Man is free because he is endowed with will and intelligence; but he is not perfectly free because he is not endowed with an infinite and perfect understanding, or with an infinite and perfect will. The drama of history and the grandeur of free will lies in the conflict between the liberty of man and the providence of God. All men are for or against God, but the man without faith has to choose between two Manicheanisms. Either it is the old Manicheanism that was found in the two principles of good and evil in two gods at war, or it is the modern Manicheanism of Proudhon, in which God is evil and man is good, and the great duty of man is to conquer God, the enemy of man. In contrast, the Catholic view would save both providence and the liberty of man by ending conflict and rivalry between them. The Catholic solution of liberty is finally the only profound answer to the questions that man may ask. But the liberals have an indolent and abstract God. Evil is denied in the physical world, but being admitted in human affairs, evil becomes a question of politics and government. The legitimate government of the liberals is a government of human, deistic reason, embodied in the middle classes, or in its philosophers. Here, Donoso enters another and important stage of the argument. He would admit that the Catholic view was at war with the liberal approach to life, but he observed also that the socialist mind, having been based in the first place on liberal thought, had now besieged the liberal stronghold. Atheists, democrats, and socialists were at war, however, not only with liberals, but also with the Catholics and the monarchists. Liberals found themselves in a sterile position, unable to do good because finally they could affirm nothing; nor was there evil, because the liberals have a horror of any absolute negation. Finally, the liberal will be driven either to Catholicism or to socialism, for men are unable to accept permanently the indecision of the liberal creed. The people, prophesied Donoso, will go to the streets, calling either for Jesus or Barabbas, tossing into the dust the liberal professors. Socialism must win, he argued, not because of its corrupt theology, but because of the indecisiveness of the liberals. Donoso’s

Juan Donoso Cortés: A Diagnosis of Crisis

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point was that liberals had sought to soften or deny the essential philosophical issues, whereas Catholics and socialists have sought to go to the heart of social and religious questions. And to the socialist it is not government that is important, for it is rather society that is sick. Donoso affirmed that the enemy of the Catholic was finally the socialist and not the liberal. The great error of socialism is the denial of any tie between God and man. All of the socialist schools of thought are rationalist, republican, and atheist, and reason is given a complete and sovereign independence, which denies revelation, grace, and providence. Donoso’s mission was to show that both liberalism and socialism were ultimately self-contradictory. It was his belief that where liberalism has prevailed, there had been a corruption of the body politic. Liberals may offer a halfhearted denial of God, but in a sense, the socialists are more logical when they deny God completely. Some critics have felt that it was unfortunate for Donoso that he could not write against Marx, Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and others in proclaiming his mystical and Christian interpretation of history. As it was, Proudhon, the chief expositor of socialism at the time, became his primary enemy and the embodiment of the ultimate contradictions of socialism. To Proudhon, the most learned of the modern socialists, God might be found in pantheism, in humanity or in deism, but he also said that God is personal or there is no God. If God exists, he is the enemy of humanity, or God is like the Fatum of the ancients. For Donoso, among all of men’s sins, rationalism is most nearly like original sin; it is an actual error and potentially contributes to all other human failings, for they are all comprehended in it. While Donoso saw that the crisis of Europe was a spiritual and moral crisis, in which the sense of purpose was lost, he did not see, perhaps, that atheism might transcend and reject both liberalism and socialism and emerge in one of its forms as modern existentialism. While no one denies the coexistence of good and evil in history, and all assume the ultimate victory of the good, there is little possibility of a reconciliation of divergent points of view. The liberals want a revolution in government; the socialists would destroy existing society and its institutions, at least in its anarchistic or Proudhonian slant; Catholicism condemns revolution and social disorder; while the rationalists condemn all moral reform, asserted Donoso. The epigones of Saint Simon and Fourier deny the Catholic theory of the dualism of human nature, and would construct society purely on their theory of man. But Donoso insisted that the supreme end of socialism is to create a society in which the passions are free, under the theory that the passions are divine and that virtues are simply a human creation. Evil is banished from the world by denying that it exists. For the Catholic, evil begins in man and exists only incidentally in society, while for the pantheist it begins in society and extends to men. The problem of evil, thought Donoso, could not be resolved unless we begin with men rather than with the organic society of the revolutionary philosophy. Evil is either essential and intrinsic to humankind or it is

34

Order and Legitimacy

accidental, and if it is accidental, the socialist must say when the accident occurred. If evil is of the essence, then no revolution in society will change it. Though the socialists are superior to the liberals in presenting their issues, Donoso insisted that only the Catholic has an adequate explanation of the problem of the co-existence of good and evil in history. To the Christian, surely, man cannot be his own savior as the socialist would lead us to believe. It is characteristic of liberal and socialist theory to deny sin in the sense of disobedience to God, and to deny, therefore, the idea that men may deserve punishment for their sins. It was an effort of Donoso, as one of the prophets of the Catholic renaissance in nineteenth-century Europe, to assert some of the implications of sin for a theory of society. The secular mind has made of sin a denial of freedom, while to the Christian sin can be and has been the basis of a doctrine of a common humanity, a common equality, and a principle of the brotherhood and solidarity of man. Sin, in other words, can be and is the basis of a progressive and reforming social theory. It is not even to be excluded as a foundation for the welfare state, though the principle of the Enlightenment of the radical goodness of human nature seems generally to be held by the secular mind as its proper foundation. Now it is true that Donoso was not proposing to answer liberals and socialists by a counter and Christian legislative reform of industrial society. To Donoso, charity can become great as men recognize their sin and their guilt, and he believed that a reaction to Christianity might bring with it a tremendous restoration of the principle of duty to one’s neighbor. In his powerful letter to María Cristina, of 26 November 1851, he traced the origin of social inequality to the greed of the bourgeoisie.22 According to Donoso, there is universal rebellion in Europe of all those who suffer hunger against those who suffer from having too much, and the cause is finally that the possessing classes have lost the virtue of charity. The hungry are sure to win unless the better-situated classes change their attitude. As a monarchist, Donoso believed that if the throne provided a viable example to the rich, there might still be time to save Spain from further disaster. Historically, Spaniards have looked upon monarchy as their protector, and the great problem of the time, argued Donoso, was to correct the maldistribution of wealth. Charity on a great scale is the only peaceful and proper remedy, but without it socialism is certain to win in Spain. Such charity, he said, would have to be continuous; it would require a new system of government. And there might be a restoration of the ancient and vital Catholic welfare institutions of Spain. The liberal revolution, indeed, has been made by the rich, for the rich, and against both the throne and the poor. In this case, of course, the rich of whom he was speaking were the liberals, who among other things, had distributed among themselves Church property that had been the economic basis of Spanish charity.

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In any case, from the fall of man, Donoso argued in the Third Book of the Ensayo, comes the dogma of the substantial unity of the human race. One of the greatest of Catholic truths is the solidarity of mankind. It is a Christian solidarity with both the past and the future; it is the communion of glories and disasters between the living and the dead. Yet how does a Christian solidarity differ from that proposed by the liberals and the socialists? To Donoso, the liberal, individualistic, and atomistic views of society are a denial of solidarity. But the socialists go further, for they assert that even the family is an obstacle to equality, and this, in turn, is a justification of the confiscation of property most often vested in family groups. The liberals have agreed with the socialists in taking property from the Church, but the socialists are more logical, since they would take property away from all. Liberal policy leads to general expropriation; it means finally the destruction of the family and the nation. Socialists draw the proper conclusions from liberalism, and with greater boldness they reject the nation and the monarchy, though by an act of faith they can still believe in the solidarity of all humanity after the destruction of free and natural social groups within a given society. In the last century, as today, there is confusion in the use of such terms as liberalism, anarchism, socialism, and Communism. But it seems true that the philosophy of revolution was more important then than the devices by which a society or a society might be reorganized economically. Donoso speaks of “Communism” as governmentalism elevated to the highest power; the state becomes an absolute tyrant and an absolute unity; and Proudhon is correct in rejecting it. As with Proudhon the denial of the state is merely the last of all negations. Yet he really affirms government by proclaiming unity and social solidarity. Proudhon supposes unity, solidarity, and social infallibility; Communism supposes these of the state.23 In this, Donoso saw plainly the modern and revolutionary meaning of Communism. But for Donoso, both Proudhon and the Communists arrive at the same place by different roads, that is, at tyranny.24 The contempt of both man and God is the most important feature of Proudhon, however, and the errors of past centuries are refurbished by him for the great heresies of the nineteenth century. He was not even original in saying that property is theft, for this was, in fact, an old Spanish idea. It was a central proposition with Donoso that the negation of sin prepares the way for nihilism. He found further evidence in Robert Owen, who denied free will and guilt, who distinguished good and evil in morals, and yet who denied the principle of punishment for individual guilt. Donoso insisted that if there is no individual responsibility, there is no social responsibility. By paradox, the revolution, founded in crime, seeks the approval of some past nobility, though in fact it has no basis for such a claim. To deny the family, state, and society is to deny any solidarity or unity, and the individual is cut away both from relationship with others and from any principle of personal responsibility. After the liberals, the socialists appear with their “holy insurrection and heroic crimes.”

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Order and Legitimacy

V Donoso Cortés lived just short of two years following the publication of the Ensayo. From February 1851, until his death, he was Spain’s Ambassador to Paris, a position he occupied when the Ensayo appeared and was translated almost immediately into French. His correspondence and controversy about the Ensayo is large in volume, while at the same time his diplomatic correspondence would seem to have been sufficient to have kept him entirely occupied. In his personal life, he became increasingly pessimistic about the revolutionary tide in Europe, and he felt that diplomatic opportunities for the stabilization of Europe were being lost. Donoso sent a copy of the Ensayo to Metternich and Donoso was from then listed among Europeans for whom Metternich had a warm admiration. In diplomacy, Donoso’s views were those of Metternich. Both had a vision of the meaning of revolution, both feared nationalism allied to democracy, and both were prophets of an approaching barbarism.25 If Donoso had perceived that the great tide of the 1848 revolutions had really receded, had he seen that nationalism was gradually separating itself from the revolutionary movement, he might have been able to take a more calm view of political trends. Yet he thought more and more of retiring from public life entirely—public life in Spain he thought intolerable—and entering the religious life with the Jesuits. Perhaps his early death prevented such a step, though had he lived his confidence in checking the revolution might also have been strengthened. The psychological desolation of his last busy, active, and public months would, perhaps, have been overcome.26 In 1853, the mortal remains of Donoso were returned to Madrid.27 The study of his thought was revived around 1900, and the process of reassessment has continued since that time. Spaniards have been impressed with his eloquence and his stylistic power. As Eugenio d’Ors said, he was cálido retórico, frío político.28 Ortí y Lara went even so far as to make him a precursor of Leo XIII and the social encyclicals. Certainly Donoso and Balmes are considered to be the great Spaniards of the mid-century who shared in stimulating the traditionalist and Catholic revival. For the Spaniard, the central question is Donoso’s relation to Spanish tradition. Donoso’s thought moved from the Spanish crisis of his day to a consideration of the whole European issue, and he doubtless used more of the thought of France than of Spain in both his moderate liberal period and during his conservative passion. Donoso had felt, as a liberal, like many Spaniards of the eighteenth century, that there was nothing good to be found in Spain. There was no Golden Century to remember; there was only France, England, and Germany to copy. To make progress, Spain must change and reconcile her older monarchic and Catholic traditions with those of the science and learning of the rest of Europe. In this sense, Donoso was like the Marqués de la Ensenada who, in the eighteenth century, invented foreign scholarships (pensiones) for young Spaniards who were to study in foreign capitals

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and bring back to Spain new ideas in the sciences, the arts, and letters. At the same time, Ensenada brought from France and England engineers and mechanics to revive industry, and he imported foreign scientists who were charged with the exploitation of Spain’s natural resources. Likewise, he wished to employ professors from other states. In neither of the great periods of Donoso’s life did he use directly the materials of the Spanish tradition in political philosophy; he was attached to the Spanish monarchical tradition, and he knew there had been better times than the days of dictatorship and revolution in which he lived.29 Donoso’s idealization of the Spanish past preceded the events of the CounterReformation period to much earlier centuries, and today he might celebrate with Spaniards the glory of the Catholic Sovereigns. The measure of the crisis in which he lived, however, is that Donoso made no comment on the loss of the Spanish-American empire or the causes for it. The decline of Spain itself was, no doubt, the most problematic of the events he confronted.30 If optimistic liberal prophecy from the eighteenth century on had proved true, rather than the entrance of the world into an agonizing period of crisis, the evaluation of Donoso would be less complex than it is. But it would also be more simple to judge men like Marx, Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and others. Those who, like Donoso, prophesied enduring crisis as a result of nineteenth-century civilization, are receiving attention in the present age. Yet it is not true that just because a prophecy is fulfilled, the basis of that prophecy must be accepted as true. For example, both Marx and Spengler predicted great world wars, but both bases of prophecy cannot be true. Donoso aspired to a metaphysics of politics, said Alfonso de Cossío, that would lead to the solidarity of the whole human race. In Catholicism, he observed, man is never alone. Against disorder and decay, he supported the monarchy; against revolution, he supported the principle of the dictatorship, the “either-or,” and necessity of the politics of decision; against dictatorship, he supported the inward suppression and discipline of religious revival and order; and with religious order he believed that true liberty could be restored.31 But if the criticism he offered of the philosophy of liberalism was central, and if it pointed the way to much of the controversy over liberalism in our time, Donoso’s failures are yet impressive and they cannot be overlooked. He failed to see man as a person in a Catholic and Thomistic sense; yet Donoso understood in implication the precariousness of the “person” in the full meaning of that word. As he seemed to know little of the political philosophy of men like Francisco Suárez, he missed the powerful Catholic doctrine of the consent of the governed in the Spanish Golden Age. He knew too little of the thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he was far too much influenced by French ideas, even in the period when he could have used Spanish philosophy most effectively. Donoso failed to stress that central principle of Catholic thought: that the state expresses the rational nature of man, and that in natural law it has a directive power toward the common good in any legitimate society.

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These ideas show that he needed to study more deeply the whole issue of what is a legitimate political order, just as he had studied in the Ensayo the issue of what is a legitimate society in general. He referred to the Church and the militia as the carriers of the doctrines of authority, obedience, and charity, which are the bases of civil society.32 In both periods of greatness and times of disorder, a Spaniard must reflect on the function of the armed forces in the political system. While Plato does not mention the army in his forms of legitimacy in the Laws, a modern is forced to accept the army, as in later Roman days, as one of the carriers of the religious, moral, and political truths on which a society is based.33 Aristotle refers to the military after the first decline of society, but the Greeks usually considered the Spartans to be the ones who confided to the military the expression of social justice. From the time of the Spanish Alzamiento (18 July 1936), when the Catholic theory of revolution was greatly advanced, to the present day, the Spanish government regards the army as the representative of the necessary authority for the support of a legitimate political regime. Perhaps Donoso’s greatest failure was not to see the need of reworking Catholic social and political theory in the light of the crisis of his time. Had he done so, he might have made more suitable discriminations between those things on which the Catholic could compromise and those things on which he could not.34 In our time, “democracy” and the “revolution” are no longer identical, as they seemed to be in Donoso’s day. Democracy is no longer a revolutionary slogan, but a sober, and often conservative, attempt to turn back the tide of fascism and Communism. Americans have less faith than they once had in revolution, and the loss of such faith in revolution as a device for assuring progress brings us closer to the ideas of the nineteenth-century continental conservative. Like them, Americans do not favor reforms that make men miserable in order to make the state strong, and they have no love for revolutions that introduce political tyranny. The issue between liberalism and its enemies is in measure as Donoso saw it, the conflict between a secular and a theistic philosophy. Today the issue turns more than before on philosophy than it did a hundred years ago. Again, the solidarity and brotherhood of man may not alone be sought in a theory of the perfection of human nature and in the evil of institutions, but also in the magnitude of man’s sin and disobedience to God, in the grandeur of his humility, and in the heroism of his charity. And this is surely one of the meanings to be found in Donoso Cortés.35 Notes 1.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Journal of Inter-American Studies, Volume 1, Number 1 (January 1960), pp. 45-63, entitled “Donoso Cortés: The Continuing Crisis.”

Juan Donoso Cortés: A Diagnosis of Crisis 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

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Carl Schmitt, Donoso Cortés in gesampteuropäischer Interpretation (Köln: Greven, 1950), p. 7: “Drei harte Schläge haben die Wurzel Europas gestroffen: der europäische Bürgerkrieg von 1848, der Ausgang des ersten Weltkrieges von 1918 and der globale Weltbürgerkrieg der Gegenwart. Jedes dieser weltgeschichtlichen Ereignisse hat dazu geführt, dass plotzlich in ganz Europa von Donoso Cortés gesprochen wurde.” (Editors’ translation: “Three terrible blows have struck at the roots of the European order: the Revolution of 1848, the outcome of the First World War, and the global civil war now taking place. Each of these events has resulted in bringing about what Donoso Cortés predicted.”) Francisco Elías de Tejada, Para una interpretación extremeña de Donoso Cortés (1949). One of the better bibliographies of works on Donoso is given in Dietmar Westemeyer, Donoso Cortés, hombre del estado y teólogo (1957), and it is apparent there is no Hispanic-American response to the Donosan revival. The Spanish Cultural Index listed, especially in 1953, the lectures given at the Madrid Athenaeum, and the publication of items in English and German, as well as in Spanish. Alois Dempf, Christliche Staatsophilosophie in Spanien (1937); Marcial Solana, El tradicionalismo político español y la ciencia hispana (1951); and Westemeyer, op. cit., passim. Ramiro de Maeztu has likewise been given increasing attention from a conservative or traditionalist point of view. A committee directed by Vicente Marrero has been directing the publication of the complete works of Maeztu. See Marrero’s Maeztu (1955), probably the best of the survey volumes about him. The extensive work of Rafael Calvo Serer also cannot be overlooked. See, for example, “Europa en 1949: Comentario a dos discursos de Donoso Cortés,” Arbor, XII (March, 1949), pp. 329 ff. A notable recent work is Santiago Galindo Herrero, Donoso Cortés y su teoría política (1957). See Obras completas, ed. by H. Juretschke (2 vols., Madrid 1946), II, pp. 785-786. It is obvious in these statements that Donoso had not fully deserted some of the “liberal ideas” of his earlier years. The following may be consulted with profit: José Luis Comellas, Los primeros pronunciamientos en España, 1814-1820 (1958); Ibid., Los realistas en el trienio constitucional, 1820-1823) (1958); María del Carmen Pintos Vieites, La política de Fernando VII entre 1814-1820 (1958); and Federico Suárez, La crisis política del antiguo régimen, 1800-1840 (2nd ed., 1958). Elías de Tejada, op. cit., p. 11, refers to Donoso as the “principe del pensamiento extremeño del siglo XIX.” See Edmund Schramm, Donoso Cortés, su vida y su pensamiento (1936), pp. 93 ff., on this point. Obras, I, pp. 65 ff. Much of the records and material of Donoso’s family was destroyed in the Spanish Civil War. The best contemporary source is the writing of Edmund Schramm, “Der Junge Donoso Cortés (1809-1836),” Spanischen Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft; Erste Reihe, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens, Band 4 (1933), pp. 248-310. Other works by Schramm are important as well: Donoso Cortés, su vida y su pensamiento (1936); Donoso Cortés, Leben und Werk Eines Spanischen Antiliberalen (1935). See H.J. Huffer, “Las relaciones hispanogermánicas durante mil doscientos años,” Revista de estudios políticos, XXXVI (1951), pp. 71-72; Thomas P. Neil, They Lived the Faith (1951), pp. 242-266, and the bibliography, pp. 374-375. Obras, I, pp. 211-231. Schramm, Vida y pensamiento, pp. 83 ff. There is some difference of opinion over the “periods” in Donoso’s life. The prevailing view is the idea that Donoso moved from liberalism to Catholicism and

40

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

Order and Legitimacy political traditionalism. Menéndez Pelayo and Schramm, for example, take this view. Francisco Elías de Tejada argues there is a third and insincere period of eclecticism between a period of liberal passion and his extreme traditionalism. Elías de Tejada, op. cit., pp. 42 and 59. See Federico Suárez, Introducción a Donoso Cortés (1964). Obras, I, p. 810. (Editors’ Translation: “But I am foolish enough to believe that all that is new in politics and morality is false, dangerous, and in religion, it is false, dangerous, and absurd.”) At this time, Donoso asserted in a newspaper article that despotism and revolution had come to Europe because Protestantism had twisted the course of Catholic civilization and restored the essential qualities of pagan civilization. Obras, I, p. 941. On the other hand, in writing to the young Isabel II, declared of age by the Cortes, Donoso said that monarchy must adjust itself to social changes and to changes of the time. Obras, I, p. 952. Editors’ Translation: “Law comes into being by the consent of the people and constitutional monarchy.” Obras, II, pp. 98 ff. At this time Donoso had become very conscious of his conflict with French rationalism. He wrote Bosquejos históricos in 1847 and his Discurso académico sobre la Biblia in 1848. His main attack on French thought was at this time a defense of sacred history, derived from his deep study of the Bible, in which he also defended free will, grace, and charity as elements in his theory of freedom. In this writing, Donoso shows himself to be a thoughtful student of St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Bossuet. After the events in Italy, which forced the Pope to flee Rome, Donoso published a newspaper article in which he speaks of democracy as insensate, without God, or law. Demagoguery has respect for nothing; it is the great evil and the absolute error; it is the enemy of human society. Obras, II, pp. 183 ff. Jules Chaix-Ruy, Donoso Cortés: Théologien de l’histoire et prophète (1956), pp. 66-67. Obras, II, pp. 187 ff., for this speech. One of the remarkable insights Donoso presented was the continued growth of the power of government, whatever the form of government, and whether or not there was a successful revolution. Cf. J.J. Chevalier, “Réflexions sur le Pouvoir, En Lisant B. de Jouvenal,” Revue Française de Science Politique, I (1951), pp. 188 ff. In the letters Donoso wrote after this speech, he affirmed to Montalembert, who had been impressed with the argument that impiety and dictatorship go together, that Catholic civilization stood against the civilization of philosophy, and that in principle Catholic civilization was all good, while that of philosophy was all error. Because of the fallen nature of man, free discussion leads to error. The speech and the letters provoked a vigorous and sustained controversy among Catholics, especially in France. Donoso was charged with Manicheanism, and with having rejected reason altogether, particularly because he held that evil is more likely to win in history than the good, unless aided by divine grace (Obras, II, pp. 205 ff.); and Eugenio Vegas Latapié, “Autoridad y libertad, según Donoso Cortés,” Arbor, 85 (January 1953). Very soon after this, Donoso went to Berlin as Spain’s Ambassador to Prussia. In his Cartas acerca de Prusia (Obras, II, pp. 229 ff.), he had become convinced that the Prussian crisis was more serious than the Spanish. He was, however, apparently unaware of the Protestant conservative movement of F. J. Stahl. Donoso feared the “democratic volcano” represented in the Frankfurt Assembly. But he also saw the end of the Latin domination of Europe and the rise of the power of the Germans and Slavs. After his short service as ambassador to Prussia, Donoso returned to Madrid and again took an active part in parliamentary life.

Juan Donoso Cortés: A Diagnosis of Crisis 19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

41

On the other hand, it appears Donoso was consulted in the editing of the Syllabus of Errors. He had been asked what were the great errors of the time, and his letter to Cardinal Fornari has been regarded as the best item in Donoso’s writing. Galindo Herrero, op. cit., pp. 131 ff., and 159. The text of the Ensayo is found in Obras, II, pp. 347-551. Donoso uses the word “Catholicism” in a variety of ways. In its totality it was absolute truth. But also it signified security for order, a system of conservative ideas, a comprehensive body of doctrine, a religious and cultural power, the ideal of the state and of culture as in monarchy, and, as a system of logical connections, a weapon in ideological war. See Westemeyer, op. cit., pp. 237 ff.; Dempf, op. cit., p. 148. In one of his digressions, Donoso discusses the government of the Church. He declared the government of the Church to be a harmonious combination of democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, and absolute monarchy. Donoso’s adherence to monarchy in the state, however, led him to believe, apparently, that Church government was a model for the state. He failed, thus, to stress one of the principles of Catholic political thought that the people have a right to choose their form of government, and that the government of the Church is not a necessary model for the government of the state. In this regard, Donoso overlooked the contributions of Counter-Reformation Spanish thought to the Western world, the revival and emphasis on the right of the people to govern themselves. Francisco Suárez, for example, seems to have had no influence on him. See Obras, II, pp. 370 ff. Cf. Galindo Herrero, op. cit., p. 346. Obras, II, pp. 595 ff. A number of writers on Donoso have seen in him a precursor of the social encyclicals, especially the Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII, because of his acute realization of the problem of class struggle. His speech on the situation in Spain, 30 December 1850, and his letter to María Cristina have both been cited in this connection. Donoso and Balmes together constitute one of the neglected sources for the formulation of Catholic social doctrine from the Rerum Novarum to the present. Normally, only northern European thinkers are cited in this connection, which is a serious omission. Obras, II, p. 503. The differentiation of the “isms” is continued in his long letter to Cardinal Fornari, in June 1852. Obras, II, pp. 613-630. On this point there is some similarity between Donoso and modern liberal critics of Proudhon, that is, that he was a precursor of a fascist system. For the letters to Metternich and for one of Metternich’s replies, see Obras, II, pp. 558 ff. The recent revision of traditional estimates of Metternich, which has been carried on by a series of competent historians, should by implication suggest a greater importance to the diplomatic theories of Donoso. Metternich said to Donoso that he did not like the “isms,” since the meaning and import of words was changed. Donoso replied that he felt forced to speak the language of the world. Bela Menczer, “Metternich and Donoso Cortés,” Dublin Review, Last Quarter, 1948, pp. 19-51. Obras, II, p. 562. The theological controversy over the Ensayo will not be considered here. Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans induced the Abbé Gaduel to charge Donoso with grave dogmatic errors. The Ensayo was submitted to papal criticism, and in time his work was not condemned, no doubt much to the discomfiture of the liberal French Catholics. See Obras, II, p. 563. Donoso charged that his letters had been made public without his consent, and he affirmed that he had no desire to engage in public polemics. He expressed his dislike of journalists who become bishops and of bishops and priests who become journalists. In La Civiltá Cattòlica of 16 April 1853, the issue was closed favorably to Donoso. See Gabriel de Armas, Donoso Cortés (1953), p. 14.

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27.

See Galindo Herrero, op. cit., p. 143. There has been some confusion on just when his remains were returned to Madrid. Apparently the issue is now settled. Carl Schmitt, Donoso Cortés in gesampteuropäischer Interpretation, Ibid., p. 74. (Editors’ Translation: “passionate speaker, dispassionate statesman.”) Salvador de Madariaga, “The Roots of the British Monarchy,” New Leader, 31 March 1952, p. 5, has said: “With the single exception of the Swiss Confederation, all the European states that have managed to maintain a happy political life are monarchies: Britain, the Scandinavian kingdoms and the Netherlands, with Belgium a borderline case.” Madariaga apparently has felt that the people must be interested in things rather than in ideas, persons, and political passions in order to maintain such regimes. Schramm, Leben und Werk, p. 127, has observed that after his death, Donoso’s ideas were associated with the Carlists (with whom he had no sympathy though his family was divided on this point) and extreme traditionalist and clerical views. Both absolutists and radical clericals drew from the Ensayo. Recently Luis Vives, Jaime Balmes, and Donoso have been linked together as forces in the restoration of Spanish religious thought. See Spanish Cultural Index, No. 69 (October 1951), pp. 63-64. Cf. Alfonso de Cossío, “Donoso Cortés, A Prophet of Our Times,” Dublin Review, Spring 1947, pp. 30-49, and p. 39. M.F. Nuñez, ed., Juan Donoso Cortés, pensamientos (1934), p. 14. Galindo Herrero, op.cit., pp. 298-299. Plato lists the following legitimate titles to rulership: (1) father and mother over children; (2) the noble over the ignoble; (3) the older over the younger; (4) masters over slaves; (5) the very common stronger over the weaker, which Pindar of Thebes once noted; (6) the most important (for example, the soundest?) the rulership of the wise over those who lack understanding, which is the natural rule of law; and (7) those who gain rulership by the casting of lots. But in any case any ruler may be subject to the “disease of kings,” the life of luxury and pride, and the rejection of the laws, which brings abut the ruin of the state, as it had occurred in the Greek world. See Xenophon, Memorabilia, trans. E. C. Marchant (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1923), III.v.14 (p. 197), in which knowing how to rule seems to give the most legitimate title, superior to being chosen by the multitude. The work of Gustave Thibon is highly provocative in this respect. The same people who have helped to revive Donoso after the Spanish Civil War have also been impressed with Thibon’s probing into the nature of society in the twentieth century. See his Diagnósticos sociales. Prefacio de Gabriel Marcel. Epílogo de Rafael Gambra (Madrid, 1958). Also, Diagnostics: essai de physiologie social, Preface de Gabriel Marcel (Paris, 1942); and Retour au réel: nouveaux diagnostics: (1943). It is a notable inquiry to read Donoso’s Ensayo in one hand and Thibon’s Diagnósticos in the other. Thibon’s work was, of course, translated from the French. Both are sharp critics of liberalism, though Thibon is more concerned with the problem of economic liberalism and with the flabbiness of twentieth century-ideology. Donoso’s own love for his neighbor has been long obscured. His great sense of charity led him to visit the poor twice a week without saying a word to anyone. In the practice of this silent Christian brotherhood, he even went so far as to deny himself necessities.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

3 Jaime Balmes: The Christian Philosophy of History I Of Jaime Balmes it might have been said that the man and the hour had met. By the time he began to write, the implications of the French Revolution had become clear. The Revolution was permanent and it had consequences, but as notable as anything it had the capacity to project its ideology onto nearly all of Europe. It placed the institutions and ideas of the past on guard and their defenders anxious for their self-preservation. The actual destruction of old things was a matter of impressive force, such as the reform of the legal systems, and the emergence of the new idea of the representation of individuals rather than regions, classes, estates, and professions. And for two centuries—since about 1635—the Spaniard of ideas had been conscious of the lagging status of his country. It was Balmes who began the great assessment, the Christian inquisition, into the meaning of the new times since 1789. Donoso had also argued fiercely that the revolution in Europe must be turned back, and the theatre for his ideas was obviously Europe as a whole, though his passion for Spanish order was no less profound. One factor must remain strategically in the foreground. The backwardness of Spain was not then primarily technological, according to the new lights, for technology was not the overwhelming issue that it has become in the twentieth century. It was rather a question of the distribution of the prerequisites that a given society was actually producing. It had become for better than half a century oppressively clear that the British were rich, powerful, and comfortable, and that their empire was spread widely, as once the empire of Philip II had shadowed the globe. Robert Owen and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the master socialists of the day, thought of the evils of classes and the possibilities of the redistribution of the products of labor at the actual level of capital investment. Donoso had answered the socialists with fierce anger in his Ensayo, defending a Catholic theory of life. But Balmes sensed something that in measure seemed 43

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to escape Donoso, and which is still an issue of imaginative importance. For what had emerged, in no small degree from the work of Hegel and Guizot, was the Protestant theory of history. To the continental thinker it might be the Hegelian dialectic of history, or, to an Englishman, it might be the Whig interpretation of history, but it all amounted to essentially the same development. In less pretentious terms it might be just the rationality of liberal reforms, such as the reform of education, religion, and politics. And it might be the theory of a kind of combination between the liberalism of the French and the economic achievement of the British. But in terms of ideological harshness it meant that progress consisted in the destruction of Catholic Europe. Catholic lands were retrograde and they could not be progressive because of the dead weight of inertia represented by historic and Catholic Christianity. With Hegel, Prussia was progressive because it had the Reformation at the bottom of its system of power, while the French Protestant like Guizot could support the Revolution itself as the achievement of progress. Tocqueville sought to evade the Catholic question, but for Balmes, the Spaniard, there was no escape. It has been said that Balmes was broken by the failure of Isabel II to marry the Carlist Pretender, which would have healed the internal conflict over the monarchy in Spain. Such a proposal put fear in the hearts of all who had benefited by the attack on the Church. But his notable intellectual achievement was his defense of Christian history. It was a profound analysis of the contributions of Christianity toward progress, and toward the alleviation of the sufferings of mankind. It was the reconquest of history, which was for Spain the restoration of tradition. By the same token it was a defense of Catholic Spain. There had been a vast failure in Spain documented by the disastrous Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the loss of most of its empire, but it was not caused by the Church. What Balmes saw was that the failure of Spain had been political and military exhaustion, and a complete failure to understand the means by which a society attains economic order and advance.1 Part of liberalism in the eighteenth century had surely been economic reform which sought to open the market to competition and to the free flow of goods. Adam Smith had pulled together the ideas of French economists and had stated for modern times the case for freedom of economic activity in his Wealth of Nations. Socialism had also proposed a system of reform which eventually would control or centralize the economic activity of a people. Then as now the backward country, if it recognized its backwardness, had two large systems to choose from, or to choose from both as political inclination might dictate. However, Spain has never had a free market system, even under the liberals of the nineteenth century. The problem of the restoration of Spain in the seventeenth and later centuries had been viewed as the proposal to the government of the correct policy, or scheme, or experiment to follow in the resuscitation of the country.2 Still, it was not until Balmes’ day that economic proposals began to take such a form that they promised more than fanciful results. In the end,

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Balmes both defended Catholic history and he proposed sober and intelligent steps toward the economic development of Spain. What he did has pointed in no small degree toward a twentieth century in which Christianity is resurgent and economic policy for “development,” “planning,” or “modernization” is a naturalized part of politics, even of the capitalistic countries. II That Balmes was a great man none deny, even those who for ideological reasons may ignore him. But the vast amount of writing about him continues with each generation. In October 1961, it was noted in the Catholic Historical Review that “a comprehensive bibliography of Jaime Balmes constitutes almost the entire annual volume (XXXIII, 1960) of Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia. The compiler, Juan de Mendoza, S. J., has listed 670 editions of Balmes’ writings in the original language and in translation in the first part of his study, and 893 works about Balmes in the second part. There is also an index of authors, translators, periodicals, and reviews cited in the bibliography.” Needless to say there is more than one edition of his Obras completas. Such an outpouring of writing and republication shows Balmes to be an undrying fountain of ideas for the contemporary world, as well as for the political and religious world of a century ago. The most famous of all the evaluations of Balmes is a document written by Don Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo for presentation to the International Congress on apologetics held at Vich in 1910. It was read at the closing session of the Congress. It was called “Dos palabras sobre el centenario de Balmes.” However, this remarkable judgment of Balmes is mixed with the general system of controversy over the work of Menéndez Pelayo, and to no small degree what one thinks of Balmes is determined by what one thinks of Don Marcelino. With flashing eloquence he declared to the Congress that Balmes had been the glory of Spain during the nineteenth century. He was the best educator of Spain during the century, and one of his achievements had been the introduction of modern philosophy, such as Fichte, Schelling, and Kant. Balmes is the only Spanish philosopher of modern times, he said in 1910, who had gained a reputation outside of the country. Balmes was determined to bring philosophical science to the most humble, and the necessity of educating the whole people was always in his mind. Education was required for both the understanding of the Catholic faith and the demands of an industrial and technological era. It was a constant demand in his writings that education be fostered in every way in Spain. According to Menéndez Pelayo, Balmes wrote before the modern scholastic restoration, but he was part of it. He reached into the past intellectual history of Spain and reconquered the great figures of the Golden Century (1519-1665) from the oblivion to which eighteenth century French liberal thought in Spain had consigned them. Since

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his day none has doubted the importance of Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Suárez, and many others of that notable time in Spanish history. Thus, in humanistic and social science he had intuitions and presentiments touched with genius. Don Marcelino was writing in a time of crisis, the aftermath of the war with the United States, and the vivisection of Spain by the Generation of 1898. For those who loved Spanish tradition and saw in it a base on which to construct the future of Spain, the writers of the Generation of 1898 were more destroyers than creators. So today, said Menéndez Pelayo in 1910, we witness the slow suicide of a people. Spain has been deceived by sophists and false teachers, and under them a monstrous liquidation of the past has been taking place. He declared bitterly but beautifully that where we do not preserve with reverence the inheritance of the past, be it rich or poor, great or small, we need expect neither the growth of any original thought nor of any sovereign ideas. Both Don Marcelino and Jaime Balmes joined in the support of a Catholic philosophy of history as a weapon to turn back political doctrinairism of such men as the powerful French Huguenot, Guizot.3 III For Americans today, the two important aspects of Balmes’ work are clearly his comparison of Catholicism and Protestantism in history and his proposals for the economic rejuvenation of Spain. The larger part of his ideas on internal Spanish politics must in this compass be passed over with brief mention.4 The impressive volume of his political journalism in Madrid, before his return to Catalonia, must be left for the Spaniard to study. Though Balmes’ life was short (1810-1848), it is an incredible monument of diligence for a man who was to die of tuberculosis. His work on politics came at the end of the first Carlist War. It was like that of many others—a plea for the restoration of the fundamental political traditions of Spain. His great proposal was that Isabel II marry the Conde de Montemolín, the son of Don Carlos, the Carlist Pretender. In this he failed, and very shortly thereafter little attention was given him. As the central political institution, monarchy was foremost in his thought. Americans may not understand the passionate devotion of men to a ruling house, and thus the appreciation of a great political fact is closed to us. Monarchy has been the most popular and most deeply loved of all the political and earthly institutions of men. In European history there is no other institution which has so adapted itself to the tradition of a people. And in Spain its whole modern history, since the unification of the country under the Catholic Sovereigns, has been interwoven with monarchy. One might even say that French republican ideas were injected into the Spanish mind under the forceful reformism of King Charles III in the eighteenth century. To Balmes, the Catholic faith, the monarchy, and the political unity of regional cultures since Fernando and Isabel, were the fundamental laws of social order in Spain. They were the first postulates of Spanish tradition.

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More than Donoso Cortés, Balmes sought to use ancient foundations for the monarchy, for representative institutions, and for the organization of the workers under modern industrial conditions. Clearly, he wanted more than a king who reigns and does not govern, as had come to be said by the liberals of the British Monarch. Indeed, many Spaniards have seen both in tradition and in contemporary political necessity the need for a strong monarchy. Balmes recognized that the American people had become accustomed to participation in parties and elections and to sharing in some measure in the management of public affairs. But in effect, what Balmes proposed and what is often proposed today in Spain is a system of genuine balance between the monarchy, the parliament, the regions of Spain, and other forces, such as the bureaucracy, in the management of government. Some system of representative institutions is necessary, but it need not or could not be a return to the “estates of the realm” which had been characteristic of Spain in the medieval and early modern period. Still, Balmes did not like the English, American, and French idea of “one man, one vote.” He believed that some system of voting by classes, by regions, and by organized and corporative bodies, such as the gremios or unions of the workers, might be the best system for the immediate future of restored tradition, internal peace, and economic development. Actually, the post-Civil War Spanish system has many of these characteristics of functional representation. Balmes did not say it, but he would no doubt have agreed with the contemporary idea that what is needed in Spain is a monarchy modeled as closely as possible on the republican system of the United States. In other words, the King of Spain should be as much as possible like the President of the United States. Such a system Balmes believed, would be grounded in the enduring values of political tradition, and it would provide a situation in which there could be an attack on the modern problems of Spain. The ancient fueros or regional laws and customs were not inconsistent with modern progress. In other words Spain was not suited for pure parliamentary government, or the conflict between political parties and sterile personal ambitions. In 1845, he asserted that the opposition in representative forms of government is an evil, and it is associated with the strife of parties and factions. In all opposition there is the germ of anarchy.5 IV Balmes was a Roman Catholic priest. He was intensely aware both of the internal difficulties of the Church in Spain, and of the course of religious conflict in Europe. In Spain there had been a growth of “regalism” under the Bourbon kings since 1700, which had insisted on increasing the power of the Crown over the Church, and thus the curtailment of its liberty. Balmes defended the liberty of the Church and he was thus a critic of regalism as a violation of Spanish religious tradition. Anyone who considers the history of a country carefully knows that religious conflict is often at the center of politics, and that

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the specific or formal issue may be merely a mask to cover the deeper, irreconcilable, and existential theology of social order. In our ecumenical times we assume that even the most profound of religious differences may be discussed in amity, or that interfaith dialogue may touch on the deepest beliefs of the participants in such colloquy. One thing is certain: the defense of a religion or a Church against serious attack is not tea-party activity; it is harsh and lacking in amity. Nevertheless, while Balmes had to defend the Church in Spain against the monarchy and against Madrid, the great issue concerned the Catholic Church in Europe as a whole. The anti-clerical liberal is not at the moment as anti-clerical as he once was. (Though it is said a liberal is born to repeat his errors.) He has been known to say even that anti-clericalism must in any intelligent man be a passing absurdity. But the anti-clerical, anti-religious attack was merely one of two main forms of attack; the other was the criticism of the Church which had emerged from the stabilization of Protestantism in Europe. A broad hypothesis which might be called a Protestant philosophy of history had been shaped in the minds of both anti-religious liberals and Protestants. First propounded, it appears, by the Germans, such as Hegel particularly, it had become widely accepted as the ultimate weapon against the ancient Catholic Church. And that thesis, accepted generally by the intellectuals of Protestant and liberal Europe, was simply that only by the crippling or destruction of the Roman Church could progress, liberty, intellectual development, and civilization be advanced. Because of its stubborn Catholicism, it was said Spain was not really a part of progressive Europe. For Europe, progressive Europe, was the only Europe of the liberal, who was both in favor of a market economy and the triumph of science over the scattered remains of the Church. Ever since the infiltration of French ideas into Spain in the eighteenth century, one form of the issue over the afrancesados, or proFrench, Spanish intellectuals, has been, and still remains so, the Europeanization of Spain. Or, one might say it is the recasting of Spain in the mold of the France that emerged from the tumult of the eighteenth-century revolution. One may say, I believe, that the issue as stated for Spain is clearer, more lucid, than for any of the other countries of the West. If one defends Spanish tradition, one must defend the Church in some manner. There have been many positions, and Catholics themselves have long insisted there is no conflict between religion and science, only that theological questions cannot be resolved by the tools of the scientist. Feijóo, the northern Benedictine in the eighteenth century, could attack all kinds of superstitions and be loyal to both the Church and to the Enlightenment, so that even today there is conflict over whether Father Feijóo was a genuine Christian or a cryptoliberal.6 Both Feijóo and Balmes were believers in the reform of Spain, especially in education, though Balmes saw clearly as well the later meanings of the industrial revolution. What Balmes saw, however, was that one cannot make an impression on Europe by merely talking about immediate reform, however

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necessary it might be. What one had to do was begin at the very start of Christianity in a decadent and corrupt classical civilization. Then one must trace the social impact of Christianity on the course of European civilization. What Balmes argued was essentially this: without Christianity there would have been no European civilization. Now Balmes is speaking clearly as a student of history and not as a theologian. He was documenting a Christian philosophy of history, something that since his day has flowered profusely in European intellectual life. It was not a philosophy of history as Bishop Bossuet wrote it, taken from the scriptures and with a vision of providence in his mind. Balmes was writing his history from the most precise investigation of the documents, the statements of Church councils, and the writings of the Catholic luminaries in times past. All the critic needed to do was to read the record and then deny if he could the Christian influence on behalf of civilization, that is, humaneness in social life particularly, that had been constantly exerted by the Church against the entrenched evils of the old dying civilizations. It was Christianity which had generated and accumulated the moral capital of the West. The first phase of his argument is presented in no generous mood, which is so increasingly characteristic of our times. But neither was there generosity in the criticism directed against the Catholic Church, nor of its historical role in European history. There was no other way to be effective than to strike directly and forcefully. Thus, the first phase of the argument asks what actually has been the result of the Protestant Reformation? Has it advanced civilization? Has it increased and secured liberty? Has it improved the structure of society itself? Balmes answers “no” to all such questions. He affirms that the Reformation had rather created many new, fat, and destructive interests that were surely no advantage to liberty. The pretended beneficent influence of Protestantism in the development of European civilization, he said, is a statement that is contrary to the reason of history.7 He argued that among Protestants there were many who had little belief in anything, such as Edward Gibbon, who returned to Protestantism but who was a disbeliever in Christianity. They talk of the free examination of the scriptures, said Balmes, but in fact there is little consequence of such a device, except to spawn further heresies. Accordingly, the abuses in the Church seemed to Balmes a mere pretext, since he argued there have been abuses in all ages. In general abuses have come from outside pressures, as from the barbarians and the Saracens, and internally from the ignorance of the clergy. On the other hand, Protestantism had produced both indifference to religion and fanaticisms or religious extremism. In this Balmes agrees with the late Monsignor Ronald Knox who was a critic of “enthusiasm.” And it was these fanatics who were the enemies of science and the universities long established under the protection of the Church. It was out of such dissolution of intellectual life in Europe that the French philosophers of the eighteenth century were bred. Protestantism had failed to make progress in Spain, in part because of the reaction against foreign intervention in Spanish affairs by governments which hoped

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to weaken Spain by the introduction of Protestantism, and in part because of the vigorous opposition of the government and the Inquisition in the sixteenth century against centers of Protestant thought, notably in Valladolid and Sevilla. The second and most sustained phase of the argument in Balmes’ work deals with the history of Christianity from ancient times to the outbreak of the Reformation. In that ancient world, said Balmes, morality had no basis, manners and morals were without modesty, the passions knew no limits, the laws had no sanction, religion was without God, and the whole social order moved aimlessly at the mercy of the preoccupations, religious fanaticisms, and the errors of the philosophers.8 One impressive error of some Protestants and of all the modern philosophers has been to believe that science could found a society or restore a lost equilibrium. In this regard, “social science” can destroy society, when as in the ancient world at the time of St. Augustine it was a mass of unorganized and undigested facts and errors. But as far as science is directly concerned, the Church had helped to preserve the science of the ancient world by rejecting the immoralities and monstrosities of ancient heresy and sect. Certain tests of progress in Europe had been formulated during the Enlightenment. One notable test is the issue of the gradual emancipation of slaves, and another is a study of the position of women in society. The Protestants and the philosophers had come to argue that Christianity had done little or nothing to alleviate the condition of the slaves and by the laws of marriage had enslaved women to men, as they had been in the classical world. Balmes’ documentation of these issues is laboriously long, but whoever wishes may read the declarations of councils and prelates in favor of the slaves which came continuously from century to century and from region to region. The central theme of Balmes is that slavery had become such an enormous and pervading institution in declining classical civilization that the Church, had it been able to, could not have freed the slaves without overturning the world—and what remained of civilization. Slavery steadily declined under the influence of the Church, though the barbarian invasions had upset the social progress that was slowly but surely being made under the law of charity. Homer and Jupiter had taken half the mind from slaves, but Christianity had restored it all. The slave became a human being with dignity and rights under the moral law defended by the Church. From the moderation urged in the New Testament to the final abolition of slavery one encounters the love with which the Christians considered the slave. It was the protection of the Christian life and moral duty of all men that acted as a dissolvent of the institution of slavery. Balmes affirms that the Christian law of reform is to reform an institution when the time is ripe, that is, when reforms may succeed without revolution and the spilling of blood—when the reform can be permanent and be a success. For Balmes, it was an injustice to the historical record to defend the imagined noble sentiments of the barbarians against the known moral achievements of the Christian world. He was no respecter of Guizot’s Teutonic theory of the rise of liberty.

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Much the same is argued by Balmes when he turns to the elevation of women in society. The European family is a product of historical Christianity. Classical civilization tended to degrade women, while the Christian elevation of women and the stabilization of the family had occurred before the Reformation. Christian monogamy stood against both the degeneration of the ancient world and the immorality of the barbarians. In contrast, Balmes is intensely bitter when he considers the Protestant destruction of the respect for virginity, modesty, and innocence, and the dissolution of the religious orders for both men and women. A curious phase of this argument is the contention of Guizot that respect for women came from the institutions of feudalism, while Balmes’ argument is that the Church protected the Christian family against perversions in the feudal order. One of the most notable of Balmes’ achievements in his classic study on Catholic-Protestant history is his restatement of Catholic political philosophy. It is true he had much to examine in the work of the Spanish-Jurist theologians of the Golden Century, but his restatement of Catholic political philosophy is the beginning of modern Catholic political thought. It is Catholic political thought that has been projected as an answer to anti-Christian political thinking in the modern liberal world. There is a straight line of continuous development from Balmes to contemporary writers on Catholic ideas. Indeed, whether Protestant or Catholic, one of the notable features of the twentieth century is the emergence of an effective body of Christian political philosophy. Again, there is a central proposition: the rise of a public conscience is due to Catholic Christianity, and this public conscience is one of the most significant elements of European civilization. The ancient world in practice was virtually unrestrained in its public morality, and its thirst for gold and usurious gain was an object of moral attack always by the Christian teacher. At almost the same time as Balmes, Lord Acton in England was arguing in much the same manner: it was through long centuries that Christianity had created the individual conscience and the moral judgment of public life. But whatever Christian influence might be used to create the spirit of humanity in manners and morals, Balmes would contend that the freedom of the Church within the political state was the first necessity. From ancient times, Christianity had urged the recognition of responsibility for the welfare of the unfortunate, while in the ancient world what happened to the unfortunate is hardly known. Christianity was a force in the world, a force for the freedom of men. The monopolization of public charity by the government under Protestantism had done much to destroy the spirit of charity and welfare in Europe. Had Catholic charitable institutions not been destroyed, as by Henry VIII, it is quite possible that the issue of poverty in Western Europe might have been far less severe.9 The primary issues of Catholic political thought had been formulated, of course, long before Balmes wrote. But while the Church may remain the same in doctrine and much the same in liturgy, the application of Christian philosophy to the problems of the world is a new issue for each generation. One may

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say that the set of questions which arose from the French Enlightenment and the Revolution occupied the center of the stage until the world wars and the Russian Revolution. In other words, Balmes was writing or restating the Catholic position on government for the liberal-conservative dichotomy. He was resisting the philosophy of the Enlightenment. How did civil society come to be? Though this question has always been present in the minds of the philosophers, it took on a peculiar sharpness during the age of the Reformation. In general, Protestant thinkers tended to restate the ancient doctrines of contract so that society itself became a product of contract or convention. Following the social contract there is some sort of governmental contract, symbolized in the ancient ceremonies in which the new king swore to be obedient to the customary laws of his kingdoms and principalities. Though St. Augustine may have spoken of sin as the basic origin of civil institutions, from the time of St. Thomas and the revival of Aristotle, the Augustinian solution was slipping into the background. Society exists by God’s will, by divine right, and neither in history nor in doctrine, considering Biblical and theological opinion, can there be a social contract. There might be, indeed, and this was Catholic doctrine, a governmental contract by which customary and Christian limitations were imposed on whoever might govern—the king, the nobles, the clergy, or the people. The foundation for this Catholic doctrine has been St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Chapter 13), where the divine origin of government is affirmed, but which had nearly always been given a general interpretation. That is, government in general had God’s sanction, though a particular government might be a tyranny and there may be fitting occasions when the subject may rise in revolt or even bring death to the tyrant. On the other hand, the New Testament has been discussed in the light of philosophy, which has tended to be Platonic and Aristotelian, or in other words, the divine sanction of government is supported by the social nature of man. As Aristotle argued, man is a social and political animal, and in the logic of the terrestrial ends of man, society or the city are prior to the individual. Rousseau has become the symbol of opposition to traditionalist, conservative, and Catholic doctrine. He has assumed this status for two reasons: first, Rousseau preached the dogma of the goodness of man. Balmes, along with other Catholic thinkers, could not forget the sinfulness of man and the composite of good and bad in human behavior. To preach that men are good, that they have no need of grace or education, and that the cause of evil is the institutions of society, had been to men like Balmes peculiarly revolutionary and dangerous doctrine. In this respect there is a fairly explicit line of conservative thought from St. Augustine to the contemporary critic of liberalism. But, secondly, Rousseau argued that as men were good, they create society by agreement, and they have in their hands, in their primary machineries of government, a complete popular sovereignty. (Rousseau, however, accepted representative institutions for the government of Poland.) It is a sovereignty that is not limited by

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Christian philosophy, doctrine, or morality. For under Rousseau’s civil religion the city would determine through popular sovereignty, for example, the General Will—what is right and wrong, just or unjust. Had the theories of social evolution been available to Balmes, he might well have accepted them as a better explanation of the origin of society than the social contract. It is also true that the governmental contract has been forgotten, while the contract principle itself remains in the relations of individuals between themselves and with the public authority only in business dealings. Assuming a divinely ordained social order which exists under the limitations of custom, law, and morality, we come then to the form of government. Balmes recognized the importance of republicanism, but as a Spaniard with Carlist sympathies he was concerned with monarchy in a Christian and Catholic society. From ancient times, Catholic thinkers have supported the principle of balance or mixture in the constitution of the state. This system of balance began with the Greeks as a theory of moderation, based in turn on a social structure with a strong middle class. Plato’s Laws, Aristotle, Polybius, St. Thomas and many others affirmed such a concept. The issue was not moderation in government, but how to achieve it. Balmes advocated the necessity of monarchy, the importance of historic nobilities, and the influence of the clergy; but, in addition, he has a long exploration of the issue of the support of popular institutions in both European and Spanish society. The genius of Christianity had supported the power of popular elements in ancient liberties, or local fueros or customs of Castilla, Aragon, Valencia, and Cataluña. Liberty was found in the fueros, the privileges, the liberties (as used also in medieval England), in the Cortes, in estates of the realm, in the rights of municipalities, in juries, in the gremios or unions of workers and artisans, and in the groupings of professional and learned men of the kingdom. Though the Bourbons in Spain had sought to root out these ancient liberties and to centralize power in the capital, the monarchy after 1700 had been only partially successful. The restoration of tradition would mean a restoration of the ancient forms of liberty, rather than a cold and impersonal territorial system of representation.10 All forms of government seem appropriate in Catholic thought, provided they operate under the laws of justice, which is to say that tyranny is not compatible with Catholic thought. Still, rebellion is not always justified, for, Balmes argued, to rebel one must be sure the government is not legitimate in origin or in practice, that there is a legitimate alternative government to propose, and that there is a good chance of success in a revolution. He believed that civil liberty was essential to Europeans, but that monarchy was also necessary because under monarchy in Christian societies, liberty for all the people had flourished. Monarchy had been weakened in Europe for various causes. Protestants had brought about despotism in many instances, since they had rejected the historic Christian limitations on government. To fight the Church they had weakened and destroyed traditional representative institutions. Indeed, Balmes

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argues that Protestantism had contributed much to the weakness and occasional death of popular institutions. The deeds of a Henry VIII had been repeated nearly everywhere in Europe in the religious struggles. In addition to the rise of despotism and the sickening of popular and representative institutions, movements of mass turbulence had exploded in politics, which Richard Hooker in England at the end of the sixteenth century had blamed largely on the Puritans. As the contemporary political philosopher Eric Voegelin might say, the Gnostic movements were one result of the Reformation.11 Further, Balmes saw that a curious result of religious Reformation had been the weakening of the influence of religion on government all over Europe. Protestants broke the power of the clergy, and with this they destroyed one of the great forces for political limitation and for the maintenance of the health of the mixed system of government. Let us note here that Balmes, like Friedrich Gentz and the American Federalists, saw a profound difference between the French and American Revolutions.12 The American Revolution and religious liberty marched together. Americans sought the aid of God, while in contrast the French blasphemed and splattered the blood of priests around the churches. If one would support liberty, he must also support the influence of religion on his government.13 Still, there is another proposition we must not forget. Balmes repeatedly returns to the idea that modern conditions, ideological and technical, demand a vast educational effort by both the state and the Church. Liberty and religion must have a basis of popular understanding on which to build. In his political writings in Madrid, in El Pensamiento de la Nación and El Criterio, he certainly had to enjoy the freedom of the press. In his discussion of toleration and intolerance, and the Inquisition, it was not really of fundamental import to show that the enemies of the Church had been and still were less tolerant than Catholics. What one has to do finally in any case is to state the conditions under which one affirms a laissez-faire of ideas. One affirms education within the national tradition, but there are limits today, as is common in all Western countries, when it comes to conspiracy and revolution. So Balmes asked: does liberty include the right to blaspheme God? May one deny free will and affirm a materialistic determinism? May one reject the reality of the spiritual and immortal soul? Surely, there must be in every country as a matter of public orthodoxy some distinction between what is called liberty and what is called license, though science itself must never be restricted, according to Balmes. Christianity has always favored the development of the human understanding, and all the more necessarily so in his day than in the past. V Professor Rafael Calvo Serer, in his book Las nuevas democracias, has noted that in contemporary democracy there are significant trends toward a new sys-

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tem all over the world, and in the West as well. There is the strengthening of the executive against the legislative branches of government, economic planning combined with the redistribution of the national income, and the regulation of the liberties of expression and association. Balmes sounds remarkably contemporary when he is dealing with economic questions. Clearly, he wanted a strong monarchy in alliance with a Christian order, but he wanted a considerable degree of economic planning, and certainly the assurance of a proper income for the working population. Perhaps one might say that even at the height of liberal influence in Spain, Spanish intellectuals have never believed in a market economy, though they have believed in free markets in specific instances and under certain conditions. Such is the case with Balmes. He was impressed with economic development in Catholic societies before the Reformation, including his own Catalonia. He understood the necessity of the accumulation of capital, and the necessity of governmental policy when it comes to international trade and the protection of national industries. He apparently believed in the traditional or the ancient organization of labor. It is still a question of interpretation whether any of the modern Catholic statements on social policy actually include the right to strike, though it is clear they include the right of businessmen to manage their businesses and to make money from their effort. Neither then nor now has Catholic thought accepted a dead level of economic equality that some socialist and Communist writers have at times proclaimed with enthusiasm. Students of the Catholic social encyclicals have often pointed to Balmes as a precursor of Leo XIII and the Rerum Novarum. That Rome approved of Balmes is clear, and had he not died so young he was to have been made a cardinal. In concrete detail, the modern Catholic principle of subsidiarity—of allowing the subordinate free association and the smaller or local unit of government to solve problems when they can—is found in the writings of Balmes.14 In part it is a result of his Spanish regionalism, but it arose also because of his skepticism about the concentration of political authority in Madrid. Skepticism about a centralization of power does not deny the right of the state to intervene in economic matters under Christian law. Mostly in these matters, however, Balmes wrote as a self-taught economist (and he had read the economists of the day to a surprising degree), as a student of the industry of Catalonia especially, and as an historian of European culture. In some degree Balmes accepted the socialistic criticisms of the nineteenthcentury social order in part, but he rejected criticisms that were based on a materialistic or anti-Christian philosophy. There was, indeed, too great a concentration of wealth in Europe and, in result, he could not accept the classical, natural laws of economics. Along with socialists, he wrote bitter descriptions of the conditions of the workers in England and France. But what were the causes of the social problem? The basic cause was a de-Christianization of society, for Balmes believed that Christianity was fundamentally progressive, and that a

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Christian society would make a more successful effort to solve economic problems. De-Christianization had brought with it a widespread materialism in ideas, which assumed that men could be made happy simply by economic reform. Furthermore, there was an increasing production of goods without a corresponding organization for their distribution. He assumed the argument—then somewhat new—that the use of machines leaves men out of work, puts riches in the hands of the few, and forces an unhealthy concentration of workers in factory areas. Finally, after a study of Adam Smith and Thomas R. Malthus, he concluded that one of the disturbing factors in economic life was the increase of population. On occasion, he thought the population of an area might be too great and then again it might be too small for a proper economic development. Balmes’ remedies for the problems we have discussed deserve our attention. There are both false and true remedies. It is false for either workers or employers to use force in gaining their economic ends. The ultimate solution of the progressive society is not in politics, though government policy and some “planning” seem obviously of immense importance to him. He did not believe that massive colonization, as practiced by the British, could be a general solution of economic questions, and he rejected completely the philosophy of socialism. At this time Robert Owen was the best-known socialist in Spain, and Balmes wrote extensive criticisms of both the “new philosophy” and what he believed would be its destructive consequences for Spain. Indeed, he preferred the socialism of Thomas More to that of Owen. In detail, Balmes rejected the principle, then more prominent than now in socialism, of the absolute equality of all. Though he rejected the gross and unnecessary inequalities of society, he recognized there are many reasons why it would be impossible to use political power or Christian zeal to make men equal. Further, he rejected the labor theory of value, which was accepted by Thomas Jefferson’s philosopher friend, Destutt de Tracy, one of the French ideologists prominent in Spain in the early nineteenth century. Balmes urged that we should not confuse cost and value. Finally, there was an extended defense of private property in Balmes’ work. The right to private property is clearly one of the principles of the social encyclicals, though in Christian economic philosophy there has always been more emphasis on the social responsibility of property than on its economic and legal defenses. As for proper remedies, Balmes had no quick solution. No doubt classes would continue to exist, and no doubt there would always be the poor, though their conditions could be alleviated in large degree. Balmes, as most other reformers, believed there should be first a revolution in the intellectual and moral order of the time. A reform of ideas meant to him teaching the moral means available to men in a changing society. But this implies education for all of the people, and the formation of the conscience of all classes. The rich must be taught their duties to the poor, for both charity and self-interest are combined in their self-preservation. On the other hand, the workers and the poor

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should not be taught utopian illusions about the abolition of poverty. Government policy itself should strive for continuous employment under equitable conditions. As in the Catholic thought of the encyclicals from Leo XIII to the present day, the worker has a right to a wage which will enable him to support a family and to be able to save something for less favorable days. Labor should be organized into associations, and Tribunals of Conciliation should be established, along with the proper reorganization of the antiguos gremios. He proposed, it would seem, the family wage on the ground of charity more than of justice, but he does not actually refer to the modern problem of labor unions, which had indeed hardly made an appearance at the time of his economic writings. On the other hand, Balmes became a prophet of modern corporativism, since he believed the organization of sociedades anónimas (corporations) would do much to retard the concentration of capital in the hands of the few. His analysis of corporate economics anticipates the teachings of Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, which focused on the organization of both workers and employers. He believed in the protection of the cotton industry in Catalonia against British competition; he urged the improvement of the means of communication (modern road building had hardly begun at the time of his writings), the education of workers and professional people in technical skills, and the development of various industries and agriculture.15 Catholic social thought has long been in flux. Christian thinking about the social order is one of the deeper preoccupations of all Christian leaders of the twentieth century. The fundamental principles for the construction of social order may remain, as do the conservative foundations of all human order. But the technical issues and the applications of principle change with historical and technical events. Policies of change are surely a matter of prudence, which in one aspect is the wisdom to apply principle to specific situations. Prudence or wisdom is the foundation of other virtues, which expand from individuals throughout society. In our time, socialism stands wearily on its record either of cruel repression and tyranny as in Russia, or upon a record of reforms which have only in a few instances made much difference to the masses of men. The opportunity to use the philosophy of Balmes, the Christian philosophy of social order, has come full turn. Balmes is not a man to be forgotten in a future order of political and economic liberty, though new forms of government and new forms of economic systems are characteristic of our century. As Menéndez Pelayo noted, speaking of Balmes, “en ciencias sociales tuvo intuiciones y presentimientos que rayan en el genio.”16 He was a man of genius. Notes 1.

See Obras completas del Dr. D. Jaime Balmes, Pbro. Primera edición crítica ordenada y anotada por el P. Ignacio Casanovas, S.J. Biblioteca Balmes, 33 vols., (1925).

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2.

The liberals were in favor of enlightened despotism, because in this way they might get their reforms adopted. See Luis Sánchez Agesta, El pensamiento político del despotismo ilustrado (1953); Melchor Ferrer, Domingo Tejera y José Acedo, Historia del tradicionalismo español (1941), vol. 1; José Muñoz Pérez, “Los proyectos sobre España e Indias en el siglo XVIII: el proyectismo como género,” Revista de estudios políticos, May-June, 1955, No. 87, pp. 169-195. Enrique Gil Robles, Derecho político según los principios de la filosofía y el derecho cristianos (2 vols., 1899, 1902), Vol. II, Ch. XVIII, used the term poliarquía (poliarcas). Polyarchy is apparently an old Spanish term for the liberal system of parliament, parties, and the vices of elections. But actually the trend has been toward as little polyarchy as possible and as much oligarchy as can be achieved. See Ensayos de crítica filosófica, Vol. IX of Obras completas, ed. Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin (1918), pp. 363 ff. In contemporary Spain there is great interest in Balmes as a monarchist. The numerous “Círculos Jaime Balmes” are dedicated largely to advocating the restoration of Don Juan as King of Spain. The “Círculos Vásquez de Mella” are composed of Carlists. See Escritos políticos, ed. D. Jaime Balmes (1847), pp. 598-603. Father Feijóo, like so many controversial Spaniards, can hardly be identified with a single political position. He used the Enlightenment thinkers and English critics like Hume, but he was always clearly loyal to the Church. See Luis Sánchez Agesta, ed., Escritos políticos de Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijóo; teatro crítico universal y cartas eruditos (1946); Clásicos castellanos contains texts of his writings; Gregorio Marañón, Las ideas biológicas del Padre Feijóo (1934); and Sánchez Agesta, El pensamiento político del despotismo ilustrado (1953). Obras completas, Vol. IV: El protestantismo comparado con el catolicismo (Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1949), p. 9. Ibid., pp. 129-130. Guglielmo Ferrero, The Principles of Power; The Great Political Crises of History, trans. Theodore R. Jaeckel (1942), p. 221, says Christianity accomplished a great humanization and demilitarization of the West. This judgment is a notable confirmation of Balmes by a liberal historian. The question of modern and ancient tolerance and intolerance, and the Inquisition in Spain is discussed in connection with Menéndez Pelayo. Balmes’ argument is not primarily theoretical but highly factual and historical. He compares in detail rather than in abstractions, which is so characteristic of twentieth-century discussion. These observations bring us squarely up against the Carlist version of traditionalism, which calls itself la Communión Tradicionalista. Under twentieth-century conditions, Carlism surely has no monopoly on the idea of traditionalism. There are about 1,500,000 Carlists in Spain, and some say four or five million who are sympathetic with the general doctrines of God, King, and Country. Balmes possessed Carlist sympathies, but he can hardly be called an activist, and he certainly did not advocate the overthrow of Isabel II when his proposal that she marry the Carlist Pretender was rejected. Among the notable Carlist exponents of traditionalist doctrine who have already been cited are Enrique Gil Robles, Antonio Aparisi y Guijarro, and Vásquez de Mella. Much of Carlist doctrine is, rather curiously, in parliamentary speeches, but the Carlists seemed to have been in error in not accepting positions in the government and thus infiltrating it with their ideas. In this they helped give the French-type liberals their opportunity. See Marqués de Eliseda, Autoridad y libertad (1945); and El tradicionalismo español del siglo XIX. Selección y prólogo de Vicente Marrero (1955). This is an exceptionally revealing collection of documents. The Braganza letter on the criticism

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

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11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

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of liberalism is one of the most forceful statements of this type that can be read. Some monarchists have asserted that the quarrel between the supporters of Don Juan (the son of Alfonso XIII, the last King of Spain) and the Carlist Pretenders (attention has recently focused on Carlos Hugo who married in 1964 the Dutch Princess Irené and is the son of Don Xavier, the elderly Pretender) will have the same results as in France in 1872. In France, a monarchist majority frittered away its opportunity by internecine quarrels. Editors’ Note: For Wilson’s assessment of Voegelin see “The Foremost Philosopher of the Age,” Modern Age, Volume 2, Number 1 (Winter 1957-1958), pp. 5462; and the correspondence between Wilson and Voegelin in the Francis Graham Wilson Papers Collection, University of Illinois Archives. Editors’ Note: See Friedrich Gentz, The French and American Revolutions Compared, trans. John Quincy Adams (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955). Ibid., pp. 715 ff. Balmes would surely agree with a later Spanish philosopher that the profound meaning of the history of Spain is the identification of the country with its religion. See Manuel García Morente, Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España, Estudio preliminar de Rafael Gambra (1957), p. 57. Editors’ Note: Following nearly a half century after Balmes’ death, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), the first modern encyclical, provides the most eloquent statement of subsidiarity: “Experience of his own weaknesses both impels and encourages a man to ally his forces with those of another. As the Bible puts it: ‘Better two than one by himself, since thus their work is really profitable. If one should fall, the other helps him up; but woe to the man by himself with no one to help him when he falls down’ (Eccles. 4:9-10); and in another place: ‘Brother, helped by brother is a fortress, friends are like the bars of a keep’ (Proverbs 18:19). Just as a man is led by this natural propensity to associate with others in a political society, so also he finds it advantageous to join with his fellows in other kinds of societies, which though small and not independent are nevertheless true societies” (“§49, Rerum Novarum,” Proclaiming Justice and Peace, ed. Michael Walsh and Brian Davies [Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1991], p. 35). For a contemporary rendering of Rerum Novarum’s themes after the collapse of Communism, see Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (especially §29 and chapters V and VI in Proclaiming Justice and Peace, Ibid., pp. 432-478). Balmes’ Obras completas must, of course, be consulted for a thorough study of his ideas, but also see Ireneo González, S.J., La cuestión social según Jaime Balmes (1943). Editors’ translation: “In the social sciences, he had intuitions and premonitions that border on genius.”

4 The Great Restorer: Menéndez Pelayo I It has been said of Don Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856-1912) that, like El Cid, he could win victories even after his death. Victory or not, no student of the Spanish tradition can possibly ignore “el gran polígrafo” as he is fondly called, even by those who reject him as a standard for the world of the twentieth century. It is the liberals who are critical of his work, and it is the conservatives who say that the errors he made are small in comparison with the large, valid judgments in his work. Critics of Spanish tradition will say that much of it must be forgotten or downgraded if Spain is to actually become a part of Europe, that is, the liberal Europe of the French Enlightenment. But those who follow Don Marcelino will argue, for example, that the great Menéndez Pidal has sustained all of the fundamental points he made in his incredibly voluminous writings and editing. His supporters will say, as in the Spanish proverb, that the liberals grab the radish plant by the leaves instead of the root. There cannot be ultimately an ideology of two Spains, the Spain of obsolescent tradition and the Spain of Europe. Ramiro de Maetzu once called such talk the Spain of the tree and the Spain of the ivy. For Menéndez Pelayo the essential question is that of the teacher, the intellectual. The greatness of Spanish intellectual life informs the intellectual, and it embodies a permanent conception of existence. The restoration of tradition can be accomplished, but it is the task of the intellectuals who shape the minds of students. First of all, one must get the facts, one must go back to the records, and sheer quantitative comparisons must in some instances be made. As a conservative, Menéndez Pelayo represents an ambitious spirit of the future when the restoration of tradition will have been effected. And then, one must study the great moments of Spanish restoration, some of which have come long after his death, that is, the victories he continues to win in the twentieth century. 61

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It was his conclusion that any honest study of Spain will show that down to the military and economic disasters of the seventeenth century, its contributions to European culture had been as great as any country. Consider Seneca, Luis Vives (the great anticipator of Francis Bacon), Ramon Lull in humanist learning, and consider the achievements of Spanish theologians at the Council of Trent. Have a look at the economic and social ideas of Feijóo and Jovellanos in the face of enlightened despotism, and remember that Juan Donoso Cortés was known throughout Europe for his criticism of mid-century revolutions. Consider as well the ultimate Catholic rejection in Spain of the tempting ideas of Charles Maurras. Finally, consider the new traditionalists who gathered around the journals Acciòn Española and Arbor to state, to explore, and to restore the force of Spanish tradition in modern life, including today what is perhaps the first great Catholic-led industrial revolution of the modern world. Menéndez Pelayo was struggling against the Spanish inferiority complex which at times had made anything foreign seem better than anything Spanish. It is probable that no nation has felt more deeply than Spain its inferiority and its failure in the modern era. It is not ostentatious, perhaps, for a Spaniard to note that the superiority of Anglo-Saxons in politics and economics, and in measure Germany today, has existed only from the beginnings of the nineteenth century, from the days of Trafalgar and Waterloo, in which Spain and France, Catholic and Latin countries, lost the supremacy they had maintained for not merely a hundred and fifty years but for three centuries, during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.1 While Spain retained her empire until the time of Napoleon, France was in many respects Catholic and certainly Latin. But Spain had lost her position in European politics by crushing military defeat early in the seventeenth century, which was confirmed by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. There has been a relatively continuous study by Spaniards of why its great disasters took place, and perhaps no nation has conducted such an intensive self-inquiry. Palacio Atard has noted that Spain fell in the seventeenth century because it suffered crushing military defeat, economic exhaustion, and it endured a profound spiritual crisis, or as some might say, a failure of nerves. Spain disregarded its material resources and the limits of its manpower for both the army and for military industry. It was idealistic, universalistic, impulsive and imprudent in its undertakings, as may be seen both in its effort against England and on the continent during the Thirty Years War. The vast effort of Spain to roll back the Reformation and make Europe Catholic again had failed in measure, but it had succeeded notably in other instances. What one might say is that the Catholic-Protestant line was preserved more or less at the old Roman Limes (or northern boundary of the Empire); the Reformation was unable to penetrate significantly beyond this point, and this surely is one of the notable achievements of Spain, with little help at all from other Catholic societies. There was, indeed, some notable recovery of Spain in the eighteenth century and had there

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been no Napoleonic invasion and subsequent war the history of Spain during the last century and a half might have been brilliantly different.2 The Duke of Maura once said that the Spanish empire died of hunger. It is clear that the government had little conception of the management of the capital available for Spanish industry, and the conception of economic freedom of individuals and corporate bodies had hardly begun to be accepted as an element in the production of wealth. One factor most Spaniards recognize is the loss of population to Hispanic America, and often thereby the debilitation of particular regions and industries. Emigration, continued war, and the expulsion of the Jews and Moriscos (the Moslems remaining in eastern Spain after the capture of Granada) were all elements in the Spanish age of the rout. The torrent of gold helped destroy the medieval economic inheritance; there was no capitalistic spirit in the unions and guilds or in “las ciudades gremiales;” there was decline of agriculture; and the constant efforts of many self-critics in Spain to persuade the aristocracy to engage in work and business failed. In the end, much of the Spanish commerce with America was taken over covertly by foreigners. As is commonly recognized, there was a loss of spirit, of Spanish idealism, of willingness to sacrifice, in the beginnings of the seventeenth century. Cervantes published the first part of his Don Quixote in 1605. It has often been said that this noble classic represents the fatigue, the overexertion of the Spanish, and their willingness to laugh at themselves and their enthusiasm which had led a brief generation before to breaking the imperialistic power of the Turks at the battle of Lepanto in 1571. Spaniards criticized their government for its corruption; that is, the prizes did not go to the most capable, but this is a complaint that is, no doubt, quite universal, and certainly is commonly heard in contemporary Spain. It must arise in any society that fails to give its intellectual and professional classes a large opportunity to make a living and to get married. In any case, the critics refer to the intellectual vacuum of Spain during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, which clearly was the result of the discouragement and the failure of nerve during the seventeenth century. But much depends on the point of view—for there are those who would praise the House of Austria and those who would damn it as the cause of decline. Those who praise the Hapsburgs look to the guardianship of the eternal religious values represented in Spain, and those who damn them turn to the Bourbons after the change in succession in 1700 for the spirit of Enlightenment and progress. For these Charles III (1759-1788) is the great king, and not Charles V or Philip II. Charles III, a man of gnome-like appearance, drove Spain forward with an iron will toward what the new Frenchified intellectuals saw was proper for the country. Education was reformed and industry began to flourish until the time of the Napoleonic invasions. Catholic spirit and Spanish traditionalism began to revive only with the War of Independence, which began on 2 May 1808. In the nineteenth century there was the strange insistence of the “liber-

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ated” intellectuals that whatever the woes of Spain had been and were now, it was due to the Catholic Church, and more in particular to the existence of the Inquisition which had been first established in Spain by the Catholic Sovereigns in 1483. Or it has been said that when Pedro Calderón de la Barcia died in 1681 the last of the “greats” in Spanish culture was dead. The liberal criticism of Menéndez Pelayo has been continuous and insistent. Part of the restatement of Spanish liberalism in the years after the end of the Civil War in 1939 has been a further attack on his irrelevance to modern life. Liberals will admit the importance of the great Spanish philosophers from Seneca to the present, but they turn almost always to José Ortega y Gasset and to Miguel de Unamuno. Both thinkers exhibit a turn away from strict Catholic belief. Ortega represents a philosophical vitalism, and Unamuno an adherence to science and a system of belief that may be reconciled with other religious views than the Catholicism of Spain. They will accept the importance of the Spanish jurist-theologians of the sixteenth century, Vitoria, De Soto, Suárez, and Molina, who helped to create the principles of international law for the modern world.3 Historically, Spanish liberals return to the supporters of French ideas in the eighteenth century. Liberalism itself has been and remains the object of constant study and reinterpretation, but it is defined in the light of some version of the idealism of the theory of progress. The great Dr. Marañón declared in his day: “To be a liberal is precisely these two things. First, it means being disposed to understand one who thinks with another method; and, second, not to ever admit that the end justifies the means, but that, on the contrary, it is the means which justify the end.”4 Spanish liberals claim they have restored the unity of the intellectual community in Spain, but this can mean only the restored unity of the liberal intellectuals. As noted earlier, the liberals are anti-Catholic, they do not like the market or capitalism, and they want immediately in Spain some form of democracy, though the specifics are unclear. They dislike ideology as do the contemporary Spanish conservatives, and some of them would, like the Christian conservatives, propose a social revolution under the aegis of the Church. The meaning of democracy is quite difficult, since in the writings in exile that some of them have done they do not advocate the parliamentary system which is commonly associated with the British, French, Germans, or the Japanese.5 However, it is clear that the liberals are opposed to any form of dictatorship, and especially the regime of General Franco. II Menéndez Pelayo was born of strongly traditionalist parents. Because of the influence of German ideas in Madrid—that is, “Krausism”—he was sent to Barcelona for his university education. There he came to reject foreign philosophy and turned to a vigorous Catholicism which did not leave him the rest of

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his life. But the most astonishing of the facts about him was his overwhelming brilliance as a young scholar. At twenty-one he passed the examinations for a professorship in the University of Madrid, and he passed it so brilliantly that it was not long before all of Spain was aware of it. At the same time, his dream of a vast re-publication of the Spanish literary classics was taking shape. In the process, he rediscovered Spanish greatness. Spain was always great. It did not decline, but it was routed and defeated by the rest of Europe. One of the notable modern books and one of the classics of Spain is his La ciencia española in 1876. It became a frontal attack on all of the positions of the liberal pilgrimage toward Spanish perfection. It is a polemic which continues today, conservatives and traditionalists supporting him and the modern liberals and neoliberals, like Pedro Laín Entralgo and Antonio Tovar, insisting that he is either seriously in error or inadequate for the modern age. Conservatives see a Menéndez Pelayo who continued throughout his life to champion his cause, but liberals like to see in him an evolution from the youthful controversialist to the more moderate and liberty-loving historian of his mature years. But all will admit that he never became a liberal in the Spanish sense of the word. It is easy to argue the failure of any political position, for most politics have always been full of deceptions and only relatively successful. Still, the defense of Spanish tradition in La ciencia española was not as nationalistic as was customary at the time in most of the rest of Europe, nor was it related peculiarly to the nineteenth century, for some have said with an excess of imagination that Spain had no nineteenth century, just as it had no Reformation, and that it stopped the French and leftwing revolution in 1939. The Spanish nineteenth century was different, indeed, from most of the rest of Europe. Menéndez Pelayo was seeking a universal philosophy which would rise logically from the Catholicism of Spain. It is on religion rather than on territorial nationalism that the universal aspirations of the Spaniards are based, and this is why they may speak of Españas, or the “Spains,” or speak of its parliament as “Las Cortes Españolas.” Further, the liberal may well be in Spain more nationalistic in the French and unitary sense than the intense Spanish patriot. The traditionalist loves his region and its fueros and accepts a “Hispanidad,” which is a kind of cultural, or linguistic and religious unity of people associated with the many “Spains” of the world. Owing to the intense controversy produced by his writing, Menéndez Pelayo tended to retire to his scholarship and his professorship in the University of Madrid. He was elected to the Cortes as a deputy from Palma de Mallorca. He went to Palma to campaign, but apparently he spent as much time looking at the material in the local libraries as in making speeches of a monarchist and conservative hue. Don Marcelino was quickly disillusioned with politics, though he was concerned with the national educational problem. He was chosen to be a Senator, but he took little interest in the position and continued his study of the national literary patrimony. For a time late in his life he was given little

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attention by the intellectuals, but at his death he was recognized as one of the greatest of Spaniards and a great European.6 While the literary studies of Menéndez Pelayo range far and wide, the political or ideological position he took was summarized in three notable statements. When he was twenty-two, he attended a commemoration of Calderón de la Barca in the park of the Retiro in Madrid. There were some remarks by the distinguished speakers present which were derogatory of Catholicism. Menéndez Pelayo rose to speak, saying that he had not intended to say anything on the occasion. But he there proclaimed his Catholicism and he then proceeded to defend the religious foundations of the literary creations of Calderón. Again, because of the brilliance of his utterance and because there was an immense number of Spaniards waiting to hear just such an affirmation of the religious foundations of the Catholic literary tradition, the Brindis became famous overnight. In a Spain dominated intellectually by the liberals, for as Maeztu says, even the conservatives were often liberals, Menéndez Pelayo’s statement was a remarkable act of courage, just as had been the recently published Ciencia. And the struggle was sharpened, for later such Olympian names as Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno were both to flail him and to ignore him. Such was the liberal spirit of the time. The second document which has been quoted in part a thousand times is the Epilogue to the Heterodoxos. There is probably no statement of greater eloquence in defense of Españolismo and no greater tribute to its achievements in history. It is a single statement which has done more than any other, no doubt, to pull together the strands of the attitude of mind, the conviction, and the passion and emotional commitment which are found in Spanish traditionalism and conservatism. For if some would say the conservatives are sterile, as liberal critics do, Menéndez Pelayo would answer that the elements we know as “conservatism” are what has made Spain and created its ineradicable impact on universal history. The third statement which comes into the literature of conservative classics is the Dos palabras which has already been discussed in the previous chapter.7 III It has been said that Menéndez Pelayo decided quite early in his spectacular career that politics was not the primary support for the restoration of Spanish tradition. It had to be found in the creative intellectual and literary tradition of Spain. He grew toward manhood in the northern atmosphere of sympathy toward Carlism, and though he leaned toward Carlism, he stood for the existing monarchy, on a model in his mind of the great Catholic Sovereigns who had brought about the unification and the preservation of the regions of Spain. But such an idealization of monarchy did not mean that the government in Madrid was the agency to restore respect for the Spanish contribution to literature and science. What he seems to have meant is that finally the universities must be

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recaptured from the liberals, and particularly from the Spanish followers of the German philosopher Krause. The ideas of Krause had been brought to Spain by Julián Sanz del Río who made a trip to Germany in 1843. Don Marcelino once observed that the history of Spain might have been profoundly changed had Jaime Balmes rather than Sanz del Río made that fateful trip to Germany.8 Thus, there is one thing that is clear in Spain as elsewhere: the battle over education, the politics of the child, is central in the politics of every state. If the intellectuals want to interpret tradition, and this reconquest of tradition by Menéndez Pelayo is what seemed to disturb them most, they want to manipulate education to control the mind of the child, even against the Church and the wishes of the parents. Menéndez Pelayo said throughout his long life that a Spaniard should be proud of his heritage, but the “history” must be recovered from those who would mold Spain following the repulse of the destructive movements in philosophy in Europe during the nineteenth century. It is a curious fact that while the liberals centralized education to control it from Madrid, against regional and family tradition, that centralization has largely survived the victory of the nationalists in 1939. Might not one suggest that after centralization has been achieved in education, not even the victors against a given centralization are willing to surrender it when it comes into new hands.9 There is surely more of Menéndez Pelayo in Spanish education today than there was during his lifetime. To educate people in science, technology, and modern languages as Thomas Jefferson wanted at the University of Virginia, and as the nineteenth century progressives wanted in Europe, does not suggest that the religious, moral, and philosophical tradition of a nation must be scrapped. Surely, there is nothing incongruous in thinking about the Trinity while one is flying in a supersonic jet airplane. Does a machine produce a philosophy, or is the machine to be used as the philosophy and moral tradition shall dictate? But if one looks at the portrait of a dour Sanz del Río hanging on the walls of the Athenaeum in Madrid, one might well agree that there was little tolerance in him. He believed that technology and power should be used to the full in the destruction of the ancient Catholic way of life. Menéndez Pelayo has been called one of the greatest of the friends of Cataluña. But he was both a regionalist and a believer in the unity of Spaniards under one national government, which is in general the position of Carlists in Spain today. Regionalism itself is one of the most natural of issues in Spain. The regional studies of language, literature, and history, constitute a world that few foreigners are willing to penetrate. One may read some of the literature, but the strange force of monarchist, and Carlist symbolism, is something that an American can more effectively state in words than in terms of his own existential understanding. Whatever commitment Don Marcelino had to Carlism never deterred him from an actual loyalty to the monarchy of the restoration. He was no revolutionist, but Spain would lose much of its meaning without the vitality of the traditions and fueros (or liberties) of its kingdoms, principalities, and

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regions. These are things that are “castizo” or typical and genuinely Spanish. And many a Spaniard of the nineteenth century was able to understand both the vitality of tradition, and the ineffectiveness of parliamentary political parties and Madrid bureaucrats.10 IV There are profound controversies in every nation, but only a nation which has existed as long as Spain and through as many dramatic historical changes could have the great polemic which was started by the Ciencia. Ever since the early years of the seventeenth century there had been among the intellectuals in Spain a kind of self-flagellation and admiration for those who had been victors over Spain in its epic struggles for universal order. It became for the selfcritics of Spain a common idea that Spanish intellectual life had been oppressed from some uncertain point in the past, from the Catholic Sovereigns to the War of Independence against France. Many explanations for the oppression of intellectual life were offered, but by the time of the Enlightenment it was common to say that the Catholic Church and the clergy, scholastic philosophy, or the Inquisition or Holy Office, were responsible for the retarded condition of Spain. Or, at times it was alleged that tolerance in other parts of Europe enabled them to surge ahead and to overcome superstition in the ruling minorities. The term “black legend” is usually applied to Spain, but every country has its black legends, including the twentieth-century criticism of the United States as imperialistic or proselytist in Hispanic America, or for having failed to have a coherent foreign policy in its attempted leadership of the free world. It was in Northern Europe, in Holland apparently, that the first black legend was launched, that Spain was cruel and grasping and that its colonial effort was almost solely for the purpose of getting rich. While the Spanish were cruel and superstitious (that is, Catholic), the Anglo-Saxons, or Dutch, or others, were benign and Protestant. Catholicism stood for the destruction of freedom while Protestantism was the foundation of liberty. And particularly the Spanish Inquisition was an engine of terror and retardation, while Protestant suppression, even if more extensive than Spanish, was only to preserve truth and liberty against the wickedness of the Spaniard. Though modern historical studies have thrown much new light on Spanish colonization with its cultural and educational achievements among the natives, and have shown that many of the strictures of Father Las Casas were exaggerated, still the issues associated with the Inquisition remain.11 This is the perduring “black legend” of Spain. Even if one might show that Protestants put more Catholic heretics to death than the Spanish, there is still that remarkably terse term “the Inquisition.” Other countries may have had trials and burnings at the stake, or beheadings as in the case of Saint Sir Thomas More, but they did not have that inexorable descriptive word “the Inquisition.” A Spaniard of traditionalist leanings may say today that the Inqui-

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sition was mild, but Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” still remains an imagination of Catholic horror. The liberal self-criticism of Spain seems to have begun in a rather ingenious fashion. It was necessary to import modern science, industry, and technical invention in order to bring Spain abreast of Europe. Father Feijóo was critical of Spain but he remained a faithful Christian, and though some like Jovellanos may have struggled with his bishop, it is generally conceded that though a serious reformer, he did not desert the Catholic beliefs of Spain. But there were others whose primary means of bringing science to Spain was the destruction of the Church. Self-criticism moved from eighteenth-century reformism, as in the case of the Marqués de Ensenada, to the virulent anti-clericalism that produced so much of the violence of the nineteenth century. In some areas, to be a liberal meant that a person was primarily against the Church and only secondarily for reforms which would establish a free economic system. It was believed by many a liberal, that tolerance, which they said was incompatible with Catholic Christianity, would bring the exaltation of achievement in science. We must bury the past. Joaquín Costa, a strangely violent politician of the nineteenth century, often urged that a double lock be placed on the tomb of El Cid to prevent him from riding again. He believed in the rebirth of Spain, in reforms in education, new roads, less waste in public funds, and fewer Caciques and oligarchs in the governments of Spain.12 He wanted self-government but not parliamentarism, he wanted capital but not capitalism, liberty of commerce but not vampirism, religion and the clergy but not clericalism, and also a “doble llave a los sepulcros de Torquemada y de Calormarde.”13 Moreover, he denounced monarchy. It is often the case that Catholic defenders of tradition may be pardoned for doubting the professed Catholicism of the anti-clerical, or the person who would diminish the role of the family and the Church in educating the rising generation.14 It was into such a situation that Menéndez Pelayo made his challenge with a defense of Spanish science, humanistic and otherwise. He was one of the first to study with any care the records of the Inquisition; he was also one of the first to make a comparison of religious intolerance in Spain and in Protestant countries. Following Balmes, he carried forward the resuscitation of the great Spanish-jurist theologians of the Golden Century. Furthermore, one cannot avoid some direct discussion of the issue of tolerance, for there are no societies in which all things are tolerated. It generally is a question of what limitations one is going to impose before tolerance is permitted. But the central and most important proposition in all the extensive studies Menéndez Pelayo made in the Ciencia and the Heterodoxos was that the Inquisition had put no obstacles before the scientific and literary achievements of the great names of Spanish science, or Spanish intellectual history. There had been no obstacles in the field of science, and no distinguished literary or scientific figure had ever been condemned by the Holy Office. Obstacles had been encountered regarding theological questions and on the attempted establishment of Protestantism in

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Spain. Whatever intolerance of heresy the Inquisition showed, it had brought no retardation of intellectual achievement.15 In a joking mood, Menéndez Pelayo remarked that much of this discussion of the Inquisition was almost as bad as saying that Adam and Eve sinned because they were advised by a Jesuit. As a second fundamental proposition, Menéndez Pelayo argued that Spanish science was something anyone could be proud of all the way up from the days of Seneca, a Spaniard, who went to Rome to distinguish himself in philosophy and letters, to the moderns who had done similar things. He cited particularly the example of Luis Vives as a precursor of Francis Bacon in the theory of experimental science. There had been, indeed, much Spanish philosophy that was in the scholastic tradition (he considered Vives more important than St. Thomas), but had nevertheless been highly influential on the intellectual life of Europe. While Menéndez Pelayo admitted the defeat of Spain in the seventeenth century, he denied the Inquisition was at fault so much as the rigidity of the pedagogical systems which dominated education at the time. Furthermore, there had been a far greater infiltration of European ideas into Spain than the critics of the Inquisition will admit. Every doctrine, good or bad, had come into Spain, though the influence of such ideas had tended to be outside of the formal educational system. Then, one should not forget that the Inquisition itself became, finally, in the eighteenth century, a docile instrument of regalism, or the theory that the Crown should dominate the Church. Indeed, the Holy Office had opposed French books only when they were clearly hostile to religion. And, today, one would consider most of the doctrines opposed by the Holy Office as absurd as they were considered to be in the eighteenth century. Menéndez Pelayo developed to some extent an argument that has become pointed in the present age. He insisted that when the scientists, literary people, or lawyers engage in discussions in their field of study, they should not set themselves up as theologians. Nor should they ignore that theological science in Spain had shown a marvelous development—the greatest in Europe—as indeed had been the case with the law from the writings of Vitoria at the beginning of the sixteenth century to the thunderous contributions of Suárez at the close of the century and in the early years of the seventeenth century. In this connection there is a curious similarity to the works of the great scientist Teilhard de Chardin, who caused himself trouble by mixing science, philosophy and theology; and a Monitum or warning against the use of his work by immature minds was issued in Rome in 1962. Chardin often used theological ideas in a vague, symbolically scientific manner, which could only cause confusion. But Menéndez Pelayo urged that when the Inquisition kept heretical religious doctrines out of Spain, the modern Spaniard should rejoice. To him true civilization lies within Catholicism, and he who defends it is no enemy of Spain. It was the triumph in the court of French Encyclopedism which finally brought about contempt for the Spanish scientific and literary tradition. Further, he observed

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that the greatest days of the Inquisition had been the greatest days of progress, for example in Catalonia, and in Spain in general. Thus, in an eloquent passage Menéndez Pelayo contends that decadence of Spain coincides, not with the unity maintained by the Inquisition, but with the Voltairian court of Charles IV, who came to the throne in 1788, with the triumph of the “constituyentes de Cádiz,” with the rebellious defenses of the Constitution of 1812, with the seizure of Church property by Mendiezábel, with the burning of convents and churches, with the public beating of members of the clergy, with the foundation of the Athanaeum of Madrid, and with the journey of Sanz del Río to Germany.16 Nor let us forget the blunt passage in which he speaks in the Heterodoxos of the harshness of Henry VIII in England. After observing both Calvinist and Lutheran intolerance, he notes that in thirtyeight years Henry VIII killed two queens, two cardinals, two archbishops, eighteen bishops, thirteen abbots, 500 priors and monks, thirty-eight doctors, twelve dukes, 164 knights, 124 citizens, and 110 women.17 Granting all this does not prove much, still it suggests the possibility that Spain did not decline from such; nor did England continue to rise in European influence because of it. There is another and startling phase of the great polemic. The critics of Menéndez Pelayo who would denigrate Catholic influence on Spain have been stepping warily toward an argument which would suggest that what achievements there were in Spain came from Arabic learning, and from the Jews who formed at the time part of the Moslem cultural system in southern Spain. The Arabic-Hebrew period is thus the most important in the whole story of Spanish intellectual origins.18 In answer to the scorn heaped on the Ciencia, it is retorted: How can one consider such people as the French philosophes really philosophers in any true sense? Menéndez Pelayo urges with passion that though the Arabic-Jewish contribution is great, it was not the only source of learning for Spaniards. Consider the sources relied on by St. Isidore of Sevilla, and while the beginning of the seventh century is no time of brilliance, it was bright enough to use many classical sources, a fountain of knowledge to which must be added the Arabic influence, if one is going to probe the foundations of the Spanish scientific tradition. At this point the argument, the furious argument in fact, becomes a little tedious.19 Who were actually burned at the stake or garroted before they were burned? No distinguished intellectual or contributor to science was killed. If the Inquisition had been directed first of all against Jews who relapsed into Judaism, the Judaizantes, all who were condemned were obscure people and no distinguished scientist or scholar in either Spain or Portugal. On the contrary, some such apostates even attained high honors in Spanish universities. Among the Moriscos none were educated; no Protestant of distinction was burned; of the witches and magicians, none were educated; among Illuminati and others, no scholar was condemned. In Portugal one Jewish playwright was burned, and in Valladolid there was the famous case of the Lutheran, Dr. Cazalla. The cata-

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log runs on and on to prove the initial point to which we have already referred. He offers no defense of the expulsion of the Jews except to say that primarily it saved the Jews from the popular hostility and suspicion to which they had been continually subjected. What Menéndez Pelayo labored to show was that the whole literary, philosophic, and scientific history of Spain was one of notable achievement down to the late period of defeat in the seventh century when the disintegrative forces in modern culture came to bear upon it. It was an achievement that might begin again with educational changes, but it was a record of which Spaniards should be proud. Accordingly, Menéndez Pelayo sought to place Spain in a universal context, a context of universal thought and of universal history. The noted Spanish philosopher Eugenio d’Ors thinks of him as Spanish in tradition, as having his roots in Graeco-Latin thought, who pondered and wrote in the manner of the Renaissance, but who was a modern by adoption. In another sense he worked in the context of a Platonic idealism, and his mind evinces the Latin intellect at its best. But to Menéndez Pelayo, his philosophy—the PlatonicChristian view of life—raised always the banner of liberty, while Aristotle, being for order primarily, could not be such a defender of liberty. Or, in another vein, d’Ors argued that classicism and Catholicism are equivalent, while romanticism has an inherent tendency toward obscurantism.20 V In this ecumenical time few, if any, Spaniards would say they want another Torquemada. Certainly, Menéndez Pelayo wanted no restoration of the Inquisition. But Spaniards may very well say that the Inquisition was in fact quite mild compared with Protestant persecutions of Catholics, and that in its better days in the sixteenth century it was a primary factor in preserving unity, though not in creating an abusive nationalism which was itself a religion or which destroyed the force of local tradition. In the later days of “regalism” when the Inquisition was primarily an agent of the throne, it often became a means of enforcing political orthodoxy.21 Perhaps one of the first extended defenses of the Inquisition and of the Catholic refusal to permit the introduction of Protestantism is to be found in Balmes’ comparison between Catholicism and Protestantism as we have previously noted. One of the oft-repeated defenses of the Inquisition is that it was supported by the population in general, and that indeed it may have often prevented great violence to people suspected of pretending to be Catholics. And it could be pointed out that there was little tolerance anywhere after the Reformation. We might add that today when we affirm tolerance we are quite intolerant of many people and many views, though, I suppose, “only toward views that are plainly evil and people who are enemies of civilization.”22 What Menéndez Pelayo did, in fact, was to continue the inquiry al-

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ready begun by Balmes. He defended the Inquisition in both the Cienca and the Heterodoxos. What must not be forgotten is that a time of crisis invokes the closing of the ranks, it makes any approach to the “open society” impossible, and the enemy must be fought as an army without internal dissent. The old Spanish War cry was “Santiago y Cierra España” (St. James! Forward, Spain!). The conservative is concerned primarily with an order in society, for conservatism is more a theory of society than it is a system of policy or a political ideology.23 Hence, when society is threatened one searches for the means to maintain a viable order, though not necessarily an order that is not to be changed. Any defense of an order is an intolerance of the individuals, ideas, and organizations that would weaken or destroy the social orthodoxy. It is not surprising, therefore, that there have been notable defenders of the Inquisition outside of Spain. When Edward Gibbon became alarmed at the disorder in Europe produced by the French Revolution, he defended the old, anything old. He was unwilling to surrender even the Inquisition in Portugal.24 In his Thoughts on French Affairs in December 1791, Edmund Burke asserted that the French Revolution was more than a mere political revolution; it was a “Revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma.” It is like the Protestant Reformation in this sense. Spain, he said, was a nerveless country, and the clergy alone look like an independent order, “and they are kept in some respect by the Inquisition, the sole, but unhappy resource of public tranquility and order now remaining in Spain. As in Venice, it is become mostly an engine of state, which, indeed, to a degree, it has always been in Spain. It wars no longer with Jews and heretics; it has no such war to carry on. Its great object is to keep atheistic and republic doctrines from making their way into that kingdom.”25 In more recent times Benedetto Croce in 1908 praised the Inquisition in general. He believed at the time of World War I that democratic ideologies were Masonic and that the exponents of democracy at that time adhered to the German idea that the state is power.26 One might contend, it seems, that the polemic over Protestantism in Spain is a kind of continuation of the long argument over the Inquisition. Spanish officials have observed that they will follow the requests of Rome in regard to any laws which restrict the minuscule minority of genuine, native Protestants in Spain, and some relaxation has occurred. But like the Inquisition, restrictions on Protestants are generally popular and the people support the government in restricting proselytizing. Catholics in Spain are quite ready also to note that Protestants are slow in asking that laws against Catholics be repealed, as in England, and in a number of the Lutheran countries of Northern Europe. They might well say that Scandinavian restrictions on Catholics are more severe than Spanish restrictions on Protestants. But this is no argument from principle. In other areas it is clear that contemporary “democracies” in Africa, Southeast Asia, and in Western Europe (to say nothing of the Communist “Peoples’ Democracies”) have increased restrictions against political or ideological dis-

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sent. The “new democracies” have far stronger executives than the older parliamentary and party systems. In order to sustain the planned democracy, or the leadership principle, discussion and the press must be regulated. Nor should it be forgotten that the white man is being driven from many parts of Africa, and the freedom to be a Christian has been abolished in a number of the new African regimes. In this sense, the issue of toleration and “new inquisitions” is not much nearer a universal solution than in the past, though it is also clear there is a determination in Western Europe, the British Commonwealth countries, and the United States to make the pluralistic type of society work. VI In his Heterodoxos, while dealing with “Erasmistas y Protestantes” (“Erasmusites and Protestants”), Menéndez Pelayo writes about the specific situations of Protestantism or Lutheranism in Valladolid and Sevilla after the middle of the sixteenth century when, in fact, Spanish Protestantism was nipped cleanly in the bud. Friends of the Inquisition say its procedures were improved with the passage of time, and that in many ways its investigation and trial procedures were better than most civil courts in Europe. However, numerous persons were convicted and put to death by the secular arm, after conviction in the Tribunal of the Inquisition. In Valladolid a group of Lutherans was discovered, and ultimately an Augustín Cazala, a canon of Salamanca, was put to death after an auto-da-fé in 1559.27 A number of others, including a convent to Lutheranism, were punished by imprisonment and the confiscation of property. But one of the most famous and most unfortunate cases of the Inquisition was that of Archbishop Bartolomé de Carranza de Miranda. The case was prolonged over sixteen years. The issue was whether the Archbishop’s “Catechism” contained Lutheran propositions. After a number of years, in which various opinions by the experts had been expressed, the case was transferred to Rome, much against the wishes of Philip II and the Inquisition in Spain. Ultimately, certain propositions were condemned by Pope Gregory XIII and the Archbishop recanted, but he died in Rome the same year. Balmes says the case was unfortunate and that Carranza must be judged by the time. Menéndez Pelayo’s view is the same, for he believed that none of the Spaniards connected with the case were free of guilt in this unhappy affair. In contrast, the actions of the Popes are immensely superior to the action of the Inquisition in Spain.28 Menéndez Pelayo clearly mounted the most penetrating and wide-ranging factual attack on the allegations of liberalism about Spain. It is no wonder that at the end of the war in 1939 the conservatives and traditionalists set about restoring him to a pre-eminent position in Spanish intellectual life.29 They argued that further historical research has established the essential positions which Menéndez Pelayo articulated. Though many errors have been pointed

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out in his literary criticism, this would hardly detract from his argument for the greatness of the Spanish intellectual tradition. In the United States the conservative may well welcome his method of analyzing tradition; they do not need to become defenders of monarchy or of the Catholic Church, but there is much similarity between a defense of the Constitution with its eighteenth-century principles and the defense of the traditional government of Spain. Finally, the defense of Christianity, and Christian philosophy, is something in which in this day there is increasing understanding between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

Rafael Calvo Serer, Las nuevas democracias (1964), pp. 235-236. See Juan José López Ibor El español y su complejo de inferioridad (2nd ed., 1951), passim. Vicente Palacio Atard, Derrota, agotamiento, decadencia en la España del siglo XVII (1949), for one of the best of the studies on the question. Also, Florentino Pérez-Embid, Ambiciones españolas (2nd ed., 1955); Pedro Laín Entralgo, España como problema (3rd ed., 1962); and Rafael Calvo Serer, España, sin problema (3rd ed., 1957). Vicente Rodríguez Casado, Conversaciones de historia de España, Vol. 1 (1963). See Bernice Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spain (1963), for one of the better short treatments of these writers of the Golden Century. It is hardly necessary to cite the works of Ortega and Unamuno. All together it is a vast bibliography. Pedro Laín Entralgo’s work should be cited, such as España como problema (3rd ed., 1962), and Mis páginas preferidas (1958), in which there are essays on both Menéndez Pelayo and Unamuno. Quoted in A. Juderías, Idearium de Marañón. Prólogo de de F.C. Sainz Robles (1960), p. 526. José Luis L. Aranguren, Catolicismo y protestantismo como formas de existencia (1952); Aranguren, et al., Libertad y organización (1963). The press of the exiled republicans is difficult to obtain; however, Manaña, published in Paris for a time (ending in 1966) was one of the best, since it pulled together a long and notable series of intellectuals in their criticism of the Spanish regime. The Historia de los heterodoxos españoles contains the epilogue which is recognized as one of the great statements in defense of the Spanish creative spirit. The Historia begins at volume XXXVII of the Edición Nacional of his Obras (1947). The Ciencia begins at volume LVIII (1953). The “Dos palabras...” on Balmes may be found in Ensayos de crítica filosófica, ed. by Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín (1918), which is Vol. IX of his edition of the Obras completas. And the Brindis del retiro is in Vol. 8 of Obras completas beginning at p. 385 (the 1941 publication of this volume of his works). See Estudios sobre Menéndez Pelayo, ed. by Florentino Pérez-Embid and others (1956), which contains many of the more significant modern essays on him. Note Antología general de Menéndez Pelayo, ed. by José Maria Sánchez de Munián, with a prologue by Herrera Oria (2 vols. Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1946), which contains extensive selections on Juan Donoso Cortés and Jaime Balmes. Also, Florentino Pérez-Embid, Textos sobre España: Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (2nd ed., 1962). Of course, many political judgments are scattered through the volumes, though Menéndez Pelayo was primarily a student of Spanish literature. For instance, if all of the references to and discussions of the Inquisition were brought together, there would be a notable book on this subject.

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7.

An equally famous utterance is, no doubt, his “Soy católico” statement in Section VIII of Volume I of La Cienca española (National Edition, Vol. 58, 1953), pp. 200201. It is in an article in answer to charges against him, and I will venture here to give a few sentences in Spanish, simply because of its inimitable eloquence. He had been called a new Catholic, inquisitorial, and a defender of barbarous institutions. He said: “Soy católico, no nuevo ni viejo, sino católico a macha martillo, como mis padres y abuelos, y como toda la España histórica, fértil en santos, héroes y sabios bastante más que la moderna. Soy católico apostólico romano sin mutilaciones ni subterfugios, sin hacer concesión alguna a la impiedad ni a la heterodoxia, en cualquiera forma que se presenten, ni rehuir ninguna de las lógicas consecuencias de la fe que profeso, pero muy ajeno, a la vez, de pretender convertir en dogmas las opiniones filosóficas de este o el otro doctor particular, por respetable que sea en la Iglesia.” (Editors’ translation and note: “I am a Catholic, neither new nor old, but a strong Catholic like my parents and my grandparents, and like all of historical Spain, richer in saints, heroes, and sages than modern Spain. I am a Roman, Apostolic Catholic without changes or tricks, without making any concessions to impiety or heterodoxy, in whatever form they may appear; neither shying away from any of the logical consequences of the faith that I possess, but at the same time, not trying to covert into dogmas the philosophical opinions of this or another particular Doctor, however respectable he may be within the Church.” The term Doctor of the Church refers to those seminal ecclesiastical figures who have been given the title by the Eastern and Western Catholic Churches as the result of their contributions to the faith.) He continued defending the maintenance of unity in Spain during the sixteenth century, even holding a blessing for the Inquisition, as a formula for thinking about unity which has governed and directed national life during the centuries. It is, of course, well to remember that in the breadth of its scope, Catholic thought has recognized that the censorship or suppression of a book gives it undue publicity, and hence there is wisdom in a cautious or reluctant approach to such censorship. See Vicente Cacho Viu, La Institución de Libre Ensenañza (Vol. I, 1962; Vol. II is to follow). Menéndez Pelayo dates the beginning of the final decline of Spain from this trip. Giner de los Ríos followed Sanz in carrying out “progressive” ideas about education. Señor Cacho remarks on the ferocious intolerance of these apostles of tolerance who sought to destroy the deep roots of Catholic education in Spain. The nineteenth-century traditionalists or Carlists will argue that Spain has had a totalitarian government ever since the victory of the liberals at the Constituyente of Cadiz. The defense of the Carlist line, the Church, the throne, and the regional culture is still an immensely powerful force in Spain. The Carlist believes the only defense of liberty against the authoritarian state is the restoration of regional fueros or liberties. At the time of the uprising against the Second Republic, it is said 40,000 Carlists wearing their red berets or boinas joined the northern armies in a single day. It is also said with good authority that at least 100,000 Carlist volunteers were in the Nationalist Armies. These troops are the Requetés. Spain would not be Spain without both anarchism and the Carlists, but that either one of them could destroy Spain itself, according to a popular argument. See Antonio Tovar, “L’Incorporation du nouveau monde à la culture occidentale,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale, Vol. VI (1961), pp. 833-856. An example: the black legend was accepted by Gamaliel Bradford, The Lessons of Popular Government (2 vols., 1899), Vol. II, pp. 294-295. He cites Hannis Taylor, our retiring minister to Spain, from The North American Review, November 1897.

8.

9. 10.

11.

The Great Restorer: Menéndez Pelayo 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

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However, much of the caciquism and oligarchism arose precisely from a liberalism that seized the property of the Church, “desamortización,” and sold them for practically nothing to new landlords who did not pay for nor cultivated effectively their new lands. But neither had the Church used its land with efficiency. Editors’ Translation: “double key to the tombs of Torquemada and Calormarde.” For a recent and sympathetic study of Costa, see R. Olivar Bertrand, “Costa, soñador y hombre de acción.” Cuadernos Americanos (Enero-Febrero, 1963), pp. 111-139. Galileo has commonly been cited but no others because there were no others and Galileo was not condemned in Spain. Nor were the books of Galileo, Kepler, or Newton ever placed on the Index. See Ciencia (1953 ed., Vol. 1, p. 266). At this point Menéndez Pelayo notes also the scientific achievements under the Spanish regime in Naples, such as Giordano Bruno (burned in Rome by the Inquisition), Campanella, and Giambattista Vico. Heterodoxos (National Edition, Vol. 37, 1947), Vol. IV, pp. 410 ff. See Américo Castro, La realidad histórica de España (Mexico, 1954), passim. See Laín Entralgo, op. cit., Chap. II, for a history of the development of the controversy. See Eugenio d’Ors, Estilos de pensar (n.d.), pp. 13 ff. D’Ors seems to stress “el paso de lo hispánico a lo universal” (“the passage from the Hispanic to the universal”) in his Perspectivas internacionales de la literatura española (1944), p. 27; in addition, see his Aprendizaje y heroísmo (1915). For instance, one of the reasons for the trouble of Juan de Mariana with the Inquisition was his criticism of the fiscal policy of the government, not his advocacy of tyrannicide. See Günter Lewy, Constitutionalism and Statecraft during the Golden Age in Spain: A Study of the Political Philosophy of Juan de Mariana, S.J. (Geneva, Switzerland, 1960), pp. 30-33. There are many curious incidents of this sort. In the eighteenth century a Jesuit, for example, got into trouble with the Inquisition for criticism of Machiavelli, which seemed to be an implied criticism of the existing Spanish government. It all suggests that even in the age of Enlightenment the Holy Office could be used against the enemies of “Enlightenment.” Balmes, op. cit., Vol. IV, pp. 338 ff on “Intolerancia,” and pp. 375 ff on “La Inquisición.” Editors’ note: See chapters 3 and 14 in Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal (Transaction Publishers, 2001), for more explication of the problem of ideology in politics by Wilson. See Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, ed. by Lord Sheffield, and Introduction by J. B. Bury (World Classics edition), p. 262. See Beaconsfield Edition of Burke’s Works (1901), Vol. IV, pp. 339-341. See Norberto Bobbio, “Liberalism Old and New,” Confluence, 5 (Autumn, 1956), pp. 239 ff.; and Melchor Ferrer, Domingo Tejera y José F. Acedo, Historia del tradicionalismo español (28 vols., Sevilla, 1941—), Vol. I, pp. 29 ff. This volume, pp. 143ff, has a vigorous treatment of the Masonic question in the Cortes of Cádiz. Joseph de Maistre was also a defender of the Inquisition. See Lettres à un gentilhomne russe sur l’Inquisition Espagnole, Oeuvres, VI, pp. 59-60 and 96-99. See Hans Barth, The Idea of Order (1960), p. 113. There is a strange confusion at times between the Act of Faith in the public square and the subsequent execution of the condemned outside the city at the ordinary place of execution. Those who recanted, as Cazalla, were garroted first, the garrote being a device by which the neck is broken quickly. But in general there was a feeling that death at the stake was a more merciful type of death than other forms, such as the rather gruesome “hanged, drawn, and quartered” in England. If one must be grue-

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Order and Legitimacy some, it would be rather difficult to choose between the axe, the guillotine, the rope, the electric chair, the gas chamber, the rifle, and the “garrote vil” still used sometimes in contemporary Spain. Menéndez Pelayo treats at some length the history of the various translations of the Bible in Spain. In general, Catholics were pardonably suspicious of translations of the Bible made by their enemies. Furthermore, when they considered the excesses of the Anabaptists and Puritans (described by Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics), their suspicions of unaided Bible reading were not mitigated. Various interpretations of this problem will be discussed in the next chapter on José Antonio.

5 José Antonio: The Revolutionary Passion I No doubt it requires imagination to understand the spirituality of the Spanish revolution which resulted in the overthrow of the Second Republic. The Spanish revolutionary mind is not a materialistic mind; it is a mind which believes first in the truth of ideas and second in the power of man to bring these ideas into some sort of social reality. As a Catholic, the Spaniard has believed in truth and not in determinism. Even the leftwing revolution of Marx or of Bakunin takes on a spiritual character in the existential struggle of the Spaniard who has made the decision to offer up his life for a cause. In José Antonio the spirit of revolution became the flashing character of the revolutionary traditionalist. There is general agreement that José Antonio was liked by all who encountered him.1 The young leader, orator, member of the Cortes, dedicated to the restoration of Spain, was executed at the age of thirty-three in Alicante in November 1936, a few months after the outbreak of the war. He observed in his Last Will and Testament that it was not easy for one so young to die, but he remembered that many of his comrades had given their lives in the intermittent civil war in Spain, and he could do no less. He expressed his sorrow that perhaps he had something to do with sending them, with whatever necessity, to their deaths. The Falange Española had never planned an invasion of foreign troops into Spain (though, of course, these foreigners fought on both sides in the war), and he exclaimed: “Ojalà fuera la mía la última sangre española que se vertiera en discordes civiles.”2 As he faced the firing squad, he is still amazed that so few had tried to understand the aims of the Falange Española, yet this is the hardest lesson for any reformer who loves his fellow men to learn. Perhaps when he learns it he ceases to be a reformer. But the very name of the Falange became an ideological word, and it would seem that all ideological words are words of emotion, of shouting, of philosophical superficiality, and ultimately of vacuity and death itself. 79

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José Antonio became a public figure in troubled times. There were many movements and many solutions propounded for the problems of Spain, as the pages of the journal Acción Española testify with eloquence. Many minds and divergent streams of thought formed both the ranks of the Right and the Left in the epic struggles on Spanish soil that led to the fall of the monarchy and the disorderly life of the Republic. And both sides had advocates of both the new and old that might provide peace and Catholicity in the future. It all began on 14 April 1931, when Alfonso XIII refused to use troops to restore order and to maintain the monarchy. The results of the municipal elections of 12 April 1931 were never made public, except that in the totality, the monarchists had a majority of seats, or seemed to, and the large cities were Republican. Under these conditions, Señor Zamora demanded the abdication of the King. Violence seemed to be endemic and the King left Spain. Under a provisional government a Constituent Assembly was elected on 28 June 1931, and a one-chamber parliament first sat in July of that year. In May 1931, churches were burned in Madrid, Valencia, and generally in the south of Spain. A Communist rebellion was crushed in January 1932, and a rightwing rebellion in August 1932. And at the end of 1931 the notorious law for the Defense of the Republic was passed, under which the government might determine the civil rights an individual might have should his arrest be ordered by the public authorities. During the hail of public disturbance in Spain, the liberals and antiCatholic forces throughout the West rejoiced in the great step forward that was being taken. Spain was having its French Revolution; its Reformation, Industrial Revolution, and its nineteenth century would come later. Liberty was being realized in the suppression of the right. Parliament was dissolved in October 1933, and elections were held on 19 November 1933. The parties of the Right won, reflecting no doubt two things: a degree of honesty in the elections and the public opinion of the Spanish people.3 With the Right in power, the Constitution (adopted 9 December 1931) faced a full crisis, since to the Left and to the revolutionaries the election was only a continuation of the revolution by other means. Special statutes had been adopted for Catalonia, for the Basques, and for Galicia, but there was a rebellion in Catalonia and by the Asturians in October 1934, and their autonomy was suspended. Clearly, there was no possibility of continuing, and it was generally conceded that civil war was imminent. It was under circumstances such as these that José Antonio held participation in elections in contempt, and he placed little value on his membership in the parliament, where among other things he had made great efforts to defend the regime of his father, General Primo de Rivera, and to ward off the attempt to declare the Falangists outlaws. Moreover, the coalition of Rightist parties had been unwilling to recognize the Falange as a full-fledged member of their movement. The inevitable approach of new elections meant little to him, since his movement was spreading rapidly in Spain, until it seemed it might hold the balance of power.

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The Cortes was again dissolved on 7 January 1936, and elections were held on 16 February 1936. This time the winner was the Left, though the Right has always contested the fairness of the election, as the pistoleros were much in evidence to prevent the opposition from voting or being present when the votes were counted. The Left Coalition, composed of the Socialists, the Izquierda Republicana, the Unión República, the Esquerra, and Communists, had 265 seats. The Right Parties, the CEDA (the Right Coalition), Agrarians, Monarchists, Independents, and Traditionalists, had 144 seats. The Center Parties (four different small groups) had sixty-four seats. With this Popular Front “victory,” the new government forced President Zamora out and installed Azaña in his place. Violence continued and open rebellion seemed only a matter of days or weeks. The Alzamiento began in Morocco on 17 July 1936, and on the following day in mainland Spain. A government was established at Burgos, a “Junta de Defensa Nacional,” on 30 July, though some of its functions were carried on in Salamanca, and the government of the Republic was moved in turn in December 1936, from Madrid to Valencia. Autonomous governments made their appearance again in Catalonia and among the Basques. In a few months the plans of the Nationalists were taking shape, and in October 1936 the new “Gobierno del Estado Español” (“the Spanish State Government”) was announced. Slowly, the insurgents made themselves the masters of Spain, first in the Western part and then gradually throughout. With the surrender of Madrid, the victory was proclaimed 29 March 1939. There is little doubt that the bitterness of the international Left against the Spanish nationalists through the years since the war arises from the simple fact that the Spanish war was in its totality a decisive battle of the world: it turned back for an indefinite period the march of the Communist revolution toward the West. It was a symbolic incident that precipitated the war itself. A Communist lieutenant was killed in the streets in July, and on 13 July 1936, the distinguished monarchist deputy, José Calvo Sotelo, was taken from his home and shot in the head in a police van. Perhaps all realized that the time for talking conventional politics had passed, and the test of war was to be added to the miseries of the Spanish people.4 II One of the most complicated of the streams of social thought in Spain is syndicalist thought, which at its simplest holds that the producer, the worker, should be organized in order to control society. The producer must be sovereign. On the Left it became in Spain a combination of anarchism and syndicalism, that is, the anarcho-syndicalists who all but destroyed public life in the last months of the Second Republic before the outbreak of the war. Undoubtedly, it was the international economic crisis in agriculture which gave them a chance, but anarcho-syndicalists started the agrarian revolution in 1935 and 1936 over

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wide areas of Spain. They seized land and organized the villages into communal, egalitarian societies. In the cities the artisans and the small middle class in general had its properties confiscated. Indeed, the situation progressed to the point at which the rising Communist Party could claim to be the friend and savior of the urban and rural middle classes.5 But on the right the syndicalist philosophy was conservative and populistic; it gave the defenders of the Spanish tradition their chance, and in the end they succeeded in organizing the Falange, which has become “the movement” of post-Civil War days. In the early days it was the F.E.T. de las J.O.N.S. (La Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista). It was, as many have urged, a syndicalist revolution of the right, but the movement for resistance to the Republic spread to almost every stratum of society. The syndicalist dominance of the revolutionary movement was lost. Many leaders, writers, and orators were involved in the development of the thought that went into the revival of syndicalist traditionalism. In the breakdown of public order Spain became a seething mass of “movements” for and against the existing republican government. But among the more important syndicalist leaders one should mention Onésimo Redondo and Ramiro Ledesma Ramos. All syndicalists appealed to youth and to workers. They were bitterly hostile to liberal parliamentarism and the capitalist bourgeoisie. What they sought was the restoration of the ancient gremios rather than the monarchy or the power of the national administration. They were, said Redondo, the true nationalists, and they were neither monarchists nor republicans. Though not anti-Catholic, the syndicalists usually said that Spanish nationalism does not have to be confessional. The Second Republic was the victory of the corruptors of Spanish culture—the Bourbons, the Encyclopedists, and any who followed French thought. What was needed, and this was a central theme of the time, was a new syndicalist movement of youth. The struggle for a new politics without parties or parliaments had been launched for the preservation of God, the race, and Spanish culture—even if it meant imitating Italy and Germany; it was the liberals who had really become fascists, that is, Jacobin and Marxist fascism. Ledesma, it was said, gave the first call to the crusade against the Republic. He organized the J.O.N.S., the Syndicalistic Juntas, with the objective of attaining a national-syndicalist revolution. French and English exploitation of Spain had introduced an exploitative capitalism. Lawyers, bureaucrats, and especially the “good bourgeoisie” had all assisted in the destruction of Spain. In the revolutionary age, the syndicalists must turn away from these groups and turn to youth, for in the revolution the youth are the effective and progressive force. The workers and the youth would be the main supporters of the new state.6 On 29 October 1933, José Antonio gave the founding discourse for the Falange Española. The address was given in the Teatro de la Comédia in Madrid and it begins with an attack on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a theme quite common among Spanish traditionalists. With the publication of the Social Contract in

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1762, there was a permanent deviation from political truth, argued Antonio. In other ages political society had proclaimed its belief in truth and justice, but with Rousseau and, of course, the intellectuals of the Enlightenment, truth and justice ceased to be permanent categories of reason, and they became in each instance decisions of the will. For José Antonio, Rousseau supposed in the General Will that each people or country assessed collectively possessed a kind of superior soul which was different from each soul of the people of a country taken individually. Truth became a decision of the people, or at least the decision of the ruling order. The liberal state became, in turn, the servant of this conception of the will of the people as truth, and the government became, in theory, the spectator of electoral battles, rather than the servant of the larger destiny of the country. The state was embroiled in the liturgies of voting, very much as we might say of the formalities of the old Venetian Republic, which James Harrington so admired. Now most of the case against the eighteenth century was stated time and again as the case against the liberal state, or against Rousseau. One has the feeling that José Antonio did not really know much about the Enlightenment. He might well have known about Diderot and the Marquis de Sade and their virtual worship of sex freed from any of the restrictions of Christian morality. He might have discussed the persecution of the Church by the French Revolutionists, and the massacre of the clergy which was much like the actions of some of the supporters of the Second Republic against the leaders of the Church in Spain. On the other hand, more than one person has attributed the emancipation of the personality from the responsibilities of morality to the influence of Rousseau. It is clear that even in the milder forms of conservatism in societies like Great Britain and the United States, the liberals stand in spirit beside Rousseau and the French Revolution, while the conservatives view it with a critical spirit. Did not both Voltaire and John Adams ridicule Rousseau, saying that after reading him they had a strong desire to walk on all fours? Rousseau became the symbol with which to beat the afrancesados over the head, while those who were pro-French had insisted since the middle of the eighteenth century that they only wanted to restore Spain to the march of European civilization. Spain naturally had been different from many other countries of Europe since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and most agree that the time of Carlos II was just about the low point in the whole history of Spain.7 José Antonio was not against science, for in the twentieth century it had been discovered by the most dubious that science does not also mean an attack on the Church.8 Indeed, in our time it may well be leaders animated by a strong Catholic spirit who will bring industrial reconstruction—the industrial revolution as one will—to Spain. Whatever may be the ideology today, one intoxicating idea or utopia has seemed to sweep the world: the solution of the problem of human misery is industrialization. Just invest capital, just borrow money, just train men to run machines, and the standard of living will rise, and in so far

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as material things can bring happiness it will be brought to all men. This is all in the background for José Antonio, since it was a time of war, and the first effort was to repulse the revolutionaries of the Second Republic, and their allies from the revolutionary movements throughout the world. But the liberal state will no longer have any monopoly on the investment of capital and the installation of new productive machinery. Whether in Spain or elsewhere, there was a kind of desperation in the political oratory of the 1930s. Millions were unemployed and revolutionary movements of a hundred kinds were beginning to make political puddings. The miracle we have after World War II is the restoration of the many economies, something that did not occur in the twenty odd years between the wars. Now with mid-century prosperity we do not need “solutions,” but in the period between the wars one is impressed with the economic shallowness of the solutions of economic and political disaster. There was only one solution apparently and that was to spend money and “make work,” and pay no attention to inflation and indebtedness either public or private. Has anyone any confidence in what the Socialists said in the 1920s and 1930s? Communism promised much after the revolution, and now a generation after the spread of world revolution to Asia and Africa, Russia and the Communist world is unable to grow enough food to feed its own people. Since Spain has been isolated by the “liberal international” and the Communist movement after the victory of General Franco, whatever she has attained, up to the treaty with the United States in the early 1950s, is her own; she owes little to the help of any other country, since she did not share in the foreign aid that was to turn back Communism, and apparently General Franco also. The economic solutions of fascist societies, the solutions proposed by Italy and Germany, and the “movements” that vibrated in sympathy with them, fare little better than the solutions of socialists, Communists, and the piebald motley of other movements. An American conservative would say that ultimately people must get to work; they must invest capital in productive enterprise; and there must be freedom of the market for the distribution of the products created by capital and labor striving in harmony for the production of wealth. But all would agree that economic existence is more than a free market. When leaders like José Antonio turn to their tradition, they return to something that has had a survival power astonishing to all revolutionaries. It has in it the possibility of restoration in newer forms under contemporary conditions.9 José Antonio insisted, it would seem, that the economy of Spain must rest, not on the market, but on the social structures so long accepted and so easily restored to the affections of Spaniards. The market comes, necessarily so, but only after the restoration of the social order. His economics look flimsy because we forget the social base. Perhaps he did not know too much economics, for he was more learned in the law, but he was able to establish touch with common men, and his following grew to the numberless thousands. He could tell the

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masses of their regional and national traditions, their historic associations, and the unions of producers that had at one time made Spain’s economy a flourishing one. To his judges at his last trial (and there were various attempts to suppress the Falange), José Antonio said, in effect: what we are accused of is proclaiming in our ideological program that Spain is a unity of destiny in universal history, and that regional separatism is a crime. We conceive of Spain as a mighty Syndicate of producers, and the word revolution that we have used has already been used by other political leaders, such as Don Antonio Maura. In our revolution we refer to a juridical, political, and economic transformation of the country, and neither to street seditions nor to assassinations.10 One may readily agree that the pages of Acción Española show a far deeper appreciation than the speeches of José Antonio of the intellectual life of both the friends and the enemies of Spanish tradition. José Antonio appeared in its pages, but his writing there was more an exhortation than an analysis of scientific life in France or Spain. Even so, the economics of Acción Española do not seem markedly superior to the economics of the speeches of the leader of the Falange. Making many speeches in a short time is bound to result in much repetition. Acción Española and the Falange were both defenders of “ancient property” and not of capitalism, or capitalist liberalism as it had emerged from the nineteenth century. Both defended the natural hierarchies of communities, the family, the Church, the municipality, the syndicate, the cultural region, and the new state that is to take the place of the Second Republic. They would dismantle both capitalism and prevent the triumph of Communism. Even so, it is the spiritual issue that counts, since none will risk their lives for a mere material good, but all will sacrifice their lives if they believe in a mystique of revolution.11 III Europeans understand perfectly that there is a pattern of conservatism in the tradition of the West. We in America are inclined to think of only one tradition, the one that is intellectually dominant in America at a given moment. But the European knows he is at war, either for or against the ancient and basic patterns of life or the traditions of liberal intellectualism and secularism. It is a war for the preservation or the restoration of tradition, it is the war of the “two Spains,” and it is a war that exists in every country with a long history. It exists also in America as well as in Spain or Germany. In part it is a matter of names for institutions and ideas, but whatever the “things” are called they are real. For example, we in America use the word democracy to describe our system which resembles Aristotle’s polity, a mixture of oligarchy and “democracy.” This mixture has not been democracy in Europe, since democracy may well be used in Rousseau’s sense of a direct and uninhibited sovereignty of the people. In a

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similar manner, we are accustomed to having among us all of the major religious traditions, but we blunt them and we pretend they are much alike. There is one aspect that we as Americans can hardly understand in the revolutionary passion of José Antonio. His passion was directed against the extremism and public irresponsibilities of the Second Republic, but the program he would have adopted is notably alike, in many respects, the program proposed by those who conspired against Hitler. Both the open revolutionism of José Antonio and the covert discussions of the rebellion against Hitler were demanding a restoration of traditional systems of order. And both were syncretic movements in that a large number of groups with partly divergent ideas were brought together for one common political purpose. Both movements, as well as others that might be mentioned, such as the Carlists in Spain and the ideology associated with Charles de Gaulle, are movements against the consequences of certain kinds of nineteenth-century thinking. There had been too much nationalism which had led to international war, revolution, and public anarchy. Liberal capitalism had seemed irresponsible, it was said, but nevertheless the creator of a mass society in which tradition and order had been rejected in favor of an inhumane, bourgeois search for riches. In the nineteenth century one had seen the growth of a secularism which denied God, and which undermined, perhaps without thinking, both morality and the respect due to individuals. The “Kreisau Circle” of Count Moltke was conservative, but hardly reactionary. It viewed Nazism as the culmination of a secularized and mass society, as an unhappy and destructive tendency in the development of European thought. What one dealt with in the “ranks” was the “mass man,” much as Ortega y Gasset had described him in La rebelión de las masas. That secularized society of industrialization, urbanization, liberalism, popular sovereignty, and materialism had produced the lonely man who wants a strong leader. It is this element that made the democratic movement at times in Europe and Asia a destructive ideology. Thus, the struggle of a man like José Antonio against the dementia of his times led him back to what many American liberals might call anti-democratic or at least “pre-democratic” institutions. And this is an element, a deep and ineradicable element in every vital European tradition, including the Spanish. The liberal in America often denigrates European conservatism by calling it “pre-capitalist,” which means it has no value at all. Such traditions are, indeed, pre-capitalist, but there is order and degree. There is no totalitarianism and there is, in truth, much liberty for the individual. The struggle to restore a tradition is more than the effort to restore merely a prior political regime. Many a Spaniard has not been sure that Alfonso XIII could do much for Spain, were he again on the throne. And few Germans thought the Weimar Republic had anything to offer, or that the so-called parliamentary struggles of France under the Third Republic might be a way to sanity and social truth.

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But how does one overcome a century of ebullient disorder in Spain, and a generation of slow-grinding disintegration in Germany? The European conservative always makes the same point: Let us restore the ancient tradition of Christian order. Allow there to be Christian schools with religious instruction. Simone Weil urged that all students be made to learn Greek in order to know the heart of man. If not Greek, then Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides in the vulgar tongue may do. But if one does not restore the parliaments of parties and the ideologies of much rhetoric, what then? A hard question, but one in which the alternative generally is some form of functional or group representation, a Reichstag with a little of the aroma of the Estates of the Realm, or perhaps the successful economic chambers in the post-World War II Republic of Austria. This form of anti-democratic and anti-capitalist thought has been very common in Europe during the twentieth century. As against democracy, which is either unconscionably capitalistic or an impossible and dead bureaucratism, Gustave Thibon proposed a social order in which the natural human communities were recognized in the formation of the state. Such groupism has profound religious roots, and it reaches back into the social theory of medieval and Christian society.12 While there must be decentralization along traditional lines, there must also be effective administration and a strong national leadership. There is, of course, the element of utopia here that seems present in all ideologies, and hope that a person may escape from time. One may use the past to pole vault into the future.13 Though we may dream of an economic order which gives man his dignity in full measure, it is hard to devise it. Even Adam Smith provided for so many government functions that one is tempted to say that the New Deal in America might as easily have been based on him as on Lord Keynes. Actually, men seem to be afraid of anything except that which they have. It takes a strong hand, indeed, to release the control of the bureaucracy over the economic order. There is a kind of inescapable tendency in those who would reject the nineteenth century to patch and piece together a new economic order; one in which there is both some free market and some social control. Some cartels may be there, but also they may be regulated or destroyed in part. The German may return in imagination to the days of Bismarck, while José Antonio might think of a late medieval functionalism, associated with the greatness of Charles I or Philip II. Still, no man may escape the hard proposition that the standard of living depends on political order, capital investment, and an increase in the productivity of labor. The pragmatic mind will say that the modern “rather free economy” can work only without too much nationalization and without too many schemes by which the inept worker or trade union leader is projected into the field of management. Or, can we say that some form of orderly or restrained form of parliamentary democracy can be attained in the twentieth century?14 José Antonio saw that man must live in a social order of truth if he is to attain the meaning he carries within him. Rousseau was the symbol of the revolution

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of the eighteenth century, but somehow José Antonio missed Burke’s brilliant rejoinder. He missed the Burke who praised the traditional elements of stability in Spain in the eighteenth century, and who, though a Protestant, saw the value of the Catholic clergy. Burke would have shown him how to leap from the eighteenth century to his own times, and the continuity of institutions in Britain would have been available for the argument of order and continuity in Spain. The early nineteenth-century term “liberalism” was the organized corpus of enmity toward that which Burke and Antonio held in profound reverence. Indeed, one might remark that British conservatism has never had the impact on the Spanish mind that British liberalism and empiricism did. The Spanish conservative has returned to Catholic philosophy, as did Juan Donoso Cortés, or as both Donoso and Balmes to some of the elements of French conservatism. Spanish traditionalism evinces more of a homegrown quality than can be found in the rest of Europe, as everything has happened in Spanish history and there is a model for the present from every age of Spanish, universal, historical experience. José Antonio believed it was the liberal system in Spain which produced the long series of disasters culminating in the Second Republic. The short life of José Antonio illustrates most of the major issues of modern European ideology. We in America have moved too much along one or a few lines of thought to be able to understand the sacrifices men have made in the European struggle for order and sanity in social life. The old issues and the new come together with a kind of sunglass effect in the activity and the eloquence of the founder of the Falange.15 The first issue is this: The Church of the eighteenth century was condemned by Voltaire and the “liberals” as low, corrupt, superstitious, and immoral. In the contemporary debate over the age of the Enlightenment the same charges are made, and in truth they are the same charges that were made against the Russian Orthodox Church at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The destruction of “decadent” Christianity justifies a revolution. Curiously, in the literature of Spanish traditionalism there is little direct defense of the eighteenthcentury Church; it is such a defense that makes the work of Balmes of such significance in the battle with Guizot’s liberalism. José Antonio attacks Rousseau and the liberals of his day, and he defends the Spanish Church, the Spanish monarchy, the Spanish functional and regional societies, and private property (which he considered the opposite of capitalism). He rejected the liberal political order of parliaments (though he was for a time a member of the Cortes), political parties, corrupt elections, and the democracy of the caciques and the pistoleros. His movement was not a party, for it was an “anti-party.” I suppose one must say that he simply and directly defended the Catholic Church and its Christianity in whatever century. The second issue is also clear: there are a number of “black legends” about Spain, and about the United States as an imperialistic force in Hispanic America. One of the stickiest of the lot concerns the Spanish Inquisition, which probably

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for English-speaking readers is difficult to overcome because of the morbid anti-Catholic imagination it has evoked. But it is strange that after the magnificent scholarship of Menéndez Pelayo and others that no dent on the legend has been made, or that the Protestant execution of Catholics is not recognized as an effective plea in abeyance. The critics of the Inquisition argue that Christianity has changed enormously during the last few centuries, but Spain represents a retrograde and unprogressive Christianity. Any of the cognoscenti of the Inquisition would know that an auto-da-fé was an act of faith which took place in the public square, and that the few recalcitrants who were burned at the stake were burned outside the towns at a “place” of execution. The distortionists of the Ilustración (that is, the Enlightenment) have the smell of burning flesh being wafted around the streets of Spanish towns at almost any time of the day or night. For José Antonio the Inquisition was a past issue, small in comparison with the twentieth-century tragedies of Spain. It would be of no interest to him to compare the British “hanged, drawn and quartered” with the more speedy garrote vil and the traditional death at the stake. Without defending the Inquisition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and without seeking its restoration, the Spanish traditionalist will tell you that it was mild, that it was mainly an agent or bureau of the government, that it developed quite fair procedures of inquiry, that, agreeing with Menéndez Pelayo, it did not interfere markedly with artistic and scientific minds, and that no distinguished Spanish intellectual was ever lost through the Holy Office. No doubt Fox’s Book of Martyrs and Mary Tudor will remain for the non-ecumenical Protestant mind an answer to the Spanish perfidy. The third issue is the nature and history of the Second Republic. The clouding propaganda about it is almost as great as around the Russian Revolution. The Spaniard will speak of the republic as “the Reds,” while the Loyalists speak of “the Fascists.” But one of the reasons for the war in 1936 was certainly the fact about which there seems little argument: during the Second Republic there was essentially continuous public disorder, and especially after the elections of 1936 revolutionary strikes, the public abuse and assassination of the clergy and the teaching orders, and the burning and destruction of churches and religious buildings. It has been said that in some of the provinces, as in Málaga, every church building was burned and every member of the clergy was killed or driven out. It was this revolutionary situation which created the political passion of José Antonio. The Second Republic was to him in no mere figurative sense the result of the teachings of the liberals of the eighteenth century; it was a reality derived especially from Rousseau who preached the right of the masses to govern with such abandon as they might see fit to use. Any student of the latter days of the Spanish Republic is bound to be on one side or the other; he is bound to be either for José Antonio or against him.

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A fourth and final argument (for our purposes of the moment) is the nature of Spanish fascism. And the nub of the argument is that Spanish fascism is just like any other fascist movement, wherever it may be found in modern times. Thus, the liberal criticism, when inspired by sympathy for the Russian Revolution and totalitarianism, makes the nationalist movement in Spain appear to be without merit, and there is no distinction in any legitimate sense between any movement in opposition to the Left. But let us start with this: There are distinctions to be made, and they ought to be made even by the leftist defenders of the Republic, even by those sensitive and often poetic individuals in Europe and America who, like Simone Weil, went to Spain to fight in the foreign battalions of the Loyalists. Let us say, first, that the study of European conservatism has many shades, and that contemporary scholarship on the sources and shadings of fascist thought has advanced greatly since the days leading up to World War II. It is true that Italy and Germany, as well as many individuals, helped the Nationalist cause, just as Russia and Communists from all over the world were found in the tercios (regiments) of the Republic. Therefore, it is not unreasonable that men like Falangists, or anyone in the movement, should feel drawn to Germany and Italy and that they would minimize the absurdities of those regimes. For it cannot be denied that perceptive Spaniards were hardly fooled by la fanfarronada (bragging) of the seemingly successful regimes. Nor should one forget that when the war was won, and World War II began, the sober calculation of the Spanish regime led it to stay out of the war, something that Signor Mussolini was not wise enough to see. But there is another profound element: the Spanish intellectual respects his brethren, the European intellectuals who had to live, often without choice, under these regimes. In the broad sweep, the European intellectual has little respect for the American intellectual whether he is liberal or conservative. He may have a higher standard of living, but the creative minds of the Western world are essentially European. There is one thing the American liberal has been unable to fathom. Neither in José Antonio nor in other Spanish traditionalists is there much reference to the so-called conservatives of France like Maurice Barrés and Charles Maurras. And the reason is simple: though such Frenchmen defended the Catholic Church as a social utility, they did not believe in its truth, as do the Spaniards. In France, the conservatives might defend the monarchy on utilitarian grounds, but in Spain they loved the monarchy as the symbol of the Spanish past, and its future; it is the symbol of the universality of Spanish history and achievement, that is, Spanish achievement in the defense of the Church in Europe down to 1648. It included the labors of its brilliant theologians at the Council of Trent, and colonizing and missionary labors in the Indies. And no doubt José Antonio might say, were he alive today, that a new age of Spanish unity—the defense of the Church, Spanish literature and language, indeed, of Hispanidad—will again bring recognition of the universality and the truth of Spanish cultural effort. Of course, José Antonio was shot in 1936, and he did not live to see the

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triumph of his ideas in the war. Nor has he lived to see the Falange Española become stiff and formalistic. Most of his followers were soon impressed with the weakness of fascism in Italy, Germany, and in other countries, even before the Allied victory in 1945. One may assume that the occasional statements in praise of fascism as a system would have faded simply because fascism would be seen as not Spanish in origin; the statements were made in early days of fascism; and that the early statements were not reconcilable with the Spanish tradition. Still, others have insisted that the Falange has been against Spanish tradition. They have insisted more vigorously than others based on the implications of Catholic social theory. The problem of prudence or wisdom, and the compromise with less than saintly situations, has ever been one of the issues faced by a dedicated Catholic in his civic life. One of the most profound of the difficulties was simply this: José Antonio seemed to follow too closely the models of Italy and Germany, and not closely enough the models of the Spanish traditions of the nation and the kingdoms of which it has been composed. Recent study of fascism argues that nationalism and syndicalism are the main sources of Italian fascist thought. Syndicalism upholds the primacy of the producer, the group, the guild, the corporation, the gremio of ancient Spain, and sometimes it suggests, indeed, that the worker should share with the employer in the management of enterprises. But such ideas are not limited to Italy, to contemporary life, to Spain, or to any particular country; they belong to the heritage of medieval institutions and economic ideas, in which all of the Western countries ultimately share. In this sense, any Spanish traditionalist might have some sympathy for Mussolini’s syndicalist ideology, but not with other ideas he may have expounded. Spanish Catholics can hardly accept the secularized theory of the universal Third Rome; in other words, a continuation of the glory of the ancient Roman Empire. Spain has its own universalism; it has no desire to be a part of a new worldwide Roman Empire. Nor can the Spanish traditionalist believe with the fascists that a “new man” was going to be created by a new Italian political movement.16 True, the bourgeoisie has been the object of contempt for both aristocrats and proletarian leaders ever since it emerged as a social power. In Christian theory man is as God made him, and no political order can recreate what the Lord himself has done. Nor would the Spanish traditionalists (including José Antonio and the Falange) believe the leader, the Dux or Caudillo, was the incarnation of the new age. In Catholic thought the state is always limited, and its mission is severely prescribed in the theory of natural law and morality. Thus, in another sense, the Falange could not be a religion, and whenever it seemed to be a substitution for Catholic fidelity, it was a pseudo-religion and false to its core. It should be noted, however, that here is no evidence that José Antonio ever believed that the movement would be a substitute for the Church. On the philosophical level, there is another reason why Spanish traditionalism can never really be just a part of the fascist movements of the twentieth

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century. A Catholic is a moderate realist, and Aristotelian of sorts, a Thomist, with other shades of philosophy as well. But all this says there is an objective reality which one may discover and understand, but which in no manner was created by any emotional or intellectual force which it might bring to bear upon it. As Dante Germino has argued: “Permeating the Fascist Weltanschauung is the idea that reality possesses no principles or structures independent of those created by the human will.” 17 Mussolini argued that this human will has no limits in its creativeness in remaking the world; it is the collectivity which will make the world around us in the day to come. It is the libido dominandi, or with Camus a form of metaphysical rebellion. It is indeed a totalitarian messianism which in part originated in the troubled minds of Rousseau, Baboeuf, and other conjurers of a modern social hell. José Antonio—and no Spanish traditionalist of any form would deny—that a science of politics must be based on the objectivities and the truths of the world. One must accept the true order, which affirms Catholicism, the inherited tradition of the West, and rejects the immanentist welfare utopia so integral to much of contemporary political thought. There is, however, another point of importance. Both Mussolini and Hitler were involved in anti-Semitism, and in a political racialism that Spanish traditionalists will deny they ever had. In the centuries of the Reconquista the Spanish cultural system became Catholic, and any member of the Church was a member of the “raza” as the word has been used since ancient times. October 12th, the day of the discovery of America under the Spanish flag, is celebrated as “the day of the race” in both Hispanic America and in Spain. But there are no biological connotations included. No doubt Spaniards have not historically loved the Jews nor the Jews the Spaniards, but the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was not a deed of biological politics, for it was religious, and cultural, and for the assumed needs of the strategic and military security of the Spanish kingdoms. Hitler’s views were, of course, deeply biological. Mussolini’s though was also biological, but it can be argued that his emphasis on conspiracy theory was inconsistent with the biological presuppositions of his racial legislation in 1938. A Spanish traditionalist believed then, and in measure he still does, that a good Spaniard is also a Catholic. Much traditionalism in Europe and America has been related to agrarianism as a social philosophy. Some of this element appears, no doubt, in Maurice Barrès, and in the Spanish writer Pío Baroja.18 But Spanish regionalism is not simply agrarianism. It reaches back to the traditions of the kingdoms and principalities which were formed in the later centuries of the war against the Moors. Tradition means here the system of fueros, or customs, and the traditional “case law” in each of the regions; it is linguistic, as in the Catalan, and the Basque; and there is an established regional literary identity. But the tradition that is defended is also the tradition of the economic life and organization of the region. Regionalism and agrarianism may sometimes be related, as they certainly are in the United States, but in Western Europe the defense of tradition

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has included the traditions of the city as well as the countryside, for both are part of the tradition of the region.19 In this sense one may argue that European traditionalism includes the producer—agrarian, commercial, manufacturing, and financial. In America we have stressed, even the trade union people, the consumer, and we have thought in terms of the sovereignty of the consumer. Does not the sovereignty of the free market under law and just competition mean the sovereignty of the consumer?20 The syndicalist philosophy is essentially unknown and not appreciated in the United States. Given the American acceptance of organized labor, and the labor unions’ refusal to consider syndicalist alternatives, any salutary influence of syndicalism is prevented. But the Falange (FET y JONS) has maintained its faith in José Antonio and that there is agreement between Catholic social principles and the existing syndicalist structure in Spain—which is vertical—and contains both employers and workers. Labor organizations are viewed as a part of society and not part of the state, though the critics of the Falange system will say it is coercive and it is used for the political purposes of the government. Falangists argue the state is power and a juridical order, but the syndicate ought to be a source of policy for the organization of society. Spain, they say, has a new solution, for the old-fashioned union was really a supporter of the greed of capitalism, and the labor leaders have been just as vicious socially as the businessmen. The Falangists say their system of representation springs as a social force from the natural rights grounded in the relations of men, such as the family, the region, the profession, and in various economic interests. But in a mixed system, such as the Falangist, the rights of labor stand above the rights of capital.21 It is all too easy to forget the bitter Civil War in Spain from 18 July 1936 to the disintegration of the Republic in the spring of 1939. When Madrid surrendered on 28 March 1939, the war was over. The victory was proclaimed on 29 March. Beginning 1 April 1964 the Spanish government began an elaborate celebration of twenty-five years of peace. There was civil disturbance in Italy and later in Germany, and in other countries, such as Switzerland and France. But only in Spain was there a great civil war, which became the measure of the devotion and dedication to principle of the Spanish people on both sides of the war. The Spaniard knows better than any others, except the Americans after the Civil War in 1865, to what extent the misery of principled conflict can be carried. And it is thus that José Antonio showed respect for regional tradition, though he was not a Carlist, for all of the Spanish traditions were grounded in a deep past. It was only here that a future reconciliation between Spaniards of different regions, varying traditions, and ideological positions could be founded. Two shadows hang over all Spanish intellectual life. One is the shadow of Don Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, who is inescapable. The Spanish intellectual sees him as the founder of the new age or he sees in him the restoration of an old and unprogressive order, the order that Carlos III tried to thrust aside in

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his support of the new learning from France. The other shadow is the shadow of the French intellectuals from the age of the Enlightenment to the contemporary period. José Antonio saw Rousseau as the founder of an irresponsible mass democracy, and the representative of all other Frenchmen who believed in the revolution. José Antonio was the enemy of the afrancesados of all of the generations since the influence of the eighteenth century began its work among Spaniards. He would not deny the retarded state of Spanish intellectual life, culture, or political power in the seventeenth and the early decades of the eighteenth centuries. But he did assert the path to resurgence was the restoration of Spanish tradition from the Golden Century and not the importation of ideas from France. While direct French influence on Spain is one source of the conflicts of ideology since the French War against Napoleon, there is another, perhaps no less complicated. Liberal intellectuals throughout the West are hostile toward Spain. At times the hostility is based on a complete knowledge of French liberalism and its criticism or rejection by Spaniards. But there is another aspect, for the model of conflict among the liberals has been France, and Spain is just an extension of the ideological wars of the French. Spanish conservatives are considered to be less charming models of French conservatives. Manifestly, there are differences. The liberal tends to see the Spanish traditionalist as he learned in a past generation to see Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, both of whom were defenders of the Catholicism, but neither of whom really believed in the truth of the Church, as we noted earlier in this chapter. A liberal simply cannot comprehend that a Spanish intellectual professes complete confidence in the Catholic Church. In fact, he cannot comprehend that he believes it, hence the element of avowed hypocrisy in French conservatism in the twentieth century must also be an element of Spanish conservatism of the more recent period. A liberal cannot conceive of anyone with an education who believes in the supernatural; the liberal is a natural-born Voltairian, a bearer of both lightness and darkness. Hence, when José Antonio defended the truth of Catholic teaching the liberal could not accept him as a speaker of the truth, a yea-sayer, of the Spanish Revolution. The black legend is grounded in the belief that missionary work must be founded on crypto-disbelief, for it cannot be sustained by anything other than a desire for power. The reason for the fading image of José Antonio is not a fading of Spanish Catholicism, or a fading of belief and a rise of skepticism among the intellectuals. There is a change of political doctrine and political situation. The great young Falangist was laboring in a time of peculiar intensity, a time in which the revolution, or some further crisis, was surely approaching. There were few certainties, save that the conflict ahead was to be bitter and victory uncertain. People did not know what kind of political state lay ahead, save that it was to be a new state, as Víctor Pradera, a deputy, argued. All the traditionalists said a new state had to be organized, for neither the liberal republic nor the indecisive mon-

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archy had been satisfactory; and the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera, José Antonio’s father, was only an interim regime. It was easy to think that Mussolini and Hitler had won decisively. Thus, the new state might show a restoration of the Spanish traditional political forms in agreement with the new orders of Italy and Germany. When the war was won and the great Holy Cross Abbey was built outside of Madrid, it was easy to bury José Antonio there as one of the nation’s heroes, but it was easy to also begin to forget the doctrines he had preached. And some of this doctrine was a stressing of the proletarian element in syndicalism and corporativism which had been prominent in the early years of the other movements in Europe. Calvo Sotelo, the monarchist deputy, who was taken from his home in the early morning and murdered by official police of the regime, precipitated the Alzamiento on 17 and 18 July 1936. His murder also precipitated the war, and while Calvo Sotelo had some doctrines to preach, he was primarily a defender of the Church and the monarchy without the trappings of the European-wide movement against an ineffective and decadent parliamentarism in Italy, Germany, France, and Belgium. Ramiro de Maeztu paid little attention to José Antonio, nor did the parties of the Right accept him willingly as an ally in the elections under the Republic. In America we have no Don Marcelino, but there are many who are critical of the liberalism we have imported from Europe and which we seek to implement in public policy. And there are numerous political leaders and speakers who are seeking to impress on Americans the danger of letting the tradition of the nation go by default. We in America have reached a time when a Menéndez Pelayo is needed, but the day of the struggles of José Antonio to cope with reality is not yet with us. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

Laín Entralgo, the contemporary “Progresista” (liberal), praises José Antonio (who saw some good in his enemies) in order to denigrate Menéndez Pelayo (who Laín says saw “absolute” evil in his enemies). See Laín Entralgo, op. cit., p. 31. Obras completas de José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1942), p. 1132. This is the official edition for “La Delagación Nacional de Prensa y Propaganda de Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las J.O.N.S.” (Editors’ Translation: “God grant that mine would be the last Spanish blood that would flow in civil strifes.”) Figures on seats in the Parliament are given as follows: Rightwing Agrarians 150, Monarchists 38, Independents 20; the Center parties: Republican Radicals 104, Republican Conservatives 17, Republican Democrats 10, Catalonian League 26. This meant 208 Right members and 157 Center. The Leftwing parties had members as follows: Socialists 62, Republicans 11, Catalonians 24, Communists 1, Unclassified 10, giving the left a total of 108 members. Calvo Sotelo had a distinguished career in the public service, first under General Primo de Rivera and then under the Second Republic. He got most of his political theory from Ramiro de Maeztu, Víctor Pradera, and from Acción Española. See Aurelio Joaniquet, Calvo Sotelo (1939), and by Calvo Sotelo, El estado que queremos, ed. A. García-Arias, Jesús Marañón y Ruiz-Zorilla (1958). He favored

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

Order and Legitimacy a state capable of defending Christian civilization, a return to the monarchy, and a Christian capitalism. Also, Santiago Galindo Herrero, El 98 de los que fueron a la guerra (1955), for a general discussion of the ideas of the Right. See Burnett Bolloten, The Grand Camouflage: The Communist Conspiracy in the Spanish Civil War (1961), passim. This author’s position is a warm support for the Republic, a condemnation of the Right and of those who were farther left than the more “moderate” republicans. (Editors’ Note: Wilson’s appreciation of Bolloten’s scholarship deserves mention, and it anticipates the achievement of Bolloten’s definitive study of the conflict, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevloution [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991].) See Onésimo Redondo, El estado nacional (1943); Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, Discurso a las juventudes de España. Prólogo de Santiago Montero Díaz (3rd ed., 1939). Consult also Santiago Galindo Herrero, Los partidos monárquicos bajo la segunda república (2nd ed., 1956); and Orden y jerarquía en la estructura social (Ateneo, Madrid, 1954). Traditionalist writers have given considerable attention to the religious defense of the right of revolution. See Aniceto de Castro Albarrán, El derecho a la rebeldía, part of which was published in Acción Española. On Rousseau, see Ferrer and others op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 133 ff; and Eugenio Vegas Latapié, Romanticismo y democracia (1938). Editors’ Note: See Father Stanley L. Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 218. Editors’ Note: See Wilson, Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), especially chapter 14. Obras, op. cit., p. 1124. Obras, op. cit., p. 349. The idea of a “new state” tended to be rather vague. It was usually a defense of the monarchy, but a stronger and more vital monarchy than had been unseated in 1931. There was hostility toward the traditional parliament of parties and ideological struggle. There are numerous similarities between Víctor Pradera and José Antonio. Both were highly critical of Rousseau and the liberal state. Pradera made considerable use of Catholic thought that had been in past times critical of popular sovereignty. He quoted Castelar that every election is a calamity, every primary or assembly a market, each elector a slave, and each minister a sultan. Each candidate fosters public immorality, and each act of a padrón (census) is a scandal and an ignominy. See Víctor Pradera, Obra completa (2 vols., Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1945), I, p. 195. The editors and contributors to Acción Española for a time formed a closely knit community of Spanish traditionalism against the Second Republic. They were called also “la Renovación Española.” Ramiro de Maeztu and Eugenio Vegas Latapié were clearly among the leading editors. Maeztu is discussed at length in the next chapter. See Latapié, Escritos políticos (1940). The last item in this volume is dated 1938, and the volume is composed mostly of articles from Acción Española and La Época. All traditionalists and renovationists at this time seemed to be harsh critics of the kind of democratic procedure characteristic of the Republic, that is, the falsification of democratic procedures. See also Latapié’s Romanticismo y democracia (1938); his theme is that romanticism eventuates in democracy, liberalism, socialism, and Communism. It seems the Republicans never tried to answer by saying that their version of democracy comes not from Rousseau but from Aristotle. Instead, they argued simply that their enemies were fascists without confronting the central issues. See especially Vicente Marrero, La guerra española y el trust de cerebros (2nd ed., 1962), pp. 346 ff. See Gustave Thibon, Retour au réel: nouveau diagnostics (1943), p. xiv.

José Antonio: The Revolutionary Passion 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

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The happy term “ucronia,” or the desertion of time, was introduced into historical reflection by Renouvier in his Uchronie in 1876. In Spain it has been used by Ortega and José Pemartín. See Laín Entralgo, op. cit., p. 10. The comparison between the resistance of José Antonio (Falange Española) and the Kreisau Circle, or the resistance to Hitler is drawn from Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler (1962), and from the notable review of this work by Klaus Epstein in Modern Age, VII (Winter, 1962-1963), p. 87. See my article “The Anatomy of Conservatives,” Ethics, LXX (July, 1960), pp. 265-281. Occasionally, however, even the Falangists will talk about the achievement of a “new man” because of the Movement. No doubt such editorializing is hardly taken seriously. The Falangist press is inclined also to praise the superior qualities of Spanish democracy under General Franco. See Germino, “Italian Fascism in the History of Political Thought,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, VIII (May, 1964), pp. 109-126. This paper was first presented at the meeting of the American Political Science Association in September 1961. See John H. Hallowell, Main Currents in Modern Political Thought (1950), p. 605. Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics (1952), and Order and History, must be cited in connection with the Gnostic immanentization of knowledge which is surely not a characteristic of the Spanish national movement. The noted contemporary Spanish philosopher, Xavier Zubiri, author of la esencia (1962), should be cited here. He condemns existentialism and historicism, and he affirms the propositions (conservative in implication) that (1) a reality exterior to man exists; (2) the mind can know this reality without distortion of the understanding; (3) pure spirits exist; (4) evolution is accepted in regard to matter; (5) evolution does not create the spirit; (6) there is a soul and God is its creator; (7) a first cause may be demonstrated; (8) man is not pure history but also a part of nature; (9) and there is a dimension of objective morality. Pío Baroja (1872-1956) has seemed to be a curiously disagreeable anti-Catholic character. He is credited with being both an anarchist and a precursor of fascism in his early novel César o nada in 1909. See his Judíos, comunistas y demás ralea, Prólogo por Giménez Caballero (2nd ed., 1939). Ludwig Freund “The New American Conservatism and European Conservatism,” Ethics, LXVI (October, 1955), pp. 10 ff. Liberal economics finds in Adam Smith that monopoly is the sole engine of the mercantilist system. And in the mercantile system the interest of the consumer is sacrificed to the interest of the producer. Production and not consumption becomes the ultimate object of all industry and commerce. Perhaps we have here another profound but easily overlooked difference between European conservatism or traditionalism and the American conservative defense of the free market system. No doubt we should also say that the twentieth-century tradition of proletarian syndicalism, and its form of the corporative state, emerges from the ancient European concern for the producer, whether urban or rural. There have been episcopal statements against the present system, and also traditionalist arguments, since there is no autonomy of the workers in their organizations. It has been proposed that a middle-way solution might be found in permitting the mixed or vertical syndicates to form voluntary associations or federations for the presentation of their views on economic and social questions. Even the Falangists recognize that the present national syndicates can hardly perform many of the duties of real labor organizations. There has been discussion in Spain as to whether the papal statements admit the right to strike, but, apparently, there is no general consensus on this question.

6 Ramiro de Maeztu: Critic of the Revolution1 I When I was in Spain I used to walk nearly every day through the playground of a school named after Ramiro de Maeztu.2 However, he was first called to my attention during one summer in the mid-1920s by Professor Edward S. Corwin of Princeton University, who was at the time teaching a graduate course in politics at Stanford University. He commented on the value of Authority, Liberty, and Function in the Light of the War, first published in 1916 when the author was a correspondent in British uniform at the front during World War I. Maeztu had an immensely complicated and brilliant mind. His brilliance as a writer was matched by a remarkable evolution from nineteenth-century liberalism toward a passionate attachment to Spanish tradition. Owing to the economic ruin of his family, he never graduated from the university. Quite early he devoted himself to journalism. He traveled in France and then to Cuba, where for a time he read the newspapers and literature (some of which he translated into Spanish) to tobacco workers while they labored. He returned to Spain to serve in 1898 as a volunteer in the army, and following the war he studied in Germany, and he was one of the Generation of 1898 which began an intellectual inquisition into the cause of the cultural and political failures of Spain. It was thus in association with the intellectuals of Madrid that he completed the first “formation” of his mind. As described by the writer Azorín (pen name of José Martiñez Ruiz) in Clásicos y modernos in 1913, this so-called generation was a group which inherited the liberal philosophical tradition of the nineteenth century. They protested, in the first place, against the politicians and writers of the Restoration monarchy after the First Republic, but, secondly, they were profoundly concerned with intellectual ideas in Europe. The men of the Generation of 1898 thought the tragedy of Spain after its defeat by the United States had come from the errors of past leadership, education, and political ideas. They wished to bring about a spiritual renovation of Spain through its 99

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Europeanization; but in detail they sought the reconstruction of Castillian writing through bringing it in contact with the trends of the world which focused upon a defeated and desperate Spain. Azorín lists Valle-Inclán, Benavente, Pío Baroja, Bueno, Maeztu, Unamuno, and Rubén Darío, as members of this literary and critical generation.3 Their linguistic ideal was found in Paul Verlaine; however, Maeztu favored the political ideas of Joaquín Costa, who was an activist, liberal, and progressive in the fields of law and education. Indeed, one of the notable qualities of intellectual life in Spain until Menéndez Pelayo published his work on La Ciencia Española in 1876 was the denigration of historic Spanish culture and science. But Maeztu was swept along in the restoration of Spanish traditionalism which surged forward near the end of the nineteenth century. Whatever else one may say, the Generation of 1898 was committed to an ideal for Spain; they were not merely witnesses to its inferiority which had been felt since the seventeenth century.4 In 1905, Maeztu went to England as a correspondent, where he was to live until 1919. He became an accomplished writer in both Spanish and English. Though he had married an English woman (his mother had also been English, while his father was a Basque), he returned to Spain in 1919 to an active life as a man of letters. Because of his writings on Spanish literary figures (Don Quixote, Don Juan, y la Celestina for example), he was invited to the Middlebury College language school during the summer of 1925. He developed a great affection and understanding of Protestant life, though he was again an active Catholic. During the 1920s he became a warm supporter of General Primo de Rivera, but he was also a penetrating critic of the failures of the Primo regime. In 1928, he was appointed Spanish ambassador to Argentina, but he was becoming increasingly concerned with the breakdown of Spanish political life; he returned to Spain again in order to engage in politics and in political journalism. After the fall of the monarchy in 1931, he was a monarchist deputy in the Cortes, and he was one of the intellectual leaders in the formation of a nationalist and traditionalist movement (Renovación Española) centering around the journal Acción Española, which appeared for the first time in December 1931. In the bitter conflicts during the republican period, Maeztu’s Catholicism became more and more positive, and during the last years of his life he was dominated by the ideas of Hispanidad.5 In his later years he was regarded by his friends as a thinker devoted to English liberalism as an ideal for a future Spain, which might be purified of anti-religious or Communist ideology. He combined his appreciation of English life with whatever he felt was necessary to preserve the Spanish tradition. His English “pluralism” was also his liberalism, as his book in 1916 shows, and it was a perpetuation of his rebellion as a member of the “Generation of 1898” against the government of Spain. After the Spanish-American War he had been profoundly influenced by Nietzsche and Immanuel Kant, but then England and English life became his model of existence. Though his Authority, Liberty, and

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Function is one of the best statements of the pluralistic hostility toward the state, his defense of Spanish tradition against the revolution must be recognized as one of the most powerful coming from the pen of any Spaniard. The monarchy was a bridge between traditions, for both England and Spain were monarchies at the time of his involvement in Spanish nationalism. Moreover, he was not alone in his appreciation of the English monarchy, for Agnes Repplier has reported that the Queen of Spain and the Princesses dressed with determination in the English style. With the fall of the monarchy in 1931, Maeztu became a widely read and penetrating critic of the Second Republic, in the course of which he moved steadily toward a nationalist and conservative position. Almost immediately after the Nationalist uprising, the Alzamiento, of 18 July 1936, he was arrested. Eventually sentenced to death, he was executed either toward the end of October 1936, or very early in November. The exact date seems uncertain. Even including his extended residence in England, his ambassadorial and literary work in Argentina, and his short residence in the United States, the drama of his life was his thought and his writing. His literary production is, seemingly, diverse and contradictory in its political commitments of varied hues. A retrospective study may suggest it was more consistent and organic than it has seemed at first glance. But in any reading, it depicts an agonizing struggle with the dilemma of his life—his love of England and America and their sturdy continuity, and his love for Spain in its post-World War I disintegration, even as he wrote from day-to-day his brilliant newspaper articles and books. The British monarchy was stable while that of Spain had a connectivity with the people. The Anglo-Saxon political systems worked, while the parliamentary organs of Spain were unable to govern. To many Spaniards of the time it seemed that democracy and universal suffrage were leading to Communism and anarchy. In 1924 he said he would vote for the liberals if he were in England, where effective party life continued. On the contrary, the parties of Spain were dominated by caciques on the local level and by favor-traders on the national. Spanish parties had ceased to have any relation to the people or to public issues. Politics was not extraordinarily corrupt in Anglo-Saxon countries, but it was completely so in Spain. There was public order in Britain and America, but disorder and the impending revolution were always present in his homeland. Even the Directorio Militar of General Primo de Rivera was too busy with Africa to engage in any popular education that might touch the people. The General had permitted all of the key positions in Spain, especially the professorships in the universities, to remain in the control of the liberal and socialist enemies of the Spanish traditions.6 With the end of the military directorate, one senses in the writings of Maeztu a growing desperation: the revolution was upon him. Neither liberal nor conservative leaders seemed to have the ability to pull together and maintain a public order that might be remotely similar to that of England; and like En-

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gland, the parties had been damaged by corruption of the state. What had been realizable in the Spanish conservative party, Maeztu said in 1923, is now realized in fact; and what is practicable in liberalism, has been tried. But unlike the British, the Spanish have not had a strong sense of national consensus in favor of preserving order after the programs of the parties had been written into law. What was needed, then, Maeztu thought, is a conservative political party dedicated to the defense of Spanish culture, one which would use the state to educate the individual, to develop the wealth of Spain, and to preserve the spiritual and religious foundations of Spanish tradition. It would be, in theory, a party grounded in society rather than in the personal struggles of politics. II Let us consider more closely the development of Maeztu’s ideas. When he was in England, he was attracted to the corporativism of the Guild Socialists, who had proposed the functional reorganization of society. From A. R. Orage, the editor of New Age, he had drawn the English conception of the guilds (though corporativism clearly extends back to the Middle Ages, perhaps even to some of the ideas of classical Roman law); though a critic of the syndicalism of Léon Duguit, the French exponent of Solidarisme and professor of public law at the University of Bordeaux, he was impressed by the idea of objective rights and the notion of an objective law of social solidarity.7 From G. E. Moore he developed the notion of the objective good; from Edmund Husserl he took the conception of objective logic; and from T. E. Hulme, the English critic and translator of Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence, who insisted that anyone who denies original sin is a romantic, Maeztu drew the proposition that original sin is a fundamental principle upon which to start his political theory. In this regard, Maeztu is similar to Juan Donoso Cortés, whom we have already discussed in chapter 2. Maeztu insisted on the failure of political authority. He argued “that the unchecked increase of bureaucracy in modern states is a sufficient reason for the present war (1916), and we have demonstrated the failure of authority as the basis of society.... If we take our stand on the supposition that the horrors of the present war and the refutation of the German theory of the state must urge European societies to constitute themselves into some kind of syndicalist or guild organization” and that the most serious obstacle to such a program was the liberal ideology which accompanied the syndicalist movement, for liberalism was individualistic by nature and the guild movement could triumph without social discipline.8 It was in America, during his summer at Middlebury College, that Maeztu discovered capitalism. The long postwar crisis in Spanish life had forced all Spaniards to think about the kind of public order they wanted, and this preoccupation left no time to consider the market system they might want. The poverty of Spain, its disordered political passions, the constant menace of the

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revolution, the breakdown of parliamentary life—all these elements made economic policy a secondary matter. Maeztu had been a pluralist and guild socialist in England, and like them he wanted the individual to have freedom to join the groups which would formulate his decisions. Pluralism was the Augustan age of English liberalism. Its supporters did not doubt however, and neither did Maeztu, that British capitalism would survive the war. In 1925, at Middlebury, he confirmed a conviction which had been growing on him in England: the economic and political superiority of the Anglo-Saxons was due to the Puritan-Calvinist tradition epitomized by the combining of one’s religious duty with one’s daily work. Riches should be a reward in this world for doing one’s duty to God. Was this true of America, the so-called “land of the dollar?” At Middlebury he decided it was so. The American capitalist endowed colleges, he established foundations, and he recognized that public benefaction was the duty of those who had wealth. The Latin, and often the Catholic mind, did not believe it was proper for man to struggle for wealth, and in any case it was better to endow convents and churches than to establish business enterprises. As the rational organization of the productivity of labor, capitalism was an outgrowth of the Puritan conscience insisting that, as Benjamin Franklin urged, one should attend to one’s daily labor with frugality and fidelity. Maeztu’s affection for the United States, perhaps one should say New England primarily, was very great. He believed the Americans were among the most cultivated people in the world, and this was so even during the time of colonial migration. There was a higher percentage of university graduates in New England during the seventeenth century than in England itself. Granting this, José Enrique Rodó’s criticism of America as Caliban, while Latins are like Ariel, is absurd. What is wrong with the Latin businessman? The banker? Why do Americans always lend money to Latins, and not the reverse? Maeztu believed the Latins should attend to the affairs of business. Maeztu’s study of Latin and Anglo-American economic activity, which was one of his preoccupations late in his life, led him to coin the phrase “el sentido reverencial del dinero” (reverence of money), to describe the American and Puritan sense of duty in economic life. The Puritans have had a reverence for money: income is to be invested in productive business rather than spent in luxury, as in India and even to a certain extent in England, with its infiltration of oriental luxury. America is simply the most profound, living illustration of frugal investment strategies and wealth concentration since the time of Julius Caesar, according to Maeztu. England is a combination of Cavalier and Puritan, but in America the Puritan alone has dominated throughout our history. When Emerson and Hawthorne went to England in the middle of the nineteenth century they were amazed by the luxury they saw, for in comparison the American millionaire led a Spartan life.9 The Latin separates religion and the necessity of daily work; the northern European combines spirituality and work, and unlike the Latin he is rich.

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But the crisis at the end of Primo’s regime, the fall of the monarchy, the issue of permanent revolution, forced appreciations of England and America into the background. One cannot discern much of Norteamérica desde dentro in his subsequent writings. This must have been so because of the worldwide economic crisis, and the greatest failure of them all was American capitalism. For the moment the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon peoples were engulfed in vast currents of political disturbance. International Communism and nationalist fascism had begun their contention in Spain, Italy, and Germany—a struggle which was to be part of the background of World War II—and into which the democracies were all but inevitably sucked as in whirlpools of the deep. Brutality and the retreat from legality were characteristic of Spain as well as of other lands. From the late 1920s to the end of World War II there was a kind of intensified age of ideology, not the least of which was the eventual trauma of the Spanish Civil War and the universal tornado of propaganda and ideological fury or farcicality surging in upon it. It was a time when everyone who thought or wrote about politics drifted toward insecurity and mental violence. Even in America, many prominent thinkers believed that democracy was finished, to say nothing of the motley cavalcade of panacea organizations, Right and Left, which sought the allegiance of the American people. In Spain the crisis was already well underway before the Great Depression started, and the Spanish traditionalist, like Maeztu, was led or driven to new evaluations of established political judgments. What seemed clear to the European intellectual in general was that either Communism or the fascist movements would win; liberalism seemed dissolved, parliamentarism completely ineffective and inept, and economic disaster was shaking the Western World. If Maeztu’s allegiances were crumbling, where could he turn? A time of crisis is an age of nostalgia for everyone, but most of all for the intellectual. The conservative impulse drives him back to the motherland of his tradition. Just as an American intellectual has a profound nostalgia for his Europe, so Maeztu returned to the values and the order of life which had created the Spain that had staggered into the twentieth century, through the gateway of its futile but heroic war against the United States. In his desperation he turned, in a conservative fashion, to the principle of order. From whence could it be derived? Not from Communists who had since 1918 been trying to set up a revolutionary order in Spain; not from liberals who failed to maintain public order; and not from conservatives who had neither a program nor courage to put it into effect. In any case, he prophesied in August 1930 that in the next few years either an armed uprising of the traditionalists, like the one in 1873, or a profound and successful criticism of the liberal-socialist ideology would take place. At the outset of the depression in 1927, he saw that to the socialists and Communists, American prosperity was the great scandal, though the adulation of “Chicago” in Communist writing was absurd. Still, he was driven to consider what could

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be done to restore the economy, and he seemed to believe that capital investment in agriculture might be one avenue of escape, in Spain as elsewhere. He favored the development of hydro-electrical power, later adopted by Generalissimo Franco. The defense of the West, being the first order of business, had to be conducted on many fronts. The tide must be turned against Bolshevism, the intellectuals must be taught that they have no future under Communism, and the criticism of socialism must show that socialist movements themselves have all too often prepared the way for the Communist revolution. As mentioned before, Maeztu had been a member of the Generation of 1898 group of writers and intellectuals. He always returned in his analysis of Spanish problems to a fundamental question: what shall we do about intellectuals who continue to embrace dying but fatal ideas, who run to Communist thinking, who would destroy the religious tradition of Spain, and who have no understanding of economic issues? For him, no doubt, the greatest issue of education was the education of the intellectuals. He asked whether the liberal professions could be encouraged to see the link between their future and the national tradition, which as a system of values represented intellectual authority, and that some of these values were more important than others. The journal Acción Española (Spanish Action) was in part the answer here. Though Acción Española and its related traditionalist movements maintained its political independence, it was always torn between accepting and rejecting other national movements which were critical of the liberal, socialist, or Communist revolution, or which were enthusiastic for the fascist movements. After the fall of the monarchy and the establishment of the Second Republic, it was only gradually that the traditionalists became convinced they could not live in peace with the Republic. It was, indeed, when countless Spaniards turned away from liberalism and conservatism to embrace what to them was a new creed of “traditionalism.” In this way traditionalism was being stolen from the Carlists. In the harsh struggles among ideologies after World War I, it was customary to speak primarily of Communism, fascism, and democracy. While all three of these terms are somewhat vague, it is characteristic of the ideological mind not to ask for definitions. In Spain during the war and still today, one finds the nationalists referring to the Republican side as the “Reds” or the Communists, while the Republican, liberal, and Communist-oriented minds always speak of the present regime as fascist, Falangist, or totalitarian. It would seem impossible to so describe any particular ideological movement with such objectivity and such behavioral detail that all informed parties will accept the description as accurate. However, let us first suggest that ideological condemnations have in mind self-praise and the criticism of the enemy. Secondly, it is impossible to argue that the situation has not changed since the years before World War II. And thirdly, in the United States it would appear that the liberals, socialists, Communists, and those who swim energetically with the ideological jet stream, are

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those who call Spain first and always simply a “fascist” state. In the nature of such a condemnation, a so-called fascist state like Spain would be worse than a Communist regime, while a society with a strong Catholic sympathy might automatically be called totalitarian and fascist. What is meant is that one must take ideological utterance in the situation in which it occurs, with explanations that may be proper at the moment. No doubt, the utility of all ideological epithets has greatly diminished.10 Thus, Maeztu, like any other Spaniard who was against the Second Republic, will be called by some a fascist. It would not help him to say that he might stand today with other monarchist, traditionalist, Catholic conservatives against the continuation of the “temporary” regime of Franco and his designated successor, or that he would be against the formalism of the Falangist movement. What is important, it would seem, is the time of disorders in which Maeztu lived. How can one attain public order, the context of civilization and the life of humane and religious institutions? In Italy, as in Spain, Maeztu saw that the parliamentary system could not govern, since there had been a succession of impotent ministries, the breakdown of order, and the rise of a strong man, who was considered then as a bridge to some better political order. The name of the regime was unimportant, for he had no ideological category for Primo’s government in Spain. To him the abuses of power by government and its pistoleros might simply be called tyranny. Instead of being a defender of any other regime, he was a Spanish traditionalist, which meant the defense of the Church, the defense of the monarchy, and the defense of the honor and patriotism of all Spaniards of all races who loved their country during the futile colonial wars in Africa and elsewhere.11 The liberals and socialists, and in the end the Communists, practiced the “abandonment” of the country. It would seem impossible to question the integrity and honorable love of liberty that Maeztu professed. His life in the Republican Cortes as a monarchist deputy convinced him that a revolution against the Republic would some time be necessary. In the struggle with the Republic and its political leaders, Maeztu believed, that the days of parliaments, fractional parties, and free elections had passed. Parliamentarism in Weimar Germany, Paris, Rome, Madrid, and even elsewhere was making government impossible. In answer to the failure of tradition and order, the day of the national “movements” had come. III The most brilliant part of Maeztu’s journalism, now collected into the volumes of his articles by Señor Vicente Marrero, is undoubtedly his analysis of the approach of revolution in Spain. It is to such analysis that we in America might listen, if we are concerned here or elsewhere with the issue of historical imitation or repetition. Obviously, as we look at ourselves we know we are now entangled in the long misery of the postwar years in Hispanic America, Africa,

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and Asia. Further, the issue is not so much “democracy” as sheer orderly and civilized behavior, with some elements of liberty. Too often cheerful Americans have talked as if we had no history, and that any connection with the past is purely a matter of choice. We have spoken of democracy as if its retreat before totalitarianism in Europe, Asia, and Africa were the consequences of the accidental power of accidental political figures. Like Maeztu, we struggle to hold onto the idea of representative government, though in Spain the violent years from 1931 to 1939 drained from the conservatives and traditionalists any belief that representative or Cortes (the Spanish parliament) democracy was possible for them. 12 In October 1923, in the Madrid newspaper El Sol, Maeztu wrote: The existing regime [of Primo de Rivera], more or less modified, must continue. One comes to this conclusion even by the road that seems to lead to the contrary conclusion, because we have proposed to formulate its fundamental problem, which is to institute or to restore a parliamentary or representative regime, in which without the falsification of voting in elections, there may come from the ballot boxes a practicable majority, which is one that is animated by a constructive and governing spirit. Thus to formulate the problem is to recognize the necessity of establishing or restoring the parliamentary or representative regime, which implies the transitional nature of the present government. It is only necessary to look about the world to understand the inevitability of the parliamentary or representative regime of government. Spain cannot be an exception to a system of government that, for the present, exists wherever there is civilization.

Still, a decade later, Maeztu was no longer convinced such a system could be established in Spain. He had turned now to the restoration of the monarchy, as a social or corporative monarchy, which would stand above the struggles of Spanish society; he turned to the restoration of Christianity, and to the reconquest of the key positions in the public service, the universities, and in the professions for those who have affection for the historical role of Spain. Had Maeztu lived into the post-Civil War period it is unlikely his convictions would have changed. He would have continued to favor the restoration of the monarchy. The “permanent revolution” of Communism had resulted in the liquidation in Spain of the parliamentary monarchy (the common form in Northern Europe). Society itself was not firm and well organized as it had been in traditional Anglo-Saxon societies. Worst of all, the men in government, the leaders of the so-called parties, and the high bureaucrats, had come to believe what intellectuals had been saying in the classroom and writing in their books about the downfall of Spain. In our age of universal turbulence, the analysis of the modern revolutionary process is surely a first postulate of the conservative system of thought. Here the European conservatives have done better than we, for our achievements, or our order, the stabilities of politics, and the wealth of the economic system, make it difficult for us to believe we are like other men. If liberals at times thank God they are not as other men, there is also some element of this Pharisaism in

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American conservative thought. Yet Maeztu might agree that a civilized man cannot understand the modern European barbarian, and he knows as well that it is impossible to explain to the barbarian that he is just that. There is much in common between Ramiro de Maeztu and Juan Donoso Cortés. It was Donoso’s view that the revolutionaries were preparing the way for the socialist and Communist revolution; that the liberal would be crushed between the re-energized conservatives and the powerful revolutionaries of the Left. And Maeztu said that the liberal revolutions had no other historical mission than to make possible the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and those which are affiliated with it. The revolutionary religion was first of all that of the French, and it was grounded in the doctrines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This religion had not varied, said Maeztu, for two centuries and it has one dogma: the natural goodness of man, which means that evil comes from the institutions of civilized order. The French Revolution was naturally viewed by Maeztu as a Calvinist heresy. To give the goodness of man a chance required in 1789 the revolution; the neutral classes, for example, both liberals and disillusioned conservatives, disappear in civil war. Around 1890 the armed socialist movement began in Spain, and the day of the pistoleros had dawned. But in 1917 the new system of revolution began, the permanent revolution, under which in every country there is a permanent organization of conspiracy, and there exists some form of revolutionary party. With Russia before their eyes, the young socialist intellectuals said one did not now have to wait until there is a capitalistic saturation of Spanish society. The revolution should come now in Spain as it had in Russia before the maturity of capitalism. Like other revolutionaries, it became easy to say as a supporter of Señor Azaña is reported to have said: “Before we have elections we will exterminate our enemies.” Meanwhile both the monarchy and the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera acted like the Second Empire in France: it was able for a time to stop anarchy only. It could not stem the tide of leftist victory. IV Equally significant in the disintegration of Spanish order was the failure of the conservatives. In 1930 Maeztu said: “We have in Spain great conservative and traditional forces. But the conservatives are simply skeptics, when they are not moderate liberals or even radicals without knowing it.” The conservative program had been surrendered without common sense; in the approaches to 1931 the forces of the Right had refused to listen to the warnings of those, like Maeztu, who had written for Acción Española. In the nineteenth century, conservatives permitted the fighting between the army and the Church, which in the end had destroyed the Catholic monarchy and had permitted in its place the military monarchy of the twentieth century. Both Spanish conservatives and liberals had paid too little attention to Spain and too much to ideological

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currents in England and Germany. As Harold Laski once said, it is no accident that the first sentences of the Contrat Social are similar, indeed, to the closing ones of the Communist Manifesto. And revolutionaries knew better than conservatives that, as in the perception of Dostoevsky’s Shigalov, unlimited liberty ends in unlimited despotism. As skeptics, the conservatives believed neither in the Spanish tradition of the Golden Century nor in the myths of the nineteenth-century liberal republic. What then was to be the conservative program in the face of the revolution? The great conservative theme and the first condition of order, according to Maeztu, is to end the class struggle. The class war has no civil right; it has no pretense of protection by the code of civil liberty, and only under such a denial of civil liberty to class warfare is there a suggestion of an end to the perpetual threat of the revolution. Only under these conditions may the bureaucratic absorption of the nation or of society be ended. Then it may be possible to restore the monarchy, and to have a king who reigns and governs at the same time, under a parliamentary system that will finally become like the British and northern European systems. Up to 1931, said Maeztu, the throne believed it could disarm the revolution by conceding to it, by doing it favors; but the restored monarchy would have no such illusions. There would be censorship, true, but ultimately an English system might be instituted in which censorship would be unnecessary because censorship would be part of the customary stability of society; the enforcement of laws against libel and slander would alone remain necessary. Spanish tradition has an almost irresistible attraction to the conservative. The explanation of this runs into symbol and hyperbole. It has been said that “Spain is not a place; it is a passion. It is an existential commitment to Don Quixote, Don Juan, and La Celestina all at the same time. Its history comes like a Castillian windstorm into the present.” In his last hours, Maeztu continued to write on his “Defense of the Spirit” and to translate some of Longfellow’s poetry for his fellow prisoners. He must have been conscious of his engagement with his history. He thus asserted his own dignity and individuality in the midst of the historical storm which had engulfed him. As a journalist he had become in the 1920s more and more a defender of order in its most comprehensive social and political sense. He defended the monarchy, the Church, and the ultimate destiny of Spain not to be poor, and to have a political consensus which is worthy of a civilized state. He had reached the conclusion that parliamentary government would not work at that time in Spain. He was a passionate advocate of the restoration of the monarchy, which sometimes in his last writings he referred to as a corporate monarchy, but his own term “social monarchy” seems to have become the more common expression of the contemporary monarchists. To the Spanish traditionalist, his history has a kind of incommunicable grandeur. He may, like Maeztu, say that in its Golden Century (1519-1665)

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Spain made universal history possible by its ideals. Spain set out to bring the world to its way of thinking, and the Spaniard was either a priest or a soldier, but a dedicated man in either case. Maeztu affirmed that never in history had there been a colonizing achievement like that of Spain. There had never been a missionary effort crowned with such success, for as Protestants gained in Europe the Spanish missionaries converted whole nations in the New World. To be of the Spanish “race,” Maeztu is at pains frequently to point out, means simply to be a Catholic. It is in this spirit that October 12, the day of the discovery of America under the flags of Spain, is celebrated as “the Day of the Race.” Was it not Spanish theologians who turned the flank against Lutheran theology in the Council of Trent, and is not thus the modern Catholic Church the product of Spain? Had it not been for Cardinal Richelieu and France, Spain might have won the Thirty Years War and reconquered Europe for the Church. Was not Europe possible because of the seven hundred years of struggle against the Moslem invaders of Spain, who fell finally at Granada in January 1492? Was not Europe a fact because of Spanish resistance to Turkish-Mohammedan pressure in the victory of Lepanto in 1571? But then there is the failure and the exhaustion of Spain—the Invincible Armada did not repeat Lepanto. Exhaustion was symbolized at the beginning of the seventeenth century in Don Quijote, who regarded himself as having a universal mission to undo the many evils of the world. For Maeztu, the great literary symbols which express the struggles of men for their ideals are found primarily in the literature of the Greeks, the English, and the Spanish. But as a Spaniard he was more inspired by the symbols of his own land than of any others, though Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe stood out brightly above the others, except the Greeks. Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Faust may be viewed as almost as great in fiction as their creators in reality. In Maeztu’s criticism, Don Quixote symbolized the universal love for humankind and for justice; Don Juan—in the Spanish and not the Northern versions—speaks of power, especially over women; while La Celestina has recounted to the Spanish the uses of knowledge, even of witchcraft and demonic power. In such symbolizations of order, the dilemma of all times is, in Dostoevsky’s terms, the absolute value or the absolute caprice. Actually, thought Maeztu, the cultivated world has always debated only one thing—the transcendence or the immanence (intranscendencia) of man; whether we are simply a part of nature or whether we are committed witnesses and participants in the supernatural. For Maeztu, the Spaniard could be no skeptic who might either laugh or weep, as Fernando de Rojas, the author of La Celestina; he has not been able to accept an existing social order as perfect as a Calvinist might; but as a Catholic he has been one to say the values of the world are insignificant before that which is beyond the world.13 The defense of these ideas, this tradition of the moral unity of mankind, was the ground on which Maeztu based his defense of Hispanidad.14 While he said

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that the world must achieve representative government, parliamentary institutions, and competing political parties, this is not possible so long as the shadow of the revolution darkens Spain and Europe. The social monarchy, the gradual achievement of political moderation and the purification of the political process, all this would lead back to a sense of order which might make the AngloSaxon political experience possible of repetition in Spain. Again, there would be the possibility of a wealthy Spain, one in which there might be free owners, free workers, all bound together in a spiritual and religious system which accepted and practiced the rational organization of free labor. It is not money the Latin lacks but the Protestant sense of “calling,” of Beruf, of obedience to the law, the duty to save, and the earthly fulfillment of the duty of men which is at the same time both religious and economic. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

For earlier published versions of this chapter, see “Ramiro de Maeztu: Critic of the Revolution,” Modern Age, Volume 8, Number 2 (Spring 1964), pp. 174-185; and a Spanish version appeared in Punta Europa, Volume 4, Number 9 (1964), pp. 6685. The editor of Maeztu’s work, Vicente Marrero Suárez, has continued his strong allegiance to traditionalism in the version expressed by the Regime. See his La consolidación política: teoría de una posibilidad española (1964). See Ángel Ganivet, Idearium español y el porvenir de España (4th ed., 1949). It was first published in 1897. The concept of the “literary generation” has been given extensive treatment in Spain, though many deny the idea of the Generation of 1898, and others call it a general utility idea which says nothing. See Hans Jeschke, La Generación de 1898, trans. from the German (1934, 1954), in general. However, he does not pay very much attention to the ideas of Maetzu, being more concerned with literary criticism. A later defender of Hispanidad, Manuel García Morente, found the Spanish historical ideal in the “caballero cristiano.” It seems that Maeztu, José Antonio, and other leaders of the conservative resurgence might well have agreed with this idea, based as it was on a profound philosophical approach to the problems of Spanish history and tradition. See his Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España (1957); and Idea de la hispanidad (1961), pp. 58 ff. The rigidity of the Spanish method of selecting professors has made it all but impossible for governments to reform the academy. From the liberal times of the last century to the present, there has been a centralized, national government control. Elaborate examinations or oposiciones are held for university status and for specific positions. These examinations are controlled by the ministry, and there are charges of unfairness, or even of creating positions and setting up examinations for particular and favored candidates. The system has continued through various regimes to the present, but it is much easier for a leader like General Primo de Rivera to let matters alone than to court open war with the system. Even today there is only one free or non-ministry university in Spain, the Catholic Pontifical University, or Estudio General, at Pamplona. Liberal dominance of education has been an enduring legacy of the nineteenth-century struggles to control education and the professions, where much the same system prevails.

112 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

Order and Legitimacy The French philosophy of “solidarity” flourished in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It held, in principle, that all metaphysical and religious philosophies are false, and that true values may be drawn from the “facts” of social life. The state, in Duguit’s view, was no longer a “sovereign legal person” as in the days of absolutism; it was, rather, a system by which certain people (the government) provided the necessary public services. As an enemy of sovereignty, Duguit is listed along with the pluralists, both German and English. One curious (for a Catholic) and long term influence on Maeztu is Immanuel Kant, the study of whose philosophy suggested to him that spiritual values, the spirit, cannot be drawn from material forces. Apparently the study of Kant was one of the important influences that led him back to Catholic philosophy. The foundation of the spirit is, of course, one of the perennial questions for the Spanish and the Catholic philosopher. See his Defensa del espíritu, Estudio preliminar de Antonio Millán Puelles (1958), pp. 51-55, 114 ff., passim. This essay is republished from the Acción Española, May 1935. Even Guglielmo Ferrero said this of the United States. See Illustrated London News, 27 March 1926. Editors’ Note: For a complementary assessment, see Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). Maeztu apparently never defended the regional fueros. This separates him clearly from Carlist traditionalism. It has been emphasized since the end of the war in 1939 that the Spanish regime is temporary. Legally, it is a monarchy, but in 1962 with the designation of a successor to General Franco, the restoration of Don Juan, or his son Juan Carlos, has seemed more remote than ever. In 1958, new regulations strengthened the Cortes to some degree, but it can hardly be argued it has the autonomy of a British Parliament, but probably it is not much less than the French Parliament under General de Gaulle. In 1966, there was further intense discussion of a successor to Franco. See his Don Quijote, Don Juan, y la Celestina: ensayos de simpatía (Madrid, 1926), pp. 245, 277 ff. Traditionalists have regarded Rubén Darío as a precursor of this complex of ideas.

7 Spain: A European Example1 I The term “new conservative” seems to have been invented in England just after World War II when the Conservative Party was pulling itself together to resist, if possible, the triumph of socialism. It was immediately fashionable to speak of “new conservatives” in the United States, no doubt because the term itself symbolized the effort of a new generation to interpret our national tradition. A traumatic shock seems necessary to produce the eternal recurrence of young, eager, and militantly conservative minds. The American trauma was the general withering of New Deal ideology and the recurrence of disappointment in war; it became difficult indeed to persuade young intellectuals that a given reform proposal would do much to reshape the political cosmos. In England the onset of socialism after the Labor victory in 1945 had the same effect, just as the failures of France—defeat in war, colonial disturbance, the overshadowing danger of Communism, and the perceptible disintegration of the Fourth Republic—made a conservative revival seem to be a political necessity. Or, in Germany the betrayal of national tradition by the Nazis, defeat in war, and a general sourness on war and planned economies helped produce the sobriety of the Federal Republic. In truth, wherever one turns there have been in the West “new conservatives,” produced by twentieth-century debacle and the sheer necessity of salvaging the possibility of existence in a national tradition. But “new conservatism” was only a passing phase of the ideological wars. When post-war recovery was well under way, and it looked as if there might be years of peace ahead for Spain and other internally disturbed countries, the return to conservatism and traditionalism was modified. Ideological splits became the order of the day. In the West generally it was a question of whether the “cold war” was really over and whether coexistence with international Communism was possible. The term “conservative” has seldom had good press, and it is easy to revert to some form of “liberalism,” for though one may not understand what is meant it sounds appealing. Also, one can always say the “old or classical liberals” were in error, but that the neoliberals are on the right track. 113

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Hence, in Western Europe a short generation after World War II there was a tendency to drop the word “conservative” for two versions of liberalism. There was (1) the resuscitation of free market theory, the “social free market” as in West Germany, where economic freedom seemed to have been as a stimulant to production; and (2) there was also the American version of liberalism, which has been a dressed-down socialism, with little trace of classical free market theory. It was this form of liberalism which stirred the imagination of certain Spaniards. The image of a Kennedy liberalism was powerful indeed, and it seemed the ideology of the future, with none of the taint of nineteenth-century liberalism and none of its mistakes. The image of Washington, D.C., or “Potomac liberalism” was blended in Spain with English reformist liberalism-socialism and the doctrines of the Catholic encyclicals on the social questions. Spanish conservatives or traditionalists have seldom used the idea of the “new conservatives.” Rather, they have thought of themselves as traditionalists, taking away from the Carlists this venerable term describing an Iberian political attitude. But, indeed, the heirs of the Spanish Civil War and the victory against the leftwing politics of the Republic might well have called themselves “new conservatives.” The National movement, or the Falange, became a part of the government, and it still is. It represents the ideology of victory which followed the Alzamiento of 18 July 1936. One might say that though there is not a serious mass following of the Falange, its principles represent the propositions the government of Spain is seeking to conserve. At its national meetings the movement has insisted that its principles be included in the fundamental law of the Spanish state, in recognition of the irreversible legitimacy of the Alzamiento. The movement should be recognized as an institution of the Spanish state, though of a different nature from those which form the public power. The Council of the Falange should be associated with the Cortes, and other representative institutions in the Spanish system. In April 1964, for example, the Council of the movement solemnly affirmed its teaching to be national syndicalism and traditionalism; that its organization is open to all Spaniards under a voluntarily accepted discipline; that the movement should be represented in the Consejo del Reino (Council of the Kingdom) and in other basic political institutions; and that popular participation and representation in the movement should be strengthened. Though fundamental doctrine must be uniform, there are many contingencies of program which need not be. In developing the active participation of the people in the government, the principle of the national referendum should be used in the perfecting of Spanish fundamental institutions, which they have regarded as a democratic device of the Spanish system. And the leaders of the National movement proclaimed their loyalty to the Chief of State. In the horrors of one of the world’s great civil wars a consciousness of what a new Spain might be seems to have been born. On the other hand, when the twenty-fifth anniversary year of the uprising came in 1960, none could say that

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the Spanish political scene had become any simpler because of the passage of time. Across international boundaries Spain may look simple, very simple to those who make it merely a country of a fascist dictatorship, or one which is a formidable strategic and spiritual bulwark against the passion of Communist mythology. The conservative intellectuals say they are devoted to tradition, for they wish to build a new Spain on a combination of the great traditions of the past and the newer demands of technological advancement. Many are not Falangists, often they are not admirers of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and they are quite likely defenders of the restoration of the monarchy. It is a point of fact that many former Falangists have become liberals, and many conservatives accept the National movement and Acción Española solely for their contribution in the past. As one gets away from Madrid, there is greater appreciation of the Chief of State, and less certainty about the value of the restoration of Don Juan, the Count of Barcelona, or any other pretender to the throne. In other words, the Falange spirit is stronger away from Madrid than in some circles closer to the national government. But there is one thing on which there seems to be agreement: the Second Republic was a disaster; it continues to represent disorder, anarchy, the destruction of property, the burning of churches, and the desecration of the graves of those who labored for the Church. As José Calvo Sotelo, one of the heroes of the National movement whose murder may have produced the Alzamiento, charged, the Republic had retreated from legality in its elections, from the protection of property, and from respect for the rights of man. It is recorded that on the day when Calvo Sotelo was taken to his death by the police themselves, Dolores Ibarruri, the noted female Communist in the Cortes who came to be known internationally as La Pasionaria, already had declared that Calvo Sotelo had said his last words. II There are at least four propositions which the conservative or traditionalist Spaniard will accept as the background of his thought about Spain today. First, he will say that the Republic’s violent conduct and the disintegration of order it permitted made a revolt, or further revolution, inevitable. Second, once the Communists began taking over the Republican government, as George Orwell describes, for example, in Homage to Catalonia, the Nationalists had to win in the name of the Western tradition, of Christianity, and the sheer possibility of liberty in the future. Third, a restoration of the Republic is quite out of the question under any reading of the times. Any new regime which succeeds that of the Generalissimo must come out of the present political situation. The conservative in or out of the government hopes it will be a restoration of the monarchy, a monarchy modeled on those in northern Europe where liberty and monarchy have remained together in the postwar years. Fourth, to say that the

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Nationalists had to win the war—they had seventy percent volunteers in their armies and half the people of Spain openly for them—does not mean that a conservative today is a supporter of General Franco. III When Spanish conservatives are asked just how they define their position, several answers are given. The Civil War is not regarded as a contemporary issue, for the conservative is first of all a Catholic, and in his own life he may be very devout. The conservative, both the Carlist and the supporter of the Regime, is a Catholic in the sense that he proposes to take Catholic social teaching seriously; the Rerum Novarum, the Quadragesimo Anno, and many other Papal statements from Leo XIII down to the reigning Pontiff are to be taken as guides in the formulation of social policy. In detail, this means that Spain must be a progressive country in the protection of the worker and his family, but it also means that Spain must advance industry, improve agriculture, invest for increased productivity, and finance public works such as housing, roads, and government buildings. Finally, it must be progressive in the effort to establish an international order in which the freedom of the Church to carry forward its mission will not be questioned by any political regime. Still, it is recognized that many prudential judgments have to be made about any set of public policies, and what might be best for Spain might not be best for other countries. Such views as these are as common outside of the National movement as in it. A second answer has emerged: the conservative in Spain today is a lover and restorer of tradition. He defends the Spanish tradition in the footsteps of the great Don Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, who in the last century almost was single-handedly able to reverse the judgment that Spain had nothing of which an intellectual could be proud. Spain has not only a great tradition of learning, language, literature, and discovery in the human sciences (such as the foundation of international law by Vitoria and Suárez in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), but it has been Catholic and monarchist in its tradition. The men who are recognized as the creators of a tradition reveal much. José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the young Falangist chief who was executed at Alicante in November 1936, is buried as a national hero; Juan Donoso Cortés is given increasing attention as a prophet of traditionalism, while Ramiro de Maeztu and Vázquez de Mella are often discussed as restorers of tradition and the creators of Hispanidad. In government circles today, Calvo Sotelo is commemorated as a figure of increasing importance in modern Spanish history. On the twenty-fifth anniversary year of Calvo Sotelo’s death in July 1936, Franco dedicated a monument to him and claimed him as a prophet of the National movement. Even José Antonio had praised Calvo Sotelo in 1934, when he was a leading monarchist in the Cortes. A B C, the “liberal” Madrid newspaper, in May 1960, spoke of Acción Española as a contemporary cultural movement

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which has summarized Spanish tradition in its program. It has favored from the Spanish past a spiritual Thomism, a generous Hispanidad, and an orthodox, baroque intellectualism.2 Bearing in mind that it is a liberal newspaper, one which has separated its religion from its political program, these remarks certainly would not sound like the revolutionary passion of José Antonio. Because of its Catholic tradition in doctrine, law, philosophy, and social theory, Spain could not offer a generous welcome to the revolutionaries spreading out in Europe from the garrets, cafés, and salons of Paris. Spain could not come to terms with the secular and atheistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, though it was seen later that agreement on scientific advance was quite possible, if one could persuade scientists to let metaphysics and theology alone. It is a symbol of the victory of tradition that along with great investment in industrial progress, every historic monument, each mosque, each ancient synagogue and church and each city wall and barrio, has been declared a national monument that may not be changed without the consent of the proper governmental officials. A third answer is a profound concern with the political regime, and the insistence that Spain is a monarchy, as indeed the law says, having declared the Chief of State to be Regent. It has been said that the actuality of sovereignty is the right to interpret the national tradition. What can be said, I think, is something like this: During the years since the end of the World War II there has been a slow evolution of conservative opinion toward consensus on what kind of political order should succeed the present Chief of State. Likewise, there has been a growing impatience with the unwillingness of the General to use the last years of his life in establishing and stabilizing such a regime of restored monarchy. The Spanish conservative knows what is going on in the world, and he studies regimes abroad and in Spain in the light of what he knows. He knows, for example, that the two-party system seems to work only in Anglo-Saxon countries, and the parliamentary system in only a few others, especially in northern Europe where it has been associated with the institution of kingship. He knows that in the world at large the strong man may represent a new kind of democracy. Now Spanish experience, through both Republics and revolutions, through the failure of political parties and elections to work in an orderly manner, suggests that a doctrinaire re-introduction of parliamentarism would court another political disaster. While the Falangists have said political parties must disappear as well as their always-unfulfilled programs, others have countered by saying there is nothing permanent about the Spanish experience and nothing that a suitable political evolution toward order and freedom cannot cure. Exiled Republicans, like Prieto, have insisted on saying the monarchists want only an absolute monarchy with no authority in the Cortes and a regime of absolute centralization characteristic of the great days of Spanish power. Nothing that the conservatives say or write may be used to support such a thesis, not

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even gossip in a proper sense of the word—and there is always much gossip in a regime of personal power. Today as in generations past, the reason for the success of British political institutions remains an absorbing question. But the success of the North American republican system also demands the careful attention of the Spanish conservative who looks forward to a time when there will be greater political liberty in a Spain of order and stability. In the last century Juan Donoso Cortés looked with awe or envy at British political success, and at times with hate because it was that very domestic political success which enabled Britain to exercise such influence on the continent. And it was political instability and internal strife that had reduced Spanish influence to a nullity in the generation immediately after Napoleon. Just as liberals and nonrevolutionary socialists believed the parliamentary system to be a suitable means of attaining the destruction of private property, so the conservatives have always approved of the monarchy and the parliament, and the relatively normal operation of two parties in British elections. Admiration for British institutions has been joined by the admiration of some conservatives for the American system, just as in the past, some Englishmen, like Sir Henry Sumner Maine, regarded our balanced and slow-moving Constitution as our greatest contribution to progress. It has been insisted that in a Spanish manner and within the Spanish tradition, democratic liberties, such as are enjoyed in America under a republican constitution, should be assured to Spaniards under a traditional and social monarchy. One of our founding fathers said that what we must attain in a Republic as many attributes of a monarchy as possible. So now it can be said that conservatives advocate a traditional monarchy that will be as much as possible like the great North American Republic. They speak of a popular, social monarchy, as in the writings of Ramiro de Maeztu who saw the monarchy as the protector of the people. Such a monarchy would work toward the end of classes and class conflict between the proletariat and the owners of capital. It should make possible the restoration of a purified middle class, which would sustain equality of opportunity and an increase in the ownership of property which functions in support of the family. Spaniards realize more clearly than Americans that we live in an age of great political experimentation and the trial and error testing of new forms of government. It is a time for the testing of democracy and the creation of new forms of political and economic liberty. We forget, for example, that the British have exported more than one form of government, that we have generally failed to export our system successfully (as in Latin America), or we have not tried, for in Japan we imported the British parliamentary system. And surely in the political uproar of Asia and Africa the theory and practice of European democracy is hardly applicable. One may remember that the Philippines are an exception, and German constitutional monarchy (with its similarities to the American presidential system) took firm root in Japan before World War II. It is said that England has had three systems of government to export. First, there is the

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Westminster parliamentary system, which has worked well in the Dominions, in India and in a few other colonial areas. Second, there is the university system of the trained civil service which may govern a peaceful area quite well with recessive parliamentary or democratic devices. Third, the Sandhurst or military system, used in times past in the Sudan and Egypt. Even the London Times has spoken of the present day as a good time for generals, who, though they may not be trained at Sandhurst or in the Pentagon-West Point axis, stand as models for those who feel that a strong man is necessary to preserve order. Of course, it goes without saying that around the world where democracy is not feasible, the Sandhurst system will be imitated, while the Pentagon system will be regarded as a kind of colonial imitation. If to the Spanish conservative, popular participation of an extreme or jacobinical kind is not inevitable, he will insist that alternatives do exist under which liberty and the security of rights is possible. In the course of political evolution, there will be transitions between the three British export systems, and little notice will be taken when there is a passage from one regime to another. One thing is clear: there do not seem to be authoritative explanations as to why parliamentary democracy works with a two-party system and free elections in the English-speaking countries, and why it does not work in others. The Spanish conservatives have various explanations for the disillusioning political history of Spain since the decline of imperial power after Philip II. Northern Europeans like to discuss Southern European illiteracy or Latin emotionalism. Protestants like to point to the existence of Catholicism, and blame it for almost everything. I heard an English woman say in Spain that, of course, one had a servant class in Catholic countries. Obviously, these explanations do not explain, especially since the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and the spread of the Communist dictatorship over parts of Europe previously dedicated to the life of reason. Even Northern European Latins, as in Belgium, will blame political disorder in Southern Europe on occasion on the emotional propensities of the “Latins.” Some Spanish traditionalists say there is no chance of a restoration of the monarchy, and there will be another “strong man” when the Generalissimo moves on. This is a common opinion among present-day Carlists, who do not favor a restoration at this time. However, the realities are granted, and a conservative tries to look with clear eyes and head at Spanish politics. It seems impossible to introduce the more extreme form of parliamentary democracy into Spain, but to many, on the contrary, the Falange is equally unsuited for a long-run political order. The Falangist effort to transcend all groups and parties through the National movement has failed. Likewise, syndicalism as a primary means of representation and the chief means of communication between society and the government is not regarded by many as an authentic democracy. When a delegation of members of the British Parliament visited Madrid in 1960 a member of the Cortes told them that Spain practiced “democracy” in its own mode which was admittedly differ-

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ent from Westminster’s. Spanish “democracy” would, thus, exemplify neither political liberalism, that is a majoritarian and parliamentary system, nor the economic liberalism of the free market economy.3 In search of an example, a conservative notes that the British have made the transition from a moderate monarchy to a monarchy associated with an unrestricted democracy, and that the same transition has taken place in the United States from a moderate republicanism in the early days of the Constitution to a radical, urbanized, and minority bloc system of democratic life. Thus, one of the conservative queries is this: Would not a pre-1832, pre-Reform Bill monarchy-parliamentary system work in Spain? Would not stability be possible under such a system? When experience under this system has resulted in educating and reassuring the Spanish people, then one might begin taking steps toward a post-Reform Bill system in Spain. Carl Schmitt once remarked that the modern state and modern dynastic politics were invented by the Spanish kings in the Escorial, that vast somber monastery and palace, but it is clear that the parliamentary monarchy, with a broad suffrage and two major parties, was invented in Westminster. Some Spanish conservatives would say that the Spanish future belongs to a blending of the politics of the Escorial and of Westminster. IV The emergence of industrial technology and the agitation of the socialist and economic revolutionary has taught the masses throughout the world that all men should have the good things of life. Poverty is unnecessary; it is a product of economic and political evil that a new regime will change. These are some of the ideas that are found in the discussion of industrialism in Toynbee’s Study of History. And this is the situation any conservative of the Western world faces. What about the economic order of the future? One might say to the masses in rebellion that in a poor country, one lacking in the fundamentals of technological advancement, not everyone can be made rich by government policy; or, one might say that a division of the dividable wealth would give only a few pesetas to each Spaniard; or, one might say that the payment for social welfare service cannot be imposed on the rich alone, because not even confiscatory income taxes will pay for it. Such services will be paid for in measure by those who receive them because of the shifting incidence of taxation. Spain’s problem of economic development is not markedly different from that of other countries, except that all recognize Spain is a “poor” nation. Though remarkable economic development has taken place since the Nationalist victory—the indices of production doubled in twenty years—and much of it surely without any “foreign” aid, the productivity of Spanish labor is low in both agriculture and industry. This means that personal income cannot advance to the envied level of wages in America, where productivity based on immense capital investment is indeed the marvel of the world. The Spanish

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government is undertaking to accelerate the training of every kind of worker and professional person in order to provide the manpower for the forthcoming industrial order. The Spanish (and Washington) economist is busy inquiring into how Spain can attain a higher level in the production of industrial and agricultural wealth, and how it can become steadily more integrated with the European and world economy. If the progress since the end of the war is continued, one may begin to speak soberly of the rebuilding of Spain, through housing, roads, dams for irrigation, resettlement, production of electrical energy, new manufacturing establishments, and the export of an immense variety of Spanish products. But what kind of an economic regime is it? It has not been liberal, as the Europeans speak of it, that is, a free market or laissez-faire economy. The Spanish conservative has not been a free market thinker. His view seems to be that there are three kinds of economic order—the free market, the welfare state, and the planned economy. European liberals want a free market system (while American “liberals” have become secular-minded socialists), and the Communistgoverned lands are committed to the principle of the planned economy. A traditional economic desire of the European conservative is the institution of the welfare state, in which there is a great development of responsible and practical social legislation, while at the same time there are free market areas and significant systems of government competition, direction, and control. It is said that all European conservatives, including the Spaniards of course, are for the welfare state, while socialists and Communists favor the planned system, and the liberals look hopefully to the restatement of Adam Smith and the nineteenthcentury Manchester system. Indeed, one may almost say that until some years after World War II, European thought was dominated by a profound anti-capitalistic spirit. Such a spirit was combined with a wide-ranging hostility toward the bourgeoisie, and apparently such hostility assumed that capitalism was the cause of poverty rather than of riches. Today in Spain a traditionalist who is hostile toward capitalism will say that it works in America because there is so much wealth, whereas in Spain where riches are limited, wealth has become concentrated in the hands of a few. Thus capitalism in Spain has been unwelcome to both socialists and traditionalists, and the subsequent campaign against it by religious leaders has become intensified. Many a traditionalist has been persuaded to say that the effectuation of the Catholic encyclicals will require the destruction of capitalism. With agreement on the destruction of capitalism, the question becomes one of means and of philosophy. And here there are many shades of opinion, indeed, but clearly a Catholic liberalism, or anti-capitalism, would be different from an anti-capitalist movement inspired by historic socialist and materialistic philosophies.4 Nor should one forget that in the Spanish Falange there is a kind of extreme revolutionary and romantic radicalism, a kind of

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populism or proletarianism that may go in almost any direction that is critical of international capitalism. Such is one implication of the doctrine of national syndicalism. In these crossings and confusions of ideas we have one of the most difficult of the issues for the American thinker to comprehend. Our American conservative judgment leads us to advocate the free market against the economic and fiscal irresponsibility of government. Our conservatives have moved toward the acceptance of economic liberalism (the free market system), while our socalled liberals have been trying with success to infiltrate into America the European attack on private property and economic liberty. However, there is an explanation, and it is that we have not had in our history any extensive experience with the aristocratic theory of social reform. This theory has shaped the European conservative’s attitude toward economic liberalism, and made him from the outset of industrialism a critic of laissez-faire and a person of anticapitalist and anti-bourgeois mentality. The European conservative theory of reform, monarchic and aristocratic as it is, has always been tilted toward the welfare state, if by this we mean the legal protection of the workers against the impact of technology. European conservatives have generally been a little anti-bourgeois, a little anti-capitalist, a little pro-proletarian, but they have been bitter critics of the socialist revolution which would destroy private property (often regarded as the opposite of capitalism) and establish the republic of the atheists. While the formulation of the conservative theory of welfare moved forward rapidly in the nineteenth century, it was erected on a series of different foundations. It reached back into the Christian theory of charity as a social solution, the most dramatic expression of which is probably the magnificent letter on charity written by Donoso Cortés to Queen María Cristina in her exile. It advocated that aristocrats—early in the nineteenth century—initiate legislation to correct the abuses of industry. It extended back into the Christian theory of the natural law of the family and of the rights of the worker to have a family, to support it, perhaps in frugality but surely not in destitution, as Charles Péguy once stated with great force. It rested on that principle of aristocracy which republicans can hardly comprehend: responsibility for others less fortunate as a means of preserving the social order. For a Catholic conservative, it has culminated in the affirmation of the social theory of Catholicism, which has been enunciated in numerous encyclicals beginning with the Rerum Novarum in 1891.5 V As events pointing clearly to revolution continued to occur in the 1930s, there was an impressive shift of rightists from the traditional right parties toward the Falange. Traditionalists were charged by the revolutionary movement

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with being reactionary capitalist exploiters and defenders of the evils of landlordism. They were denounced as being plutocratic and unconcerned both with the plight of the city worker and the peasant. The Falange or the frente nacional was, at times in the speeches of José Antonio, a fascist, authoritarian, and if necessary, revolutionary organization; it was, he said, neither of the right nor the left, and in the election of 1936 it presented no candidates. It was unsuccessfully charged in the Cortes with organizing an uprising, and it was on this basis that José Antonio was condemned to death in November 1936. The supporters of tradition, the rightists, were, indeed, in conflict with both the Falange and with the republicans, who in part were liberals, in part socialists, in part anarchists, and in part Communists who engineered the infiltration of Russian leadership. There was some agreement, however, for all rightists or Falangists declared themselves against the class war; against socialism and Communism, they affirmed their love of Spain, of the Catholic faith of Spaniards, and they rejected the liberal philosophy of the French Enlightenment, which came to be symbolized in the ideas of Rousseau. But the differences were sharp as well. The Falange attempted in this period to be a revolutionary mass movement, modeled on the movements in Italy and Germany. Falangists wore “blue shirts” and adopted the slogan of “Arriba España.” No doubt the F. E. T. shared in precipitating the Alzamiento, though it is conceded now that the death of Calvo Sotelo was the most important single factor. In effect, the F. E. T. tried to claim a monopoly of bureaucratic power, the right to dominate the universities and the syndicates organized as alternatives to the leftwing trade unions. It was against capitalism and all forms of economic liberalism. It repudiated political parties and the traditional system of parliamentary or constitutional government. It asserted its loyalty to Catholic teaching. Some of the opponents of the Falangists were Christian Democrats, supporters of Catholic Action; some were regionalists and decentralists; the ranks of the Carlists, swollen by the persecution of the Church, were against the Falange (though the Requetés, the Carlist militia, fought with the Falangists in the Nationalist cause); some were agrarians in political position; and in an overall sense, the opponents of the Falange were legalists and constitutionalists in their defense of the Spanish tradition. The emergent conservatives rejected racialism, and, as Maeztu insisted, Spain was a religious community and not a racial one, while the F. E. T. was undisturbed at this time by German antiSemitic policy. One of the continuing criticisms of the Falange is that it has tried to create a monolithic society, a society in which there is no autonomous and pluralistic expression of the family, the municipality, the region, the functioning corporation of the economy, and the culture. José Antonio as leader and ideologist of the Falange spoke often of authority, hierarchy, and order, of the defense of the Church, and the protection of the country against offense and attack.6

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Now the defense of the corporate order, an order in which corporations have freedom from the government, reaches back into the Middle Ages, and into the early modern criticism of bourgeois and capitalistic society. A corporate or functional order has become a part of the general Catholic statement of the kind of economy that may come nearest to the expression of Christian ideals in economic life. But if the Falange were to assume the trappings of a political “machine” like Tammany Hall, especially in its regional expression, it would in effect support an order in which syndicates and functional groups are dominated by the bureaucracy. The conservative would say that taking Catholic thought seriously means autonomous corporations, syndicates, trade unions, or other groups such as universities, cities, regions, and cultural associations. The conservative would contend there should be freedom for Catholic universities, which they do not have in Spain to nearly the same degree as in the United States. The government, speaking through the Generalissimo, has demanded that the universities share in the National movement; their liberty must be attained in the context of unity, authority, discipline, and order. Only in this way will they be able to form properly the young intellectuals of Spain. But a Spanish conservative may well point to the United States as a pluralistic, corporate society, with autonomous corporations, cities with home rule, universities operated as they wish, and a federal system in which some autonomy of the states is left. American liberty may seem, indeed, to a Spaniard like a noble example of corporative liberty which is in accordance with Catholic principles of the organization of free society and a new economy. And in Spain it is the groups that assert in effect their liberty, like intellectuals, professionals, publishers, and business people, who are now providing ideas for the government, rather than the more stiff and unimaginative institutions that are dominated by a bureaucratic tradition that evolved from the liberal centralization of the last century. VI In the Spanish system where there are no elections, other than numerous “indirect elections” managed by the government, (although it is said Navarra has some autonomy dating back to the Carlist wars) the government itself has been very skillful in using and balancing various potential and actual political forces. This has indeed been one of the achievements of the Generalissimo. As new forces have appeared, like the Opus Dei (which has been becoming more neoliberal than traditionalist), they have been used in the government. Censorship has operated on particular individuals who may have gotten too far out of line for governmental comfort. While political parties do not exist in the American sense of the concept, they are present to a degree, but assume no representative function. As groups within the social and political order, the only function of political parties is criticism or censure of public policy. The formal

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groups that might be parties under happier circumstances do exist, and they are included in various governmental agencies. Through the examination system, many Opus Dei people have attained university posts. In other words, the Falange become formalistic and institutionalized, has resented the encroachment of Opus Dei in all of the institutions of society where intellectuals and trained minds are used. Many critics of Opus Dei charge that it is a kind of Catholic Masonry, with secret and conspiratorial purposes. It is charged with having too much power because of the approval of the Church. All this is denied by Opus Dei people, who assert in return that many Spanish intellectuals are really anticlerical liberals because they believe that social science, technology, government policy, and research can be neutral in regard to the Christian faith. Not the least startling aspect of current thinking on the continent generally has been the willingness to effect some reconciliation with the ideal of the Enlightenment, which in truth in the eighteenth century was primarily a cultural movement, a cultural atmosphere, than a system of philosophy or even an ideology. The natural rights of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, being founded on the conception of a natural law and rationalistic natural law theory is mended, as indeed it can be and should be. However, for Spain nothing is simple, and ideas and movement tend to go to excess as Donoso Cortés said over a hundred years ago. There is among Spanish conservatives a renewed discussion of the issue of French ideas. The French impact on Spain was great in the eighteenth century, but the sense of the issue was enormously sharpened by the French invasion and the war against the French for Spanish Independence, the attempt of the Francophiles, los afrancesados, to destroy the Church and to defend Napoleon Bonaparte’s puppet on the Spanish throne. The memories of Spaniards are green when they contemplate the damage wrought by French soldiers in Spain, for old bullet marks and historical monuments that no longer stand can speak an eloquent language. Obviously, it is not easy for a Spanish conservative and believer in his tradition to turn to France for inspiration, even with the resurgence of French Catholic and conservative ideas in recent times. The central trouble is, of course, that the French political tradition resembles the Spanish too much. For a new start the conservative can turn to Anglo-Saxon political experience. If the Spaniard turns to the Anglo-American political proposition, he discovers much that is similar to what a Spanish conservative would hold. On the level of political philosophy the Anglo-Americans have held to natural law and rights, the principle of popular consent to a form of government, and to the rule of law symbolized either in the British monarchy after 1688 or in the American Republic of moderation and constitutionalism. In Spain the tradition of natural law and rights, and the principle of the consent of the governed, was expressed in Catholic terms by the Spanish jurist-theologians of the Golden Age like Vitoria, Suárez, Molina, and others. In the light of much recent revision, it is quite possible to build a bridge between the Catholic natural law doctrines of

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Spain and the rewritten Protestant and Whig political tradition of natural law and constitutionalism. May not one suggest that the conservatism of Burke, which sought out its historical roots, has much in common with a Catholic conservatism of the twentieth century? The Spaniards who tried to use French ideas in the eighteenth century were still Catholics, though not Catholics in the same sense as today. The eighteenth-century governors of Spain were competent people trying to do a difficult job. They knew there had been no Protestant Reformation in Spain and they wanted none, but they saw that much of the liberalism of the French Revolutions consisted in the advocacy of the use of science in government, and in attempting to bring about the economic advance of the nation. Now as then, it is the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment that Spain can use in making its own type of progress. The eighteenth century saw in Spain the beginning of a long industrial revolution that has not yet reached an end. VII In the years after the Carlist Wars, the word “traditionalism” referred almost exclusively to the social and political theory of Carlism. It meant the support of the Church, the monarchy, the regions, and their fueros, or their traditional and regional case law rather than the Napoleonic codified law. Today in Spain it is said there are about 1,500,000 political or activist Carlists (la Comunión Tradicionalista), but that every one of them counts from three to five others who accept the general cultural and philosophical attitude about the nature of Spanish tradition. But from the last years before the fall of the monarchy and during the Second Republic a great number of public men turned to “traditionalism,” sensing perhaps there ought to be an end to the crisis of modern revolutionism and Communism. Under such conditions traditionalism became a many-colored garment. The critic will say that many political converts to traditionalism, making it much wider in importance than merely Carlism, and especially since the end of the Civil War, have deserted liberal parliamentarism only to affirm a kind of diehard conservatism. Perhaps one might say that Ramiro de Maeztu or Calvo Sotelo were genuine traditionalists with whatever good faith they may have.7 What seems to have been happening is something like this. In recent years many Spanish leaders who have been critical of General Franco, the Falange, the Syndicates, and the conservatives, have been turning to the success of American liberalism shown in the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the New Frontier (especially the latter because Kennedy was a Catholic). American liberalism (a mild socialism, generally speaking), combined with British labor-liberalism, has provided what has seemed for the moment to be a new statement of political position for the Spanish. Some Opus Dei leaders have been critical, indeed, of the old liberalism, but have confidence that a new liberalism, purged of its

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vices, has now become available for Spaniards. This suggests that those Spaniards who will have nothing to do with Carlist traditionalism, or with an old style conservatism, or who want nothing to do with a new type of Spanish, free market liberalism of the nineteenth century, can turn to the American brand. They may also believe that in following such an example from “Catholic” Washington, they are advancing the cause of Catholic social principles in Spain, though as a part of the social doctrine of the Church and not as a part of Spanish tradition.8 There are certainly dangers. Such a neoliberal position may easily become itself simply the conservatism they assert they have been fighting, because they may be confounded with the Catholic bourgeoisie in Spain, which is a kind of bridge to the free market and the conservative viewpoint. On the other hand, the traditionalist who may defend continuity and reformism may easily forget reformism in the fervor of his attachment to continuity. It may well be said that it might be better to accept the principles of Carlism, combined with a Catholic reformism, rather than to desert the principle of “traditionalism” itself. And especially important is the fact that the Pretender Don Juan may be made over into a liberal who will acquiesce in all of the difficulties faced earlier by the liberal and military monarchy that was overthrown in 1931. The Carlist proposes a religious and Catholic monarchy, and in this their intuition is sound. Few might argue that a restoration of the monarchy, without the principle of the Catholic and social monarchy, has much chance of finding itself loved by the masses of Spaniards. Certainly the four million or more Carlists and older traditionalists will not. In this light a new form of issue may be taking shape. It may be that Church and religious leaders are deserting traditionalism, or the principle of natural hierarchies so common in Falangist thought, and that they are turning toward the individualistic type of reformism so common in the United States and Great Britain. But these reformers do not intend to be caught defending capitalism and the free market as we do on occasion in the United States. The traditionalist will say the history of social structure in Spain shows that the regional-functioning principle is too deeply grounded to be shucked from the Spanish scene. They will say, no doubt, that a reformism built on the social structure that had been generated in the twenty-five years of peace since the end of the Civil War is a better, if slower, foundation for the application of the social doctrines of the Church. In such a situation there might be a reconciliation between the liberalism of capitalism and the reformism of the social encyclicals, which in truth have recognized the rights of private property and the rights of the businessman in the operation of the economy. But that there should be a salutary continuity in Spanish experience without some acceptance of traditionalism would seem quite out of the question. The liberal, whether Catholic or anti-clerical, can make the old mistakes all over again; the path toward social disturbance and revolution may well be paved with the intentions of men who go to Mass daily

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and those who, instead of going to Mass, go to their Masonic Lodges. The intelligent conservative may hold, it might seem, that in the years since the end of the war some foundations for the future progress and peace of Spain has been laid. The Spanish traditionalist denies there is any overlapping between his views and those of some conservatives. One kind of conservative, particularly noticeable in Latin countries, is the liberal who has gotten rich on the robbery of the Church, and then wants the revolution to stop. He has desired to conserve that which he gained by the desamortización or “redemption” of Church property in the last century. The conservative in this view has really no philosophy, though it is quite possible he may be sincere in his protestations of belief. There is one point he cannot escape. Since he has benefited by Church property he had become committed to French influence that produced the attack on the Church. He was once a liberal, at least de facto wise, because he bought Church property, for which he may never have completed the payments or even shown any genuine interest in the agricultural possibilities of the land. It is in this sense that the traditionalist argues the close ultimate similarity between the liberal and the conservative, for when the liberal has gained something for which he has been struggling the “instinct” to conserve—to stop reformation and revolution—sets in. In such a manner the Carlist philosophy carries on the criticism of the bourgeoisie in terms of Spanish experience. And the conservative might further insist that it is much too early in the history of the expansion of the American national government to make any predictions about the future. He might indeed consider here some of the sophistries of democratic politics, particularly when an election looms ahead. An American conservative might argue that it is always good politics to fight poverty, and that after generations of progressivism there is always one more good campaign against poverty or monopoly to be mounted by the politician. Further, there is a serious question about the British model, since a widely held view considers the British economy in serious and long run trouble. It suffers perhaps what Pareto once analyzed as the eventual decline of an economic system. Conservative thought in Northern Europe and America might explain the British difficulties because of the extensive and uncalculated social program which takes capital needed for economic growth for the distribution of social benefits of many different kinds. The conservative might admit that the Catholic encyclicals provide for voluntary workers organizations (either mixed with employers or not), and even for the benefits that may be obtained from profit sharing. But there are obviously various means of attaining better living conditions, and the conservative in America might argue that the best one and perhaps the only one is to increase the productivity of labor by the freedom of business to invest and produce according to the demands of the market. One can hardly say, it might appear, that there is much similarity between the theory and practice of Christian reform and that of socialism and Communism.

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VIII The conservatives of Hispanic mind, whether new or old, should be of profound interest to American conservatives. This is true not only because there is an increasing interest among Latins in the Anglo-American tradition, but because of the contrasts that may be observed. The commitments of the Latin mind seem more profound, and its conflicts seem generally more demanding than those among Anglo-Americans. In consequence, its conservatism may be more real, more lucid in philosophical commitment, even if it remains pragmatic and prudential in the selection of immediate public policies. The Latin conservative, or let us say, the Spanish conservative, demands that a person live by the truth that is in himself or herself. The thread running through everything is the religious question, and on this the conservative may not remain neutral, though he may employ the economic, technical, and scientific means available generally in Europe for the ends of Spain. Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

Republished with revisions from Modern Age (Spring 1961) with the consent of the editors. For the Spanish traditionalist, the Baroque, beginning in the late sixteenth century, (in the Spanish “Golden Century,” 1519-1665) is not regarded as decadent. Though there was bad taste in the arts at times, it was a period of tremendous political importance, as well as the golden time of Spanish letters. It is associated with the Counter Reformation, the spirit of the Council of Trent, and it is considered simply as a change of style in Renaissance creativeness. Emilio Orozco Díaz declared before the Spanish Athenaeum in Madrid that baroque culture was the last common effort in Europe in art and literature, in the search for God under the guidance of Spain; the lasting wisdom of the baroque is the validity of thinking deeply of the eternal salvation of the individual and the temporal salvation of European culture. See Emilio Orozco Díaz, Lección permanente del barroco español (2nd ed., Ateneo, Madrid, 1956), pp. 57-59, and the literature cited in the monograph. If Spain should be admitted to the European common market, the Spanish system must move rapidly toward a free market system. One of the most moving of anti-capitalist statements has been made by the French writer-worker Gustave Thibon, which has been translated into Spanish by those interested in this view. It is Diagnósticos de fisiología social, prefacio de Gabriel Marcel y epílogo de Rafael Gambra (1958). Thibon clearly wishes to rise above both capitalism and socialism in order to reach a new social order. He accepts the doctrine of natural hierarchies so common in Spanish traditionalist thought. The greed of the right is balanced by the idealization of human baseness on the left. Democracy itself is criticized because of its tendency to atomize men. See Henri de Lovinfosse et Gustave Thibon, Solution social (4th ed., 1953). Thibon has been in charge of the publication of the literary remains of Simone Weil. See J.-M. Perrin et G. Thibon, Simone Weil telle que nous avons connue (1952). There has been, however, a significant emergence of free market economic theory in Spain. The Fundación Ignacio Villalonga of Valencia has been translating the distinguished modern defenses of the free market, and distributing them in Spain. Their translations have included Swiss, German, American, and other economists. The

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Order and Legitimacy main issue has been the leftwing interpretation of the social encyclicals, and the statements by the bishops which have demanded in effect a kind of democratic, welfare, and moderate socialism. Taking the term “socialization” from the encyclical Mater et Magistra, it will sometimes be said that Catholics are against socialism and for socialization, but then socialization is developed into what is in effect a new form of socialism. The effort of the Spanish free market economists is to show that Catholic social thought cannot be reconciled with socialism, and that the doctrines of the encyclicals are compatible with a modern free economy. Other Spanish economists will go along with the capitalistic interpretation of economic life for a considerable distance, but then they will reach a point where they will say that the government must step in if there is to be a suitable development of the economic system. The debate with the Falange has changed its character on numerous occasions. It has obviously failed to achieve its early aspirations. Within the F. E. T., there have always been sharp differences in ideological position. One of the most effective advocates of Carlist traditionalism in Spanish politics was Juan Vásquez de Mella. See Santiago Galindo Herrera, ed., Regionalismo y monarquía (1957), for a study of Vásquez de Mella and selections from his public statements. The liberalizing trend in “the movement” seems to consist in large measure in recognizing a competition between alternative political solutions. The Spanish government in 1964 seemed to recognize with Charles De Gaulle that a new political age had come to European politics.

Part 2 An Anchor in the Latin Mind

8 Intellectuals: Latin, Liberal, and Aristocratic It is the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin intellectuals who command our interest today. One thing is highly characteristic of them: they have served as an integrating force between what is happening in the rest of the world and in their own tradition. One can read them for cogent interpretations of Northern Europeans, especially the Germans and the English. Northern European intellectual life, integrated in a sense with all of Europe, has been studied by the Latins since the age of Renaissance learning. English eighteenthcentury ideas spread throughout Europe, especially economic thought and utilitarian theory propounded by Jeremy Bentham. George Borrow recounts in his The Bible in Spain how a Galician official insisted to him that Bentham was the greatest thinker of all time; he thought that Englishmen would no longer read Borrow’s New Testament when they might read utilitarian thought. In the Renaissance, Erasmus had a profound influence throughout Europe, including the Catholic countries of the Mediterranean. The interaction between Germans and southerners has a history of centuries. The German emphasis on life against reason, romanticism, Lutheranism, and the Hegelian conception of the philosophy of history, have been of perennial interest to the Latins. The Latins have hardly shared in the twentieth century the Anglo-American hostility toward the Germans, except during the periods when war allegiances superseded other systems of judgment. The most lucid interpretations of the turgidities of German philosophy are to be found among Latin intellectuals. For generations, it was most important for the Latins to learn German, though in a utilitarian sense English has practically taken its place in recent years. In philosophy, the struggle in the anti-clerical mind of the Latin has been between reason and life. In Ortega’s work reason was symbolized in Socrates, and life was symbolized in Goethe and Nietzsche. One may say that there is a balance in Latin thought between reason and life, which is expressed in the refusal of the intellectuals of the mezzogiorno to become romantics. For the Latin intellectual, politics and the state were, on the one hand, subject to law, and to a kind of realism and determinism which limited the creativeness of the political leader; and, on the other, the state and politics are works of art, which 133

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is, according to Carl Schmitt, the essence of the romantic political position. One may say, perhaps, that we have a kind of dynamic equilibrium which moves like a pendulum toward the Germanic and then backward toward the Greeks and Socrates.1 I Every ideological struggle, every struggle in applying political theory in government, is in significant measure a struggle between intellectuals. Naturally, in the West, it is the struggle of the European intellectuals. But here the Latin intellectuals have been brilliant in their expression, for their impact has been through literary creation rather than through any form of political or scientific leadership. Their brilliance has been spread through the twentieth century, although some, like Mosca, began their work in the last generation of the nineteenth century. Still, among those who have had the greatest impact on the theory of politics we must mention Benedetto Croce for his criticism of the politicians of post-Risorgimento times, and Vilfredo Pareto for a mathematical realism in the study of economic and political behavior. Pareto was called by the Communists in the 1930s the Karl Marx of the bourgeoisie. Mosca’s contribution was in the field of method and in the study of the history of politics, much as with Guido de Ruggiero. Robert Michels, the Italian-Swiss student of the leftwing and of the oligarchical trend in political parties, has had a profound impact on contemporary behavioral political science in America. His book Political Parties is one of the modern classics, and to combine this book with Georges Sorel’s Reflexions sur la violence is to provide oneself with a clue to the age. Guglielmo Ferrero moved from the study of classical history into meditation on legitimacy and power in the period after World War I. And Giovanni Sartori’s Democratic Theory may very likely be the best of the books that have been produced in our generation on this subject. There is also the trilogy of great Spanish critics of politics: Miguel de Unamuno, George Santayana (the only man it was once said who ever resigned a professorship at Harvard), and José Ortega y Gasset, who is almost a universal man. These Spanish or Latin liberals are read by almost all of the literate throughout the West. One may ponder what these thinkers really stand for? It is easier to answer for politics than for some other things. In a sense they are all lapsed Catholics, though the Catholic air seems to run through their writings. Generally, they are neither monarchists nor democrats. They have been unimpressed by the rhetoric of the democratic crusade, which has covered so many virtues and so many vices of political misunderstanding. In a sense they are all psychological naturalists—even though history does not always follow a pattern (Ortega said one can always predict the historical future)—still men are not different from age to age. The patterns of history are the patterns of human behavior. They are the patterns of political and class conflict. As intellectuals, they share the unending

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historical antipathy of the philosopher for the businessman. They are, even one-time proletarians like Michels, aristocratic liberals, while the AmericanNorthern European intellectuals have been protesting their democratic commitment. The Latin hardly bothers. He is concerned with a “political formula,” perhaps even Machiavellian in nature, which will succeed in governing or establishing a system of public order in accordance with the nature of men. They want a governing order, whatever may be its structures, which will take account of the differences between men, but which will not be wrecked on equality. Psychological naturalism is, like Nietzsche’s view, a kind of eternal recurrence of the relativistic in politics. In their conflict with other intellectuals they assert that they are on top of reality, that is, of behavior, and in this sense they are a kind of precursor of contemporary behavioral science. In their theory of politics they are probably closer to Burke and the British tradition than to others, and here the words conservative and liberal tend to lose significance. They invented, especially Ortega, the idea of the mass man. Ever since the new barbarian fascists and Communists have made their appearance, the Latin liberals have been busy delineating and analyzing the new political monstrosities of our days. Here they are not impressed with either fascism or the parliamentarism it overthrew, for neither regime had much to commend it for the future. Neither could maintain the principles of legitimacy which were so lucid in the analysis of Ferrero. The work that comes closest to saying what the aristocratic and Latin liberal would like to have in politics is Santayana’s Dominations and Powers, published in 1951. It has something of the flavor of Croce’s aspersions on the parliamentary politicians of the years before World War I. Santayana believed in his mature years of retirement that the majority actually seldom rules; and when it succeeds in doing so there is national disaster. Indeed, he would favor the principle of co-option in the choice of new members of the ruling class. Promotion to power should come to the able as it does in the great structures generally, that is, in armies, banks, industries, publications and publishing houses, universities, and in churches. But there are a number of principles or postulates that run through such thought. First of all, it is possible for the intellectuals and the able to be disinterested in their loyalty to their tasks, while the majority of mass-men, as the Greeks urged us to consider, seek only to rob the state for their own benefit. To stay in power, the politician must help the masses in their robberies. Power does not corrupt those who are born or fitted to exercise it. Santayana believed that the leaders who wish to maintain their institutions can select the able and the disinterested to succeed them in their positions. In the contemporary discussion among scientists about scientific intellectuals there is either clearly or implicitly the claim that their public service can be disinterested, objective, and for the public welfare. At the same time there seems to be an assumption that humanistic, philosophical, or religious intellectuals are not equipped to be objective servants of the common good, simply because

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they are not scientists. For in this argument, only science—and not religion— can affect a liberalizing movement of the inner and social life of man. Outside of the practical or servile arts and outside of science, men are simply not rational. Most of the human race has thus been irrational in its beliefs. Here we have one of the bitter arguments of our time. C. P. Snow has called it the “two cultures” in which there is little communication between the humanistic and the scientific intellectuals. The traditional culture has paid little attention to the scientific and technological revolution. Our scientific revolution is the application of science to industry, and the use of science in the solution of the great problems we face, that is, atomic or nuclear war, the population explosion, and the gap in wealth between the rich and advanced countries and those who, though poor, have sensed the possibilities of the freedom of an improving standard of living. For example, both Toynbee and Snow believe the scientific revolution is possible everywhere in the world—if the rich will let the scientists provide the capital that is necessary. “Intellectuals,” said Snow, “particularly literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites.” And he cited Ruskin, Emerson, William Morris, and Henry David Thoreau.2 There is a further stage in the argument between the Latin—aristocratic liberal on the one hand, and the ritualistic liberal of the democratic crusade on the other. For both the classical thinker and the Christian philosopher, the social order was primarily voluntary and not determined. Always, however, any situation was mixed with deterministic elements. One might say, indeed, that both the classical thinker and the Christian accepted in measure a corrupt society, because the reform of the individual and the Church was not a function of the state.3 On the other hand, the modern Latin liberal will say that the genetic principle will enable us to select men for their differences and not for their equality. However, the theorists of classical libertas would also insist that superior people can serve disinterestedly, and that the humanistic intellectual is truly the one who is equipped to understand objective service to a culture. With the Greeks, for example, and Plato particularly, one must perform his function in the light of knowledge that is both religious and philosophical. A ruler who is trained like a philosopher, perhaps a young and malleable tyrant, might be able to reform the state so that intelligence and justice will prevail, in Syracuse or in Athens.4 In contemporary democracy one thing that intellectuals refuse to discuss is the human genetic equipment. Children are underprivileged or culturally deprived, but they are never just lacking in intelligence. In 1965, for example, U.S. government began assuring the right of southern illiterates to vote. It is clear that those in power at the moment believed they might direct the voting of those who are illiterate. To the Latin liberals all this is political and social suicide. It is the death of culture, and as Spengler might argue, the onset of the civilization of mere technology. Finally, the aristocratic liberal would argue that the great civilizations of the past have not discovered their social purposes by counting votes. Social order

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and its values have come to those who are informed about society and who have the skills to find out what is happening in the world. Santayana argued that the rulers simply know better than the masses what is good for them—even when the government imposes its will on the people. The judgment of public policy must arise from science and man’s nature, and not from something that is called public opinion. The democrat might say that they are making up their own minds without the assistance of the civil servant.5 Were Santayana alive today he might look with amusement on the rise of the new generations of strong men almost everywhere in the world. The democratic illusion of a universalization of parliamentary bodies based on free elections and free electoral propaganda has receded before either strongmen, colonels, and generals, or before the alienation and boredom of a repetitious and meaningless political life. The democratic intellectual will often express fear of the mass man, though this must surely be one of the aspects of his contemporary propaganda. For the democrat seems busy seeking out the mass-man and asking for his support. The collapse of the ideology and institutions of the nineteenth century does not mean in itself an end to the golden age of progress. There is the further question of what will come from the age of the wars of races and of nations. There seems to be a slow collapse of institutions and ideas. It was Latins after World War I who eagerly embraced such “new-fashioned but ancient” ideas. They became romantic fascists. There was a considerable class of young intellectuals of the time who turned to some form of revolution, either of the Right or of the Left. Such an age of political romanticism seems to have passed.6 An American will try to find his ideology in scientism and technology, and since we do not like the difficult business of metaphysics we say we have no philosophy. If we are amazed at the loss of the American dream in so many young who do not want to fight for their country, we may turn to a remote statement of the Anglo-American tradition, like the glorification of Magna Carta. Or, we may say that ecumenism is possible, which means another version of the idea of each man loving his neighbor. All this is a little like the surface of the existential struggle to be something, to surmount an age of anxiety, and to escape the problem of facing nothingness or death, as López Ibor once remarked. What the Anglo-American mind does is to conflate things altogether, rather than to separate the elements as does the Latin. The great event of our time has been the defeat of the “ideologies,” their loss of the power of myth, and a turning toward efficiency and technology in society and politics. There has been a failure of both dictatorship or of Napoleonic regimes on the one hand, and the failure of parties and parliaments on the other. The growth of executive power in alliance with efficiency and technology has been the story of our time. Such events do not mean a failure of the Latin mind. The Latin mind is not necessarily liberal or conservative, and it may be either Catholic or anticlerical, Christian or pagan. For one thing, the defeat of ideologies means the possibility of recovering Latin realism in the treatment of poli-

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tics and its separation from cultural and literary achievements. Such a recovery would mean a condemnation of the return to romanticism, the romanticism of the fascists or the more current romanticism of the liberals or conservatives in the world of parliaments and congresses.7 The failure of the romanticisms of the twentieth century reaffirms that the greatest of Western secular continuities is Latin and classical intellectualism. It may be clear that the mandates of technology, the age of technicism as Spengler once said, have superseded the aspirations of ideology, but it is also clear that the mandates of technology cannot be the mandates of the Latin, classical, and humanistic mind. A Latin, like Ortega in The Revolt of the Masses, insisted that the Communists and the fascists are the new barbarians who will accept no authority outside of themselves. The barbarians are like the Asiatics and the Slavs who are again in migratory movement. The Latin would be inclined to see technology as the symbol of the new barbarism which solves no issues. He would linger with Demeter perhaps, of the “golden sword and glorious fruits,” or the lyre of Apollo, rather than march with the mass-man who may believe there is a technical solution for any and all of the miseries of the human soul. Technology is nothing for Demeter, for where technology is nothing can grow. Latin realism might suggest as well that the romanticism of exporting democracy to areas where it has not been well received is bound to fail. For Americans have often seen their aid to “democracies” turned to the benefit of the insurgent Communist movement. The Latin mind with its long memory may regard the late Roman civil wars as similar to the wars of Europe of the twentieth century. What we have called simply “international war” has been to the classical tradition the outbreak of another internal war. II An intellectual is not easy to define. One common definition is that he is a person who has ideas and who talks about them. Others would say an intellectual is one who can think in terms of the various liberal arts, but this is, naturally, also the definition of an educated individual. On the other hand, in our times some of the classical liberal arts like theology and philosophy have been downgraded, while the scientist is placed at the top of the intellectual hierarchy. We live in the age of electronics and the computer in which government officials calculate the scientific manpower of the nation, and the creative thought of the intellectual is defined as one who does what the machine cannot yet accomplish. Such a definition is grim, indeed, and it bears little relation to the reverence in authority for the philosopher, who was often regarded as an instrument of a higher guidance, and as Goethe said “a vessel found worthy of receiving a divine influence.”8 Scholarly opinions have differed as to just when the modern intellectuals became self-conscious and sought, therefore, to become a political force. One

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view is that this occurred at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, through the defense of the captain by the intellectuals—writers, professors, and artists in particular. The entrance of intellectuals into politics was greeted with sharp criticism, as in Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals. Benda’s view was broader than a particular incident in politics. He was concerned with the general alliance of the clercs with political movements like nationalism. This alliance he considered a betrayal of the quality, mission, and character of the clercs or intellectuals. But it would seem clear that since the political uproar of the nineteenthcentury the intellectuals have never ceased to be a “force” in politics, though at the same time most of them have been allied with the Left, including the Communists in many cases after World War I. Plato would have refused to call them “philosophers” for they would be sophists like Thrasymachus or Gorgias. In this manner the controversy over the intellectual in politics is a contribution of classical times; it involves the efforts of Plato to create philosophical ruling classes in Syracuse and in the Troad (see his Epistles). The Greek philosophers were not unwilling to enter politics, but they were concerned with the kind of teaching they offered the future rulers of cities. Or, one might cite the Scipionic Circle as a powerful intellectual group in Rome in the time of Polybius and at the height of the Roman Republic. Roman philosophers were deeply divided between those who wished to restore republican ideals and institutions, like Cicero, for example, and philosophers like Seneca who hopefully accepted the empire and saw in it a new and “perfect democracy.” Thus, the intellectual in politics, as he has been bequeathed to us from Latin culture, has always been an issue in the teaching he has offered, and not whether he was simply involved in political advocacy. In the United States in the period after World War I and the Great Depression, the liberal intellectuals came to dominate most of the important institutions of society. They came to control the universities, the foundations (and the money available there), the bureaucracy, and through this the national executive, and perhaps more startling than this they came to control the federal judicial system. How did all this come about in a short period of a generation? There is no clear answer, but one explanation is that the preparation for the contemporary domination began in the nineteenth century. Young American intellectuals went to Europe to get advanced degrees, and the Germans gave the Ph.D. In England, one studied in economics the classical laws derived from Adam Smith, the laws of capitalism and of supply and demand; but in Germany the historical school and the principle that a nation might make its own economic and social order was accepted. One of the paradoxes then is that along with the German Ph.D. came a certain amount of reformism, which was transferred to America through the new teachers in American universities. Apparently this reformism was combined with an ethical system, partly Christian and partly plain humanitarianism, and it was actually a powerful social force in America during the last generation of the nineteenth century. But by about 1900 the intellectuals be-

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gan to call themselves “liberals.” The meaning of liberal was changed gradually in the United States. It no longer meant the classical economic doctrines of the free market system, but it meant on the contrary a system in which the state edged into the direction of the economic order, just as it had done for centuries and in those countries where English economic doctrine did not penetrate. It meant in addition that those who were on the free market-capitalist side of politics had to call themselves something other than liberals, and thus the label of “conservatism” came into use for what had been in a recent past liberal economic doctrines. The domination of American institutional life by the socialistic “liberals” was, no doubt, greatly facilitated by the events of our time. Reformism was in the air before World War I, but it suddenly became a dominant interest with the economic disorder of the late 1920s. With the New Deal, the triumph of the leftwing liberals was assured. It was an approach to socialism without using the word itself. But it was parochial, and the permanence of “liberal” as a doctrine of the free market remained among the intellectuals on the continent, though the English liberals shifted to collectivism in measure during the latter years of the nineteenth century. The movement toward collectivism was moderate in economics and strenuous in philosophy among the Latin intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For many, the Latin liberal was simply a secularized philosopher, one who was anti-clerical and anti-Christian. Early in the nineteenth century the liberals of the Latin countries rejected the so-called extreme individualism of the English. Instead, they advocated programs of reform which might bring about the economic conditions they admired so much in wealthy and free England. Much of the Latin-liberal reformism of the time resulted in little tangible improvement for the peasants, the city artisans, or the new class of industrial workers. At times even the philosophy the liberals adopted was British, for among many the ideas of John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, and the utilitarians were regarded as the truth of society and government. In general, however, Latin liberalism drew its philosophy from within, that is, from French, Italian, and Spanish sources. As always there are inevitable contrary positions. Latin intellectuals recognized that politics must be studied at the social focus of a time. Politics is the focus, but it does not control it, for the problem in society (as against the state or government) is to control or direct politics. For politics to be meaningful, or powerful, it must be in the midst of the focus. It is a little like the sunglass: Society may be burned, destroyed, or vivified by it. Politics is in the life of society. The Latin intellectuals were constantly drawn to the proposition that the central problem is life rather than reason. We must reform, that is, we must live rather than strive to create a regime of perfection or a mystic conception of the future. On this basis, Jaime Balmes could see that slavery was so deeply embedded in ancient society that its abolition would itself destroy society. In

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another sense, one might take as an ideal the ethics of the Peripatetics or the Stoics, as Cicero did, but in practical detail one might also accept much of the moral caution and reluctance that has stemmed from the Latin mind of Niccolò Machiavelli. One must not forget, however, that the Latin mind forwarded through history strong aversions to politics, for one might seek to escape from politics though not from the City. The ideals, unrealized but beautiful, might remain in the idea of beneficial reform, the revolution and utopia, or the ultimate and perfect realization of human equality. But, as Santayana noted, when one turns to God his reign discards all political instrumentalities. In the “mysteries” or sacraments through the Greeks to the modern world, religion has been fostered more than through any single social program. Philosophy in Pythagoras or Plato led to the hope of founding a true brotherhood of right-thinking philosopher-kings. In this manner philosophy led to the Platonic disgust for politics and the democratic City. However, Plato, as symbolic of the whole class of men (for example, Isocrates), proposed himself as a lawgiver in his late work The Laws. Instead of a utopian city, perhaps laid up in heaven, he is analyzing the social structure of the new city in Crete which the three travelers are discussing. Such is the philosopher’s return to politics, but others would never return. The anarchist would destroy the City by the creation of a new social order. May not one say that the consequence of revolutionary energy is the destruction of politics? The Latin mind has had a keen sense of crisis. The revolution arises, as Tocqueville urged for both the ancient world and his own, in a contradiction between an ideal of liberty and the ultimate claim to social equality. The problem is to what extent one may achieve liberty within politics. Here is the crisis of moeurs seen always in the institutions of imperfect society, and notably in the law. “Roman law,” said Alexis de Tocqueville, “which has perfected civil society everywhere, has everywhere tended to degrade political society because it was principally the work of a people which was very civilized and very servile. Kings have adopted it with passion, and they have established it wherever they have been masters. The interpreters of this law became in all of Europe the kings’ ministers and their agents.... At the side of a prince who was violating the laws, it was very rare that a legist or civil lawyer did not appear to assure the king that nothing was more legitimate. He proved learnedly and profoundly that the king’s violence was just and that it was the oppressed who were at fault.”9 May we not say that since the French Revolution the problem for the Latin intellectual has been to apply the new version of Latinity to modern politics? Indeed, the Latin tradition has not agreed with the nineteenth-century sociology of rebellion, the destruction of property, and the bourgeoisie. For the intellectual, some kind of individualistic conception of life drawn from ancient sources stands against the revolutionary fury of our time. To stress the “single principle” and “organic idea,” as implicit at least in much of this type of analy-

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sis, is something like the “ideal-type” critique of Max Weber. It is based on a kind of essentialism that may be subject to criticism, but which leads to some understanding of the problem, for we may assume that ideas are vital in the functioning of the body politic. III It was the peculiar fortune of Guglielmo Ferrero that he became a widely sought intellectual by being first a historian of Rome. From studying history he became a social philosopher and a theorist. By being invited to both North and South America to lecture, he became concerned with the historical relation between the Old World and the New. In February 1908 he was invited by the incredibly wide-ranging Theodore Roosevelt to visit him at the White House. It was one of those rare moments in our history when a President invited a leading intellectual to come to talk with him.10 A second great stage in Ferrero’s thinking was the discovery in World War I of the menace of the Germans to Latin civilization, and this led him to produce Le génie latin et le monde moderne, in which he affirmed that civilization itself is the product of the Latin spirit. But he did not anticipate the catastrophic consequences of the war. Apparently, it took nearly all intellectuals some time to realize that Communism was a world-shaking philosophy with a horrifying future. On the contrary, the rise of fascism in Italy seemed to be a continuation of the stupidities of Italian politics. One of the most difficult issues of communication between Anglo-Americans and Latins is about forms of government. The continental thinkers in general do not rate any form of government as high as Americans have placed “democracy.” We have mentioned the Latin aversion to politics, and this has involved a negative attitude toward all forms of government. For all except socialists, it involves a disinclination to believe that the solution of difficult issues is to be found in politics. In Anglo-American circles fighting fascism meant the necessarily logical glorification of democracy, whatever that much abused word might mean in any specific usage. A man like Ferrero placed civilization at the top of his hierarchy of social benefits, and most politics of the nineteenth century had hardly been a benefit to intelligent life in the world. Mussolini’s showy regime was a continuation of the quasi-legitimacy of the Italian dictatorial prime ministers of the past century. Ferrero wrote his powerful book Four Years of Fascism before the rise of Hitler; whether he would have shared the Anglo-American hostility toward this regime is not at all clear. In general, many Latin intellectuals (some of whom now call themselves “liberals”) considered a regime that repudiated parliamentary government as the form of government that was inevitable in the future. Even some American leaders seemed to feel this way in the months just before Franklin D. Roosevelt became President. And, of course, many of his enemies regarded President

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Roosevelt as a kind of American dictator, with the Weberian charismatic qualities of leadership. Or, it may be said that continental intellectuals have remained unconvinced that the United States has either democracy or liberty. The American economic order has been the summation of evil. In these later years it would seem that Lenin’s Imperialism has become the world textbook in condemnation of America’s effort to defend what it has called “democracy.” My point, I suppose, is that the misunderstanding and hostility toward the United States is one of the more complicated and deep-rooted of contemporary issues. Men like Ferrero tried desperately to appreciate America, but in his Between the Old World and the New in 1914, it is clear that there is no overcoming of his hostility toward America, though his hostility is clearly less toward Latin America than toward Anglo-America. In the end, the judgment of Latin intellectuals is that their culture is the universal basis of civilization. The preservation of civilization depends on the preservation of the classical heritage, upon the safeguarding of the Latin spirit. Civilization, regardless of forms of government, is possible only under these conditions. As Ferrero said in the opening of Le génie latin, nearly all of the civilization of Europe and America— both North and South in its essentials—was created on the shores of the Mediterranean by the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews, all together in ancient, medieval, and in modern times. Such an impulse to creativeness extends to all of Europe in common, and it includes the inspiration to science which distinguished the modern world from the ancient. Indeed, much of the slowness in scientific development in the modern world came from the scientific poverty of the Roman Empire, which in turn was in significant measure caused by the failure to transmit clearly and rapidly the Greek and Alexandrian scientific legacy. In other words, this transmission, to the mind of many Latin students aside from Ferrero, was aborted. From this, European growth in civilization became uneven. The military predominance of the modern Latin in Europe ended with Trafalgar and Waterloo, after a period of about 300 years. But the economic failure of the south was evident long before. The political triviality of the Latin countries, especially Italy and Spain, encouraged a belief in the north that all virtue had gone out of the Latins. As a result, the Latin intellectual thought he could live with Britain and Germany. British economic success, its wealth, and its empire had long shaken the confidence of the mezzogiorno, but so had its politics, which contrasted strangely in the nineteenth century with the division of Italy, the instability of Spain, the weakness of France vis-à-vis the Germans in 1870, and British diplomacy after the fall of Napoleon. The outbreak of war in 1914 was a profound trauma, for it showed the Germans were bent on the conquest of Latin Europe. The tragic surprise of the war meant, said Ferrero in Lyon in 1916, the destruction of our hopes and illusions. It was not merely war; the Germans were overturning the foundations of Europe. Germany had meant order and power, against the Latin ideal of perfection, but now she had become

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a great destructive force in European civilization. The Germans in their egotism, as George Santayana argued, had overstepped the limits that no society should overpass. The sense of order in history, Ferrero insisted, is represented by the Latin spirit, which like the Greek spirit, accepts limits to the capacity of man, and being limited, it is also ordered. Further, if the Latin genius had dominated the modern world as it had dominated the ancient, no catastrophe such as the world wars of the twentieth century would have been possible. The Germans had become Vulcan and the Latins remained Apollo. Behind all this, however, there remained the terrible fact of heavy industry in the north of Europe. German civilization was one of science and iron, and how, after it had tried to vulgarize the markets of the world with low-grade goods and cheapness, it was attempting through military adventure to take over or to destroy civilization itself. But the Latin ideal, the contrasting ideal of perfection, still stands in its intellectual power. If the Latin spirit means order, perfection, and one must add the peaceful development of modern society, only the Latin spirit can limit the criminality of peoples. The war of 1914 seemed to Ferrero the beginning of a long crisis in modern history, but he did not anticipate the Russian Revolution, the disorder in Europe that was to follow the defeat of Germany (perhaps the defeat of Germany was as great a surprise to him as the outbreak of war itself), and the disintegration of the nineteenth-century system of political legitimacy. Against the contemporary tragedy at the summit, the revival of civilization has depended on the revival of the intellectual classes who live in the Latin tradition. Or again, he saw the cause of tragedy in the terrible nineteenth century, which pretended to know all things and believed itself capable of discovering all things. Since World War II the psychological impact of totalitarianism seems to be fading. Naturally, the Hitlerian regime is only a memory, and the once regnant fascism in other countries is hardly a model for any political leader or writer. Indeed, the permanence and eternality of parliamentarism had been taken for granted, and thus at the onset of Communism and fascism it was impossible to take them seriously or to believe they would last. The crisis of regimes was a momentary aberration which would be overcome in the near future. But not so to Ferrero, as he argued: “The spiritual debris of the dying nineteenth century—Nietzscheism, imperialism, amoralism, idealism, anti-Christianism—fermenting in the heat of the times,” was the background of the weak regimes of dictators. Still, regimes must be placed in the patterns of politics, which is one of the central themes of the Latin intellectuals when they approach the discussions of political science. The “laws of politics,” it would seem, apply both to the defeated Germans and the Allied victors, for the victors in the peace treaties had been reviving the German doctrines of power. Domination on both sides had become a doctrine, and “violence and exaggeration” had become incurable habits of the will and the mind. Thus, one might ask: How could parliamentarism survive in such an overheated political climate? Those, how-

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ever, who had hoped for a restored and orderly Europe had revived the word and the principle of legitimacy at the end of 1918, which was a word that had been buried for half a century in the dictionary, “the common grave of dead words.”11 Initially, Ferrero saw in Italian fascism a continuity with the quasi-legitimacy of the nineteenth century. The patterns of politics continued in operation; Mussolini could not break out. Even under dictatorship, the will of the people remained the only source of legitimacy, a kind of “plebiscitary democracy.”12 With the excess of power and money to be found in the modern state, the dictator could not escape. He postures in the modern bureaucratic state, responsible for everything but at the same time impotent. Indeed, all personal governments are weak, and they are weaker in proportion as their legitimacy is more doubtful and open to challenge. In another sense, the dictator is himself the leader of the blind, for the powerful elements in the state had no sense of political law or direction. As Ferrero suggests: The large landowners, the great industrialists, the bankers, the subversive conservatives, the heretical Liberals, the malcontents among the bureaucracy and the cultured middle classes, have lost their way. Imagining that they were achieving a great revolution, they have merely brought Italy, after a wide circuit, back to the pre-war type of government. They have turned back just when a resolute step forward should have been made towards the regime of the future.13

Before everyone, even today, is the great task of trying to learn something, a little something, about the art of self-government. Many an intellectual, of whatever tradition, has been forced to start over, but all of the standard solutions, ideology and institutions have yet to achieve the greatness of the future. The Latin liberal has bequeathed to all who are active in politics the classical notion of personality and its libertas. The attainment of liberty is to him the primary objective of man. R. G. Collingwood’s preface to de Ruggiero states that liberalism “begins with the recognition that men, do what we will, are free; that a man’s acts are his own, spring from his own personality, and cannot be coerced. But this freedom is not possessed at birth; it is acquired by degrees as a man enters into the self-conscious possession of his personality through a life of discipline and moral progress; renouncing the two opposite errors of forcing upon him a development for which he is inwardly unprepared, and leaving him alone, depriving him of that aid to progress which a political system, wisely designed and wisely administered, can give.”14 Later, in his history, de Ruggiero argued that government has a synthetic character which obliges it to be careful and charitable toward the motives of its late political enemies. “Care for the interests of the minority is the most strictly liberal of its tasks.”15 But libertas must be defined in terms of some ordering of experience, some veritas that has emerged in the judgment of the political leader. He may state it

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in a hundred ways, from the harsh, unambiguous violence of Lenin or Sorel, or he may be evasive as is customary in the democratic politics of our days. Now the Latin liberal would say, indeed, that the defense of liberty is a high and noble purpose, but it is not necessarily democratic, nor the rule of the majority. Liberty is related to humanitas, to the spirit of literacy in living, rather than to any achievement simply of technical or servile effectiveness. It is not authoritarianism, or the irresponsible and hypocritical rule of those who manipulate power. Latin liberty may stand between these, and it is no mere compromise of pragmatic solution, for there is design, order, and principle, and these stand first. We thus approach one of the profound themes of modern European politics—all the way from the baroque to the anguish of the intellectuals in the period after World War I and the Communist revolutions. It was in the deepest and grimmest of periods in modern times, the 1920s to the 1940s, when it seemed to all clear heads that either Communism or some form of fascism had to be victor in the political future of Europe. It was the question of what kind of a ruling class there was to be in the future; and if it were totalitarian there would be few intermediate groups between the masses of men and the rulers. For even as de Tocqueville said, the breakdown of the corps intermédiaire signalized the onrush of the revolution. In other words, the northern people would speak of the rule of the sovereignty of the masses, the populus, but the Latin always kept his eye on the reality of the ruling classes. The French, as in the mind of the historian Taine, might think of good citizenship. Gaetano Mosca, who formulated his theories of the ruling order in the 1880s, separated out the “noble” from the sheer existence of a ruling class and its behavior. As Arthur Livingston has said: Mosca instead was an Italian, to whom the analytical method of thinking came naturally. He leaped upon Taine’s method as a tool for straight thinking and sought to be, and, to a surprising extent in one still so young, succeeded in being ‘objective.’ I find that very Italian. Italians do easily and as a matter of course what other human beings do rarely, if at all, and then only with great effort and after hard and sustained discipline: They think by processes of distinction. While the rest of the world is hunting for ways to show that the true is good and the good is true, and that both are beautiful, the Italians are busy keeping virtue, truth and beauty separate and in the heart as well as in the mind. Perhaps that is the great Italian ‘contribution to civilization,’ which Italian nationalists are always trying to discover.16

But Mosca had second thoughts in his later years. He saw that the Latin liberals had succeeded in weaning the common man away from religion. Instead of following the rationalism of the secular-minded philosophers, the common men had turned to socialism and to the demagogues who, pretending to be democrats, were undercutting the structure of the society the liberals had done much to create. The brutal separation of religion from politics was having curious results; the nineteenth-century parliamentary democracy was sadly

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weakened before it faced the crisis of the twentieth century. Limitations on the suffrage which might have saved the representative system were destroyed in the onrush of the revolt of the masses, as Ortega was to say later.17 As the masses had turned to socialism, the groundwork was being laid for the triumphs of Bolshevism, and, indeed, the barbarities of fascism in the twentieth century. The “political formula” for legitimacy which the Latin liberals had proposed was thrust aside. Elections and parliaments, as well as political parties, were weakened with no sure political alternative, now that monarchy had lost its baroque glory. With these consequences, said Mosca, the liberal faced the choice of a plutocratic dictatorship, a bureaucratico-military dictatorship, or a demagogic dictatorship.18 Without the preservation of the aristocratic or more philosophically oriented element in the democratic surge itself, there is an eventual devolution to some authoritarian or totalitarian form of political order.19 For Mosca, the decisive element in liberty is not the participation of the masses in politics, but the juridical protection of the individual, a heritage from the classical Roman legal system. In practically all of the Latin liberals, unless they seem to be writing for Anglo-American audiences like Giovanni Sartori in his Democratic Theory, the form of government or the system of politics is not of primary interest. They would like to have pluralism in religion, but not a society in which the admonitions of the clergy enter into public policy. But they move with a kind of amiable tolerance with new political regimes and systems, provided the freedom of the intellectual is not to be governed by priests, colonels, or businessmen. Like intellectuals from old times, they like neither the religionist nor the man of the marketplace. They accept more easily the bureaucrat or the military man. V Ortega looks well standing on the Acropolis, for he was not only a philosopher but inevitably a philosopher of history. The view from the Acropolis and the Forum is toward the future, toward the present, and toward us. On the other hand, the view from the present is backward to the Forum and to the Acropolis, or perhaps even to the legend of Europa. From the present backward history seems linear, or even unilinear. Today is a kind of absurd culmination toward which evolution, or even all history, has labored to bring forth our latest statesman. But granting that we stand at the height of the times, what has made history move in one direction and not in another? We are driven to a philosophy of history. Though event and sequence was clearly visible to the ancient historian, it was the rise of the non-Latin that has made necessary the “philosophy of history.” It is the explanation of the glorious or inglorious present of impending tragedy. It helps us to forget quickly the wickedness of yesterday, the wars of last week. Evolution has declared it: The future will be better, and this is the phi-

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losophy of history of those who have no understanding of the Latin and classical heritage. For the Latin, there was only minimal determinism and the causes of history were largely within man himself. It is for this reason that Ortega once roundly declared that any one of us can predict the future (though Ortega failed in his judgment of the Second Spanish Republic; he quickly became an exile from Spain, from the system he had helped to create). Spanish intellectuals seem never to exhaust the meaning of Ortega and Unamuno, but for our purposes let us assume that Santayana had one of the politically creative of Latin minds in modern times. Santayana was a Spaniard in the world, and though he wrote in English he always thought of himself as a Spaniard. He was renewing his Spanish passport in Rome when the fall occurred which brought on his final illness. Unamuno stands as a hero to the liberal student of literature, much more of a hero in literature than in politics. Ortega was a critic of his time and a philosopher of history, as so much of his work will show. But Santayana made profound and lasting statements of the Latin tradition in politics. All three of these immortal thinkers seem to be Catholic in their souls and psychological naturalists in their minds. Some said that Unamuno was a Lutheran at heart, but he wrote about religion for Catholics, and The Tragic Sentiment of Life is one of the classics of modern days. Though the Latin intellectual generally is a “naturalist,” Santayana more than others realized that the spiritual (see his The Idea of Christ in the Gospels) leads to the natural, which indeed includes both materialism and idealism.20 It is from realism that one can understand history, and it is from within realism that one looks at culture and politics. One has the feeling that Ortega was never interested in politics or really at home in the struggles of politicians. He opposed the monarchy and favored the republic, but as a member of the Spanish Chamber of Deputies he said all too quickly of the Second Republic: “This is not my Republic.” It was perhaps opposition to Alfonso XIII more than love of a republic that animated him in the final hours of the monarchy when he and a few other intellectuals decided that the monarchy must fall. Those in Spain during the late days of the Republic and during the war showed an intense resentment against the former liberals and intellectuals who, from across the Spanish border, submerged either the Republic or the National government in Vitriol. Still, one must remember that the Latin intellectual, like Ortega and Unamuno, is hostile at heart to politics, because all politics is unintelligent and ultimately uncreative. In the world of historical and psychological naturalism, moral claims (or claims under natural law theory) are very different in different cities and in different epochs. Moral judgment—even of the politics of Spain under the Republic—comes out of a disintegrating culture (as Ortega argued). Morality is valid in terms of a tradition, but the tradition itself may be corrupted or uncivilized, as Gregorio Marañón, another founder of the Second Republic, affirmed when in French exile he said that the Second Republic had become a Soviet system. The common elements of tradition to the Latin intellectual are

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not moral systems but systems of behavior. This is the mark of order. It is the order which reason can discover and interpret, but one does not come to the ideal state. One does not come to the Republic proposed by Plato which existed in an order of ideal or idea formulations beyond palpable grasp. The standard of judgment, from which philosophy arises, is a standard the Latin intellectual believes can be drawn from psychological naturalism.21 Though there is indifference to “politics,” there is no indifference to the political process. For here one derives laws, aspects, and generalizations, which may be projected easily and naturally into the future. Life is easier, indeed, when one eliminates the principled achievement of a utopia, but the Latin intellectual and his heirs, conservatives and liberals, would say also that life is more true. In politics, the Latin mind is continually weighing the classical proposition, the proposition that comes from the Greek philosophers, that unrestrained democracy, for example, “the revolt of the masses,” brings with it some form of tyranny, barbarism, or a society that is purely “sophistical” in its judgment of human rights. The alternative is a moral judgment that is as ancient as the literary consciousness of politics: Aristocracy is the creative, civilized type of government. Whatever system of Greek “moderation at white heat” may be generated comes from the government of the best, the civilized, the orderly, the intelligent, and the men of specialized competence. The German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, recognized this. In speaking of his appreciation of his family, one thing he remembers was “their inclination to achieve democracy by way of aristocracy.”22 Latin intellectuals may well insist that if one can accept the postulate it is no more difficult to organize such a system of aristocracy, or function by competence, than it is to make what we call democracy work—in most of the world. Indeed, the reason democracy works in Anglo-American countries and in much of Western Europe is precisely because democracy has not been doctrinaire and because in fact it is a veiled system of aristocracy. And as contemporary societies become more populous and technological, the law of oligarchy prevails and fewer and fewer people become the governors or aristocrats of sovereignty. VI Jorge Ruiz de Santayana (6.XII. 1863—26.IX. 1952, as his Roman grave stone says) was one of the most systematic of the modern Latin intellectuals. He exemplifies a complicated materialism and psychologism, in which spiritual qualities from the Greeks and Christians are included; and he was one of the most effective and savage of the Latin critics of the Germans. His Dominations and Powers is surely one of the modern classics in the field of politics. Like Ortega and unlike Ferrero, he was not concerned with historical proofs of a position. While he was one of the most rational of men, he was a critic of reason as were both Ortega and Henri Bergson. He was an imaginative exponent of

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“Platonic love,” that great theme in the literature of Western culture; he was a Catholic free thinker, who argued that a Catholic in a Protestant country like the United States was in an impossible situation. It was said that he never married because he could not bear to have his children reared as Catholics and he could not tolerate them being anything other than Catholics. His ideal of love was, no doubt, a mixing of Catholicism and Platonism. And by pushing his taxonomy, Ramón J. Sender has included Santayana in the Generation of 1898, that group of Spaniards who examined the reason for the modern failure of Spain, symbolized in its defeat by the United States. He is seldom so classified by scholars. Someone said he is the only man who ever resigned a professorship at Harvard, but perhaps as he reacted against the trivialization of American life he could see some of the same misfortune at Harvard. Santayana’s realism and naturalism was, as intimated, of the Latin kind. On the other hand, there was both the power of love and reason in human life, though both would be terrestrial; but, on the other, his realism taught him that, “reason imposed on the universe is madness, because existence is necessarily irrational.”23 He saw the spiritual values of classical religion; he compares with sympathy Homer and the Gospels, and Christ risen is compared with the shade of Achilles. Christ risen seems, “sadder, more vacant, more helpless than when he was living.”24 Though he did not say it, he would probably agree with Dean Inge that the fusion of the Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris with Hellenic religion produced a religion startlingly like Christianity.25 Historically, the Latin intellectual seems to have experienced both attraction toward and repulsion from the German mind. But it was the wars of the twentieth century which finally sealed the Latin intellectual position. Ferrero attacked the Germans economically and politically, or one might say sociologically. Santayana has a sustained philosophical onslaught, in his Egotism in German Philosophy, which was published in 1916 and then again in 1940. The theme of this book (a notable philosophical achievement) is that egotism, or subjectivity, in thought and willfulness in morals is the soul of German philosophy. Idealism, he said, is the autobiography of your own illusions. Still, many a Latin has used German idealism. Ramiro de Maeztu used Kant as a basis for Christian ethics, and intellectuals in Mussolini’s movement turned to German thought as an element in the new politics. German philosophy and Protestantism, thought Santayana, represent a primitive faith which cannot be called knowledge. Protestantism is favorable to learning, but it is incompatible with clearness and fundamental freedoms of attitude. He admits that Goethe was a universal man and not strictly in the German line; he was classical and romantic and he obviously had understanding and sympathy with the Latin mind. But, on the contrary, Santayana launches a savage attack on Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Fitche provided the Junkers and bankers with their philosophy, just as Plato supplied the dull Spartans with theirs. Fichte also had a boundless contempt for the Latin races. Hegel was a

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solemn sophist, and he provided a stage on which the ego struts alone. For Nietzsche, Santayana noted how he inherited Schopenhauer’s pessimism and metaphysical anarchy; it is remarkable how little Nietzsche learned from the Greeks. All of these strictures, which he elaborated in detail, were pointed to the fact that the Germans have been willfully engaged in war twice in the twentieth century.26 But somehow Goethe’s universalism seems to soften the Latin judgment. Goethe seems to be the great German who appeals to all men. His thought seems to be immersed in Latin sources, and it is based on an understanding of the Greeks. It is naturalistic, for good and evil were equally digestible. Im Anfang war die That; thus, to begin with was a natural fact, the word, the sense, the force, the deed.27 Goethe does not commit tragic error of the Germans; he does not make vulgar passion, self-assertion, and ambition the creative spirit of the universe. There is a balance of grandeur between reason and nature, between fact and faith. And it would seem that these judgments of principle may be drawn from Faust. Here, at the beginning, there is an operation of the great economy of heaven, hell, and earth, with the will of humankind, however misguided, commanding forces that will destroy him. “Ach Gott! Die Kunst ist lang, und kurz ist unser Leben,” said Wagner (11.558-559).28 But nature is also long, even if it extends to Heaven, and reason is short. Some would say, as against Santayana, that Faust presents the German ideal of a full life. Romanticism seeks the rejection of limits, but Santayana would reply that the limits come relentlessly down upon the German.29 H. G. Haile’s study of Goethe’s political thinking leads him to argue that Goethe opposed the, “periwigged Franco-German Enlightenment,” with its excessive value placed on the rational faculties, and its failure to comprehend, “the infinite depth of human experience.” In Goethe’s picture of Egmont against Alba, the Latin Catholic, Alba becomes the rationalist who forgets there are evils that a ruler cannot correct. Against this, Egmont demands that the people be allowed to retain their traditional character. Haile argues that as Goethe grew older he became more conservative and more critical of the overconfidence of the age in human reason. He turned toward a traditional and organic view of the people. It is the traditionalism of the Dutch which makes them superior to Alba and the Spanish rulers. To preserve order, Alba would use force, but Egmont would rely on the love of the people for their governors. The meliorist and rationalist will sacrifice the people in order to attain their betterment, but the traditionalist will sacrifice himself for his values.30 One is led swiftly to a modification of what some have called psychological naturalism. Santayana is not like the American liberal, James Harvey Robinson, who praised Pavlov and applied integrally the conditioned reflex to man’s condition. As a creator of American liberal philosophy, Robinson turned against Christianity and nationalism, arguing that we are not super animals and not degraded angels. So let “history” be used in what the Latin would call a cru-

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sade, a utopian crusade for the perfection of man.31 Against German romanticism and against liberal positivism or scientism in a social order, Santayana seems to draw from Goethe, among other sources, the notion of a vital integrity. It is an emphasis on life, but one that is not remote from experience. Vitalism, for Santayana, “may be sweetened by charity and understanding, and the surer a man is of his soul, the more courteous he can afford to be of the souls of others.” 32 This then is Santayana’s humane naturalism, a naturalism which seems to be based on the rationalism of the Greeks—and on the Latin intellectual’s attention to detail, distinction, difference, and sequence in experience—and the wisdom of all high souls in the past.33 All of this stands for our purposes as a background to the question: How shall we be governed? It is not classic democracy, for as many an earlier student of politics has said (for example, Jean Bodin and John Cotton), if all of us govern, then there can be no governors. One must redefine democracy, as we have, for almost anything goes. The European who, following Aristotle, dislikes democracy but likes the traditional or constitutional system in the United Sates, is not like the American who has redefined his system to be democracy. Thus, it is democracy to have a measured representative system (see Madison’s Federalist No. 10), but it is also democracy to have a judicial order which at the middle of the twentieth century has been making the important and sovereign social decisions—many of which, however, seemed to contradict the consensus of the American people. We may say that the Latin intellectual is a friend of justice (as Aristotle defined it) but that he is seldom a passionate friend of nineteenth-century parliamentarism, that is, government by elections, many political parties, much talk, and an occasional fight with ink-bottles or swords between the heroes of the people. If Santayana accepts Aristotelian justice, he can hardly be called a “totalitarian.” Of course, any supporter of “authority” in government or in society (as distinguished from government) is some kind or degree of authoritarian, for unless we are anarchists, we can hardly be otherwise. And when anarchists have organized their communes (as in Spain just before the Civil War broke out), they were more than merely authoritarian, for they were total in the organization they imposed. A total critique of society, such as that of the revolutionary (the anarchist, revolutionary socialist, or Communist, for example) may readily eventuate in a regime from which all individual freedom has been drained. However, the Latin, aristocratic liberal, such as George Santayana, is different. The enemy of individual freedom, order, and civilization is not the professional revolutionary, but the politicians who take over a government in the name of political parties. They are the bosses, the caciques, who make nominations and control elections, and whose figureheads make fine speeches in parliament. In the abstract, the enemy of liberty and civilization is the irresponsible and impersonal political process. But the judgment of a regime is not easy, for there is an infinity of variation in the shadings from a regime in which nearly

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all officials are selected in ordinary elections to regimes in which there are practically no elections. Since Ortega, Unamuno, Mosca, Croce, Santayana, and others were critics of fascism, they may, perhaps, be listed as skeptical about systems of elections in which social or functional groups are used for the purpose of selecting delegates to a legislative body. On the other hand, to the extent that political cronyism and parties are curbed, even by functional choices, they must be listed among those who might be favorable to radical reform in the electoral systems of the modern state. Santayana’s concern in Dominations and Powers was to make coherent, erudite statements of his political naturalism and his alternatives to nineteenthcentury systems of parliamentary government. It all centers, ultimately, on how to get superior men into the right public function. It is one of the oldest of intellectual inquiries. In what Karl Jaspers has called the “axial period” of human development, some 800 to 500 B.C., it was a central theme in government. Confucius sought, for example, to establish the government of the sage. It is said that Heraclitus, who wrote about 500 B.C., felt “electrifying” contempt for the masses of his fellow-citizens. They were incapable of salvation because they did not possess man’s fundamental virtue: The capacity to recognize superiority.34 Ernest Renan, along with others, including Friedrich Nietzsche, believed that truth and justice were not to be gained through democratic government, but through a rational aristocracy, like Plato’s bureaucracy, which was political power grounded in the trained intelligence. And might not one say that the modern civil service or bureaucracy is an exemplification of Plato’s ruling order in its special training, its secrecy, and independence of the people? In every serious discussion of the right to rule, there is latent or explicit the ancient conflict between the sovereignty of those who know and the sovereignty of an existing majority. Here the modern state is like the ideal or rational state in Plato. In the nineteenth century, during the time of the formulation of the claims to sovereignty of electoral masses, there was also the development of specialized cadres in the state. Along with the cadres one found usually the monarchy which provided unity for the state. The civil servant injected an ideal of service, which the bureaucracy accepted as part of its special interest. There was a broad social class of national and local civil servants—the organized clergy, corporations of teachers, officers in the military, and executives in business—who served the state in specific and limited ways in the formation and the enforcement of policy. Gradually, one became a citizen through the education of children and not through property or the lack of it, and not through the traditional class system. The oligarchies, thus, were in central positions which enabled them to restrict (though not abolish) the influence of the people. There was both persuasion and the derailment of the representatives of the people in the systems of parliamentary government. But, as in Plato, there must be in addition to the training of ruling orders, the training of the masses of the citizens to the highest point of their ability. Freedom of opportunity according

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to talents was, indeed, like the Napoleonic principle of la carrière ouvert aux talents.35 In religious thought the conflict has been sharpened between freedom of conscience and the right of those in the position of religious teachers and prelates to care for the welfare of the masses. Liberty must, then, be restricted or removed in order to lighten the responsibility of the masses and to direct them through a rational and moral will toward their own self-realization. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man,” taken from The Brothers Karamazov, was written by a man who knew actually little or nothing about the Inquisition, either in Spain or elsewhere. But it offers a moving statement of the ancient problem. Christ gave liberty, duty, and responsibility to man, but it is a heavy burden, probably because in Orwellian terms, “men love 1984.” It is too heavy, according to the Inquisitor, and thus man’s liberty has been lifted from him in the interest of the inculcation of the morality of which he is capable. The Inquisitor is “every bureaucrat” who would deny to the free conscience the decision of moral and political questions. The Christian in the world has always presented to the magisterium and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church the issue of the blurred line between one form of decision or another, that is, the imposition of duty or the affirmation of freedom. Doctrine has often been determined by the practice and belief of the faithful; the priest has often been forced to accept the teachings and practices of the masses. The same is measurably true in politics. The priest who goes into politics has been defeated many times by the Christian masses. Eventually, the rebel priest is heard of no more. Or, the kind of rebellion he wanted to effect is thrown into the literary notes on once vivid utopias. Both doctrine and politics may be governed by the emergence of popular tradition, though any tradition may die from lack of teaching.36 In the pursuit of meaning in the Latin mind one thing is clear: In politics we must escape from sentimentalism. Sentimentalism, our Latins would say, leads to political futility. We close our eyes to the realities of society and of government because we may say that love conquers all, or that science will provide us with the information to resolve all issues for the happiness of man. The loss of a sense of Mediterranean realism makes sentimentalists out of us. In the middle of the twentieth century, religious leaders have been getting busily into politics by urging reforms that might lead toward equality. Religious politics has been rapidly becoming sentimental politics; it has become unglued from the human conditions in which a reform must succeed or fail. Christian radicalism has assumed that one can force evil men to behave like saints. After all, the Christian radical forgets that when Christ was tempted by the Devil he refused to turn stones into bread. If the clergyman believes his New Testament, must he not also believe that if Christ had wanted to he could have turned all the stones of this earth into bread so that man would never be hungry again? Revolutionary clergy, Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, are insisting on re-

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forms that will not be adopted, or if adopted they will hardly bring the consequences that the reformers have been seeking. Latin realism seeks, indeed, to base politics on scientific knowledge, but reform must not then be analyzed and proposed by sentimentalists. Philosophers and politicians, said Santayana, tell us they have a priori knowledge of what human needs and capacities are, and that these are identical in everybody. Conflict among men arises from the absence of education or from the perversity of education. Conflict arises because men are ignorant of what is good. In reply, Santayana declared that such people have really only a knowledge of themselves; they are born dogmatists and congenitally militant, for example, authoritarian, though seldom totalitarian. They are blind to the radical diversity among men, but if they admitted such diversity, they would confess themselves to be tyrants. In contrast, thought Santayana, the rational government would imitate the modesty of the physician. “In other words,” said Santayana: a rational government is one that speaks to its people in the name of the nature of things, and acts by that authority. Its criterion and method must be a scientific criterion and method. Therefore the members of a rational government would not be prophets, reformers, agitators, politicians, or demagogues, never persons elected by majority votes, but educated and trained in the science and the art of government: persons able to discern the possibility or impossibility of human ambitions. Such persons might have to be, like the Roman ruling class, all soldiers; but besides the requisite military capacity they should be experts in economics. Yet in modern times, rather perhaps than soldiers, they should be anthropologists, medical men, and scientific psychologists; for it is the psyche that is the agent in politics.37

Such a government, obviously, would never follow blindly party or sect; indeed, it might do all in its power to transcend the party system which has evolved out of the disasters of the century. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

See Schmitt, Politsche Romantik (Zweite Auflage, 1925), pp. 172-173: “Das ist also der Kern aller politichen Romantik: der Staat ist ein Kunstwerk, der Staat der historisch-politischen Wirklichkeit ist occasio zu der das Kunstwerk produzierenden schöpferischen Leistund des romantischen Subjekts, Anlass zur Poesie und zum Roman, oder auch zu einer blossen romantischen Stimmung.” (Editors’ Translation: “That is the core of all political romanticism. The state is a work of art; the state of historical-political reality is merely an occasion for the creative achievement resulting in this artistic production by the romantic subject, an opportunity for poetry and novels and for a mere romantic disposition.) C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959, 1964). See Gerhart Burian Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). Glenn R. Morrow, trans. and ed., Plato’s Epistles (1962), pp. 49, 54-55, and 123 (Laws, IV, 709E). In the Greek text Plato did not use king; he used “tyrant” instead.

156 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

Order and Legitimacy Editors’ Note: In this regard, see Wilson, A Theory of Public Opinion (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1962; repr. Greenwood Press, 1975). Frederick D. Wilhelmsen has argued that fascism functioned historically as a resolution of the tension between the proletariat and capitalism within the open society. Which is to say, it is one of the consequences of liberalism. Fascism is a purely provincial event created by and within the world of liberalism. It solved no problems, it drew to itself no first-ranking intelligences, and it ended before reaching maturity. Its followers hated the machines—which itself produced hate—and its most important characteristic was to hate the rich man with half your heart, and the man at the bottom with all your heart. See Wilhelmsen, El problema de occidente y los cristianos (Sevilla, 1965), pp. 126-127. See Paul Sérant, Le romantisme Fasciste (1959), passim, for a study of the young French and fascist intellectuals of the period before and during World War II. Cf. J. A. A. Van Leent, “Scientific Creativity,” in Higher Education and Research in the Netherlands, VIII (1964), p. 14. L’ancient régime et la Revolution (8th ed., Paris, 1877), pp. 331-332. Is it not by contrast and symbolic of changing times that the Kennedys invited the Bossa Nova musicians to the White House (and other leftwing artists, it would seem)? In October, 1967, Lyndon Johnson invited Eric Hoffer to come to the White House and talk with him. Theodore Roosevelt, as a writer and thinker, was an intellectual in his own right. Perhaps Johnson would be better off with Hoffer than Ferrero. Ferrero’s Four Years of Fascism, trans. E. W. Dickes (1924), is one of the best of the works of fascism, simply because it emerges from such a rich historical background, both in ancient history and modern Italian political experience. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 135. Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans. by R. G. Collingwood (1927), p. vii. Ibid., p. 362. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (Elementi di scienza politica), trans. Hannah D. Kahn and ed. Arthur Livingston (1939), p. xii. Ibid., pp. 492, 481, and 310. Ibid., p. 391. Editors’ Note: For recent complementary assessments, see Claes G. Ryn, The New Jacobinism: Can Democracy Survive? (Washington, DC: National Humanities Institute, 1991), pp. 31-43; and H. Lee Cheek, Jr., “A Note on the Platonic and Aristotelian Critique of Democratic Man,” International Social Science Review, Volume 66, Number 2 (Spring 1991). See J. M. Alonso Gamo, Un español en el mundo, Santayana: poesia y poética (1966), p. 86. See Ortega y Gasset, The Origin of Philosophy, trans. Toby Talbot (1967), pp. 44 and 50. One implication of any good philosophizing is, of course, the necessity of making distinctions, which is often the heart of the Latin mental process. As Plato argued in the Gorgias, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library [Harvard University Press, 1925], p. 321; 9465D), things must not be jumbled together. Jaspers, Philosophy and the Modern World: Selected Essays, trans. by E. B. Ashton (Chicago: Regnery, 1963), p. 299. The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, p. 101. Ibid., p. 159.

Intellectuals: Latin, Liberal, and Aristocratic 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

157

W. R. Inge, “Religion,” in The Legacy of Greece, edit. R. W. Livingstone (1921), pp. 50, passim. Inge continues saying that Greek religion passed into Christian theology and culture without any real break. The early Church spoke in Greek and thought in Greek. “The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of the classical culture” (p. 30). Cf. David L. Hoggan, The Myth of the New History (1965), for more sympathetic comment on the Germans, but not on the German community in the United States before World War I. Editors’ translation: “In the beginning was the deed.” Editors’ Translation: “Oh God, art is long, and life is short.” Cf. Peter Viereck, Metapolitics (1941), p. 36. H. G. Haile, “Herr, er will uns fressen: The Spirit of Götz,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXIV (October, 1965), pp. 610-634; “Goethe’s Political Thinking and Egmont,” Germanic Review, XLII (March, 1967), pp. 96-107. David L. Hoggan, The Myth of the New History (1965), pp. 223-224. Egotism in German Philosophy, pp. 191-192. In one of his Soliloquies entitled “On My Friendly Critics,” Santayana said: “But the other philosophers, and those whose religion is of the anxious and intolerant sort, are not at all pleased. They think my morality very loose: I am a friend of publicans and sinners, not (as they are) in zeal to reform them, but because I like them as they are; and indeed I am a pagan and a moral skeptic in my naturalism (p. 257). The propagandists for virtuous character have filled the world with hatred, darkness, and blood…they are the eternal obstacle…to simple happiness (p. 258).” See Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, intro. Ralph Ross (University of Michigan Press, 1967), pp. 257-258. Ibid. Ortega y Gasset, The Origin of Philosophy (1967), pp. 84-85. Cf. Robert von Pöhlmann, Geschicte der Sozialen Fraga und des Sozialismus in der Antiken Welt (1912), Vol. II, pp. 138 ff. and 176. Cf. Pöhlmann, op. cit., II, pp. 58-159, 108-144. Dostoevsky continued his ideas in The Possessed, especially in the ideas of Shigalov, where liberty for most of mankind would be destroyed. See also “nihilism” in Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. It is difficult to trace the source of Russian hostility toward their society, their nihilism, revolutionism, and various forms of socialism. But it would seem clear that the revolutionary principle was borrowed from the West, as a weapon against Russian tradition. Perhaps the invention of a word like “nihilism” is a kind of towering accident. The Russian revolutionary has his ancestors in the Greek intellectuals and masses from about the sixth century B.C., who would destroy the ruling classes in the interest of an equal society. Or, one may cite various utopian schemes and projects from the ancient world as precursors, for the destruction of the existing society has to precede the establishment of the utopia. See Dominations and Powers (1951, pp. 434 and 462). Chapter 34 of this work is recommended as a political classic of our times.

9 Order and Legitimacy It is not the purpose of this essay to give a universal history of the idea of legitimacy. It is rather to discuss the spirit of the present hour, in which our own legitimacy seems increasingly to be called in question. The emergence of constitutional crisis signifies the erosion of order and the spiritual quality or the authority of a regime which is the substance of its legitimacy.1 We are engaged in these essays in reflections on the Latin mind, and what is needed here is not universal history, but the interpretation of history that has been given by some notable thinkers of the Latin tribe. To the Latin, there is the almost personal sense of the fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire is his, just as the Italy or Spain of today is his. Though order and legitimacy are problems of the intellectuals, as well as that of the practical political leader, it is the modern crisis—the continuing crisis from the French Revolution—that serves as the basis for both intellectual continuity and intellectual experiment. The old terms of explanation from classical times blend with the nineteenth-century effort to provide new words for old behavior. To some, Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx seem the inventive minds of the age, but their explanations were different. Today, more than ever, people of all ideological stamps read Tocqueville, but they read also Marx, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, August Comte, and British liberals like John Stuart Mill. Just as the nineteenth century was the time in which new ideological terms came into being, it was also ripe for the exploration of words like community, authority, status and class, religion and the sacred element of life, by political scientists and sociologists. I One of the greatest of the modern students of legitimacy was the Italian historian and intellectual, Guglielmo Ferrero, who was invited to visit the White House by Theodore Roosevelt, apparently just to talk; they were both writers of some reputation. But it is doubtful that any other President of the United States has invited an intellectual, here a Latin intellectual, to the White House just to 159

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talk. Ferrero was a noted historian, but in the course of his life he became a famous social and political philosopher. Of Ferrero it might be said that we should not be envious of his contribution; we should be thankful that he existed. On the evanescence of Roman legitimacy, he is lucid. Alexander Severus was killed in 235 A.D. by his revolted legions. At this time, the empire was at its height of influence in every way. But fifty years later, Greco-Roman civilization and polytheism were in their death agonies, and Christianity was a rising force which was prophetic of some new unity in the classical world. There was simply no dynastic principle, no principle on the succession to power which could be sustained. And Ferrero argued that “no human effort could succeed in preventing the final catastrophe.”2 The point he makes is that for centuries the Roman Senate had been the primary organ of government and the source of legitimacy in the choice of rulers. The election of an emperor was validated by the Senate, but when Marcus Aurelius ignored the Senate and tried to introduce the dynastic principle, an absolute military dictatorship was erected on the ruins of the authority of the Senate. The revolt of 235 A.D. began a half-century in which the ruling class was destroyed, although Vespasian made efforts to rebuild the Roman aristocracy by inscribing a thousand provincial families in the Senatorial and Equestrian orders. Legitimacy as principle, however, disappeared, and new religious cults, such as Sol Invictus and Latinized Mithraism, could not prevent the dissolution of the Empire. Likewise, efforts to rebuild the Empire on the Asiatic model lasted only a limited time. In its stead, and because of Christianity, the divinity of the emperor had to be abandoned, but Christian heresy, such as the terrible struggle over Arianism, did not provide a principle of effective legitimacy and unity.3 Ferrero ventured the opinion that the triumph of Christianity, which Diocletian lived long enough to see, marked the end of ancient civilization. Though Diocletian dropped the cultus of the emperor, his hope that orthodoxy would be the bulwark of empire itself failed. The nineteenth-century struggle for legitimacy between monarchy and popular sovereignty looked back to the issues of legitimacy in the ancient world. Today we can consider the failures of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the destruction of Europe by the Russian Revolution in March 1917; we can look back at the nineteenth-century discussion of its own problems of establishing legitimate government. Germans such as Karl Jaspers will tell us that the destruction of the German spirit of independence in the Thirty Year’s War has never been overcome, and Ferrero affirmed that the fall of religion in that war was one of the reasons for the ruin of the West.4 Without transcendence at the center of the mind, the popular will becomes a formality by which to legitimize a military dictatorship founded on force. This authority emerging from “popular will” is absolute and far more tyrannical than monarchy with its limitations in the national tradition. But alternatively, the revolutions of the people, as the revolutions of 1848, came to nothing. The sovereignty of the people lasted, and seems always to last, but a moment. Europe came through the first

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half of the twentieth century with two principles of authority—monarchy and the people—neither of which has been able to sustain continuity in order and legitimacy. And much the same may be said of Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, that is, the barbarism of Communism and fascism. One hopeful item is, indeed, that all sensible people seem to be afraid of further mad political and economic adventures in the West. Only argument and not war must be used to deflate the totalitarian systems. In the nineteenth century, the study of revolution in France, especially, drove scholars to the theory of social status and class. The loss of legitimacy became a loss in the minds of those who belonged to a social class. Such an effort at interpretation was not by any means limited to the Marxists, the socialists, or revolutionaries. Lorenz von Stein was one of the seminal minds of the last century. His analysis of French society, as distinguished from the French government or state, was prophetic of future social theory. But it was an analysis founded in a theory of social classes which was to provide ideas for revolutionary thought, as well as the European defense of capitalism and tradition in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It has been the destiny of capitalism to be viewed almost always in terms of the operation of a social class of men known as “capitalists.” Von Stein perceived the capitalist class as the foundation of government. Indeed, the combination of capitalists and bourgeois monarchists under Louis Philippe was the basis of that society. Like Ferrero, von Stein could appreciate the search for legitimacy in the years from 1830 to 1848. Monarchy was traditionalist, and European monarchists and aristocrats in general were against the principle of Louis Philippe, that is, the Charte, simply because of the industrial-bourgeois basis of the new order. No doubt the failure of the regime of 1830 may be interpreted as the incompatibility of the bourgeois capitalist order and monarchy. Yet such a view is based on the idea that traditionalism is impossible under industrialism, and this is surely not the case. For traditionalism is the foundation of an effort toward the development of industrialism in the Mediterranean societies of the present day. The industrial revolution in Spain, fostered under Catholic leadership, is a case in point. Von Stein declared: Since the time when the term légitimité had been used at the Congress of Vienna, it had been interpreted in diverse ways. Usually it was intended to designate a certain, not very clearly defined complex of princely rights. Actually, legitimacy is nothing else but the essence of true monarchy, which makes it the absolute prerequisite of any constitution. In this sense the princes of Europe called themselves legitimate rulers. The same idea is expressed by the phrase ‘by the Grace of God,’ which had originated in Europe at the same time that the principalities were becoming aware of the importance of their position…. But since the crowns had been distributed by the victory of armies, particularly by Napoleon, legitimacy, as a claim of the princes to the throne by birth right, found its opponent in the princes whom the Revolution had raised to the throne. Only by contrast to the revolutionary monarchies did the old principalities gain a clear concept of legitimacy.5

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It may well be suggested that in the nineteenth century the problem of legitimacy was often discussed simply as the legitimacy of power over the proletariat. II In 1849, Juan Donoso Cortés, in writing to the Conde de Montalembert, said that he owed his conversion to a conservative position to divine mercy and to the profound study of revolutions.6 We have been wearied of “crisis” in the twentieth century, and we are constantly driven to consider as profoundly as we can the course of revolutions. Crisis means in one fashion the failure of government to command the obedience or acceptance of the citizenry, and crisis, therefore, is another way of speaking of the failure of legitimacy. Or, perhaps we can perceive the outlines of constitutional crisis as we probe the meaning of the revolutionary age which began with the French Revolution, as we have noted. Revolution drives people then and now into the study of legitimate government, since the revolution itself overthrows the older and inherited principles of public order. We have a widespread crisis in legitimacy in the world today because of the failure of the nineteenth-century political systems to be accepted by various national traditions. The revolutionary regimes of Marxism, fascism, totalitarianism, pseudodemocratism, and the quasi-legitimate regimes of Africa and Asia are common indeed. The future achievement of peace and efficiency depend on the attainment of political legitimacy. Some have become convinced that the age of revolution ends when there are no longer aristocrats to lead them. But the profound study of revolution leads one to compare the roles of the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the modern exponents of efficiency. Out of this the conclusion has emerged that just as once the babel of tongues produced a confusion of ideas, today the confusion of all ideas has resulted in a confusion of political and ideological language. We have little interest in the forms of government today. We strengthen the executive and strive for the concentration of power, the automatic operation of political institutions, and the stabilization or neutralization of political forces. It has been said that from the fall of the Bastille to the fall of the bomb on Hiroshima, we have progressed from liberty to the ideal of security, and from the uncertainties of representation to the ideal of efficiency. From ideology, political parties, and the revolution, we seem to be struggling toward a legitimacy that is based on the efficiency of scientists in a technological society. In the last century, the symbols of legality were substituted without success for the symbols of legitimacy, but the troubled age was not resolved into peace through the charms of the parliamentary order.7 It is often uncertain on just what grounds we should try to found the order and legitimacy of the future. Guglielmo Ferrero has said there are four basic principles of legitimacy. There are the aristo-monarchic principle, the hereditary principle, the elective

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principle, and the democratic principle of government. The literature in the West to be found on the subject of legitimacy is sparse—the most prominent of which are some pages of Talleyrand’s Mémoires—and some thoughts from Pascal. But when one of these four principles is accepted there is public order and there is no revolution. The profound study of the revolution led the historian Ferrero back to Talleyrand, who had said: I speak of the legitimacy of governments in general, whatever their form, and not only that of kings, because it must be applied to everything. A legitimate government, be it monarchial or republican, hereditary or elective, aristocratic or democratic, is always the one whose existence, form, and mode of action have been strengthened and sanctioned over a long period of years, I might even say over a period of centuries. The legitimacy of sovereign power stems from the ancient state of possession, as also, in the case of individuals, does the legitimacy of the law of property.8

When order breaks down we have crisis, the Greek “judgment” of a regime. Only when the demonic fear that is mutual between the rulers and the ruled has been placated, can legitimacy be established and in consequence a public order in which the technology of our age may flourish. Legitimacy in the government must penetrate into society as the foundation of order.9 It is much the same in any principle of legitimacy, whether monarchy, aristocracy, or the technique of parliamentarism which liberalism has used as the foundation of the post-Napoleonic age. The revolutions destroyed the older principles and the governed would not accept the new, even to the present day in the scattered and partial acceptance of the Western principles of democratic and industrial progress. And authority exists when there is a legitimate system of society and government. The nature of effective authority under order has been a perennial inquiry. As a rule, legitimacy must be effective, that is, it must maintain itself through the fact of public order. In Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, and Grotius, for example, the response to the disorders of the age was the defense of the state as sovereign and the guarantor of public order. Hans Barth has suggested there are three elements to be distinguished in the conception of order: (1) “spiritual unity, which is determined by the meaning and purpose of order which expresses itself in consensus and loyalty; (2) the complex of sanctions which is entrusted with the protection and maintenance of order; and (3) authority, which makes society capable of decision and action.” Finally, he pointed out that the state is itself an order which includes within it a multitude of other forms of order.10 Legitimacy is always a central problem for a state with a crisis of order, obedience, and the constriction of liberty for the preservation of the state. The failure of the nineteenth century was a failure to penetrate or to remake society. Those who seized power had little time to justify themselves, and their new statements of doctrine failed to become traditional. As Ferrero might say, we have dictators because people do not understand either the old or the new formulations of legitimacy that are offered them for the exorcism of the ancient fears of politics.

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III Let us turn to some brief consideration of the historical justifications of power, both in the spiritual penetration into society of metaphysical principles of justice, and the down-to-earth statements of legitimacy. For, indeed, the justifications of order are pragmatic; they are seldom worked out in the practice which is claimed for them. The practical problem is the embodiment of legitimacy in some form of acceptable governing elite, or the institutional pattern of a directing minority. Ferrero argued such principles are simply not transcendent, for they are positive, practical and operational. But to the individual committed to a principle of legitimacy, there is a standard of validity or truth behind the practical and operational. One may argue that any system of rulership is disconnected from a metaphysical principle, and that the social implications of monarchy or democracy are nil. But in general, it is only the empirical mind which can take such a position. What one will argue, in fact, is that a given principle of justification, in the actual historical situation, comports best with some institutional arrangement of government. In the twentieth-century crisis of regimes, where voting rights have been expanded and political parties dominate the political landscape, the presumed objectives of an orderly society have not been obtained. The rightist criticism of liberalism attacked the prevailing assumptions of such a political order as merely representing Rousseauistic, plebiscitarian democracy. Rousseau became the evil demon of the post-World War I democratic and parliamentary order. The literature on this question is immense. Defenders of parliamentarism did not turn to Rousseau, but the critics of parliamentarism used Rousseau as the symbol of political original sin.11 It is most curious that in this debate the defenders of the parliamentary order seemed never to use Aristotle. Why could they not have said: “Our democracy is based on the Greek principle of Aristotle’s polity, a mixture of oligarchy and democracy, and this is the most legitimate form of government we can imagine. The American system is more a polity than a democracy; the United States Constitution is the best modern regime in accordance with the Stagirite.” Such an argument should be related to the proposition that the objective of political theory is, according to the Greeks, the discovery of the best political regime. At least this is one of the objectives of Aristotle. The best regime has the best right to rule. But the best regime might be so—not because of its institutional structure—but rather because it was committed to teaching the truth of society and defending that social truth in the structure of its order.12 Many suggestions have been made. Xenophon in his Memorabilia paid tribute to the deeply religious spirit of Socrates; it was, of course, a probing traditional spirit which led Socrates in his talks with the son of Pericles to urge the restoration of tradition.13 Socrates urged consulting the oracle and he seemed not unfriendly toward divination as a means of discovery

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of the justified course to follow. Socrates was frequently in communion with his demon, or we can say “guardian angel.” Xenophon may be cited as affirming that kings and rulers “know how to rule,” and thus they rule rightfully or legitimately. They are not legitimate because they are simply in power, or chosen by the multitude, or by lot, or that they have acquired power by force and deception. Rather, they have the knowledge of rulership that legitimizes, much as Plato might speak of the science of government in his Statesman.14 In Aristotle’s Ethics it is the mature man, the spoudaios, who has the right to engage in ethical discussion, and this maturity might also give him the right to govern.15 He can engage in the pedagogy which Plato argued in the Laws. The mature man is the teacher, the pedagogue, and the ruler of the state. As ruler he is the sovereign, but as teacher he is teacher of the truth, and he speaks for the gods and philosophers. Men who have the truth can speak of the laws; legality in this transcendent sense stands far above the consent of those who are either ignorant or corrupted. The wise man, as with St. Thomas, or the spoudaios in the mind of the Greek philosopher, may engage in the legitimate discussion and in the proper determination of public questions. In spite of angry comments about the “royal fiction,” as Cornford states it, Plato does not seem serious about it. What he is trying to do is to suggest in the myth, which is a gateway to knowledge and a statement of the truth, the order the people should obey. In this way, he sought to gain consent for the teachings of the philosopher.16 In the Greek discussions of legitimacy in rulership, there are several principles to mention. Since there is the institution aureoled by philosophical truth, we may say that power comes from “above” and that it also comes “before” the human situation. There is no practical legitimacy without continuity because both institutions and the teaching of political truth occur in continuity. However, the educable young tyrant might well be an instrumentality for bringing into effect the principles of Plato’s teaching.17 But he would be educable only if he showed a capacity to be a member of the sacred brotherhood of the Academy. While the Greeks had a variety of legitimate systems, it is forcefully true of the modern age that legitimacy is institutionally narrowed either to some form of monarchy or executive concentration, or to some form of democracy related in practice to representative government. Plato’s Laws speaks of at least seven manners in which a legitimate ruler or governing elite might be chosen. The father and the mother rule the children, and the state by analogy is a kind of household. The noble should rule over the ignoble, the older over the younger, masters over slaves, the stronger over the weaker, wise men over those lacking in understanding, and those who may in the most democratic of ways be chosen by lot. But whatever the form of government, there is the perennial danger of the “king’s disease” of pride and ignorance.18 But is it not curious that the Greek writers hardly mention the military? Aristotle speaks of it after the first decline, but otherwise, and except in relation to the discussion of Sparta, there seems to be little or no focus on it. From the

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time of the murderous civil wars between the Roman legions down to the present, some are inclined to see practically every government backed by its armed forces. Hispanic-American government is dependent on the army, every Communist dictatorship of the party has the army behind it, and similarly in the disorderly African states the army is the engine of government. One may say that the military as the carrier of legitimacy is vastly more important now than it was in Greek society. It becomes one of the symbols of teacher and doctrine in any social order where the traditional nineteenth-century parliamentary, party, and judicial system has broken down. Here the military must assume the burden of order, or principle, and of continuity in the legitimacy of government. Its responsibility is social peace. To place a civilian at the head of the state is often merely a formality, a kind of Platonic myth which covers the deeper modes of teaching through the legions. The army may become the school of virtue; and it may well teach acceptance of the civil order. To this we must return at a later juncture. IV The interpretation of history is philosophical for the past and “probable” for the future. One of the profoundest, most prolonged, and bitterest of arguments among Western man is the role that Christianity has played in the formation of the modern principles of justice and legitimacy. In a more precise sense, one may say that the Catholic Church is the greatest of historical issues. It has not been primarily a question of the legitimacy of a particular form of government. Christianity has adjusted itself to practically all of the systems of government under which it has been forced to exist with persecution, or permitted to flourish with freedom. From liberalism, through socialism to Communism, and any other forms of proletarian revolutionary thought, attack has been directed at Christianity as an institution, but even more so against Christianity as a teacher of doctrines and philosophy. In other words, the leftwing revolution has attacked social teachings that have come from the Bible, from Christian tradition, and from the decisions of councils, prelates, theologians, and philosophers. In the West it has not been as in Ethiopia, ancient China, or modern Japan, an issue of the divine institution of a particular government. It has been a question, first, whether Christianity labored for the progress of humane feelings and institutions in Western history; and, second, it has been a philosophical question: Is Christian teaching, morality, and philosophy true, and thus a foundation for justice? Or, is it an illusion, which must give place before the truth of the secularized philosophies of liberalism and revolutionism? That Christian practices added much to the creation of political institutions is generally admitted, as parliaments, legal procedure, the administrative systems of the modern state, and many of the practices in voting and in the forms of majority control emerged during the Middle Ages. We recognize the continuity of governmen-

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tal institutions from the medieval period—of both Church, or state—began to take shape.19 Guglielmo Ferrero has referred to “the great humanization and demilitarization of the West that Christianity accomplished.”20 Probably the greatest nineteenth-century defense of Christianity in the light of history is the reply of Jaime Balmes to Guizot, defending the melioration of manners and the extension of charity into all areas of social life.21 Balmes cites council after council in the long struggle against slavery and the oppression of women, which were legacies from the decadent civilization of Greece and Rome. Christian charity and humanity was a public orthodoxy throughout the West. Virtue and care for the common good gave a people the right to select their magistrates. With St. Augustine, the virtue of a people gave them the right to govern themselves and their city under the eternal law of God, with whatever form of government they might find best suited to the attainment of this end.22 The Christian conception of a public orthodoxy is grounded in the principle of eternal and natural law, though the form of government may be chosen in accordance with the wishes of the people. Orthodoxy limits toleration, but toleration itself, one may observe, may sometimes bring about public disorder and sometimes it may establish social peace.23 In our present age it is difficult to see how Christians can favor the toleration of the anti-Christian revolution of dialectical materialism. Can the public orthodoxy of Communism live with the public orthodoxy of Christian morality? For the long course of Christian social thinking, legitimacy had depended, as with the Greeks, on the justice of social theory and the virtue in the standards defended by the law. The issue has been especially acute when a political society has approved in its public law a religious faith, or, indeed, where a religious creed has formed part of its tradition to such an extent that the creed has shaped or created the national style, and the contours of the national soul. A public philosophy of religious pluralism, such as exists in the United States, is more the exception than the rule in world history. In the present age the argument for popular ecumenism (not the official Decree of the Vatican Council in 1964 on the subject) seeks to expand good will and tolerance throughout the world. When the confessional state exists, there may be tolerance for others, as in the Catholic and Protestant confessional states of Europe, but the official religion has privileges the others do not have. The religious style of the society provides the basis of legitimacy in public policy. In much of Western history there has been a movement like a pendulum toward and away from what might be called popular or democratic control of government. The pattern of the defeat of Greek democracy is clearly one that has been repeated. One may cite the preservation of “republican words” in Rome when the imperial power was being created with such “republican” notions as the tribunitian power. The lex regia was invented as an idea to explain imperial centralization. Much the same is true in Christian history as in the

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invention of the Donation of Constantine. Monarchy has been until quite recent times the approved political order though the principle has long been accepted that there should be some popular participation in any legitimate government. St. Thomas stressed the function of wise men on different questions, but there should also be a clearly recognized right of the people to remove a tyrant if they find him unbearable. The Western Christian pattern has been monarchy with estates or parliaments for the representation of social institutions. Actually, it would seem today that many of the areas where democracy has been stable have established churches, that is, the confessional state and the institution of constitutional monarchy. Thus, a religious and a monarchical legitimacy have emerged from the past in the preservation of national tradition. Should one remember that after the Congress of Vienna, which preserved monarchic legitimacy, there was general peace in Europe for about a century? One thing to be kept in mind is that as the modern age emerged, the state required something more than just a tradition of monarchy and some system of the Estates of the Realm. Hobbes’ affirmation is probably correct: A legitimate government must work. There is, thus, a pragmatic principle in our thinking about the modern state. This is a part of the whole system of legitimacy: philosophy, structure, and efficiency. The idea of efficiency was added to the principle of the good prince. A legitimate government is a virtuous prince who at the same time is reasonably efficient in attaining the goals of government. Such efficiency does not suggest that the people should be authorized to tell the good prince what to do, but that the good prince will be just and effective.24 In revolution and war, Christianity has to be concerned with the survival of the Church and preeminently its freedom to conduct public worship and to administer the sacraments. The concordat is an agreement with a government when there has been trouble with the government, though this can cause criticism later, as for example the relation of the Vatican with various governments during the two world wars.25 On the other hand, in more peaceful times in orderly societies, Christian social theory becomes concerned with the details of economic and social order. In America the leftwing clergy seek to attain social legislation for the protection of the workers and for racial minorities. In the postwar prosperity of the United States, the reformers could turn more and more toward a revolution in racial relations as part of the Christian principle of a legitimate or just society. But it would seem impossible for the exponent of Christian ethics to accept as valid any and every strictly constitutionalized expression of majority will. The Christian majority must be Christian in its judgment of what is proper in a political society. Ethics in politics is no simple subject. In the end, however, the ethical approach to politics demands that public judgment be based on the acceptance of values grounded in acceptable ethical principle. Here and only here can one discover legitimate power. An important distinction is to be made: The ethical

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principle must be “open-ended,” that is, the specific application depends on situations or on prudential judgment. Applications will change in time and in different cultures. And a mere proportional representation of opinion—mass opinion let us say—ought not and cannot be the ground for a true democratic procedure. Ultimately, sovereign opinion must contain a recognition of at least a situational moral order. The larger issue for the European Christian has been the secularism, materialism, and the anti-Christian philosophy of the French Revolution. For Americans, it has been possible to ignore such an issue under the proposition that the American Revolution was the same as the French.26 For the European, legitimacy in the sovereign was historical and traditional. It was grounded in the law, in the natural rights of men, but not under the egalitarian individualism which has been associated with Rousseau. The Revolution was against the liberty of the Church. For the continental Christian, down almost to the present day, the legitimacy of any institution has been its conformity with the law. But the law includes all of the possible extensions of the word, and for that reason legitimacy is in accordance with divine, natural, positive, human, and customary law (even if it is written) when these laws have an historical, traditional, and rational foundation. Thus, legitimacy in such a view is also legality. In these views there is no compatibility between a society shaped by Christian tradition and the revolutionary systems of Europe as they emerged from the French Revolution.27 V We must now consider some contemporary problems in the formulation of the legitimate political system. Our problem emerges, as has been said, from the failures of the nineteenth century in its restatement of legitimacy. That failure is the crisis of our time. (A) Justice was surely fundamental in the minds of the Romans. The legal system presumably embodied higher principles of justice and order. But justice and order went together, and in its better time the Roman lawyers would surely have preferred, as in the statement of an English legalist, injustice to public disorder. Whatever the scheme of justice, order, and legitimacy, they all implied some form of higher principle, which might, however, be formulated as one of the maxims of the Roman civil law. Under the classical Roman constitution the army was simply an instrumentality of the SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus)—the Senate and Roman people. Polybius and Cicero described the classical features of the system, the Consuls, the Senate, and the people under the Tribunes and in their tribes, centuries, and other forms of corporations.28 The will of the people was in theory the source of legitimacy and justice. But the Senate was select, its members were supposedly wise, though in imperial times the Senate became an essentially sycophantic body, praising the wisdom of the one man.29 Senators had abdicated in favor of charismatic personalities,

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who were the legislators, and perhaps even prophets. By analogy, the will of the Emperor was like a Roman last will and testament naming an heir, and the Emperor could name his successor for the approval of the Senate. Such a selection by the concentration of testamentary authority was not as firm as a direct and known hereditary succession. It did, however, validate the concentration of the authority of the people in one person through its transfer from the larger to the smaller unity. The end was reached in the creation of the legions as the symbol of the justice of the Roman city. The dream of the constitution evaporated in the dominance of the army. But the symbol of justice remained in the writings of Vergil and later in Dante, for whom the age of Augustus still lived. Such was the pattern of political evolution. In the present age of confusion, it seems that only the army is capable of embodying the principles of some societies. The military becomes the ruling power, the ruling legitimacy, in a time of crisis when the ordinary political procedures have given place to a more stern efficiency. Some Latin American conservatives have argued that army leaders do not show any real intellectual independence from those who surround them, for example, and they surrender to foreign capitalists. Ferrero has stressed the mutual fear between the rulers and the ruled, but in a time of fear the military commanded; the colonel or the general is a natural symbol of authority to which one may turn. Armies are simply one of the common expedients which recur in human history. In the disorders of emergent nations, the army has seemed to be the natural point to return for the creation of the state.30 At its best, however, army discipline can be the creative force in making a nation. The Spaniard may say that the Catholic Church created the Spanish nation and the Spanish tradition, but he will also assert that the creation of the modern state under the Catholic Sovereigns produced the military style of life which served as the foundation of Spanish power. The army was the exponent both of a style of life and the values of the national society. It supported public order and the necessity of rebellion when a government has deserted the national tradition.31 One may trace the rise and fall of the national spirit of service in the characteristics of the military system. Military morality may be and usually is close to Christian morality: the military virtues may be called simply the virtues of good men. Both the civilian and the soldier should symbolize a legitimate social order. When the parliamentary order has disintegrated and when the military as a disciplined system of order has taken over, the leaders of the government who are military men assert their right to formulate the national tradition and the national style in history. Thus, in our time, when the army or the colonels take over, they will say that social politics, mass progress, or some such formula, is the primary problem of the age. For the age in which peace, progress, and liberty are to be realized, the military declares that a well-organized power is needed, a strong and centrally functioning army, and a highly self-conscious and precisely stated social policy. The army comes to symbolize the level of

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national vitality and national morality. In this sense, the army is the mainstay of loyalty to whoever is the head of state.32 In the struggles maintained by the United States against Communist imperialism, we have tried to insist on civilian control of anti-Communist governments. We have had our anti-Communist revolutions, as in Guatemala, and our revolutions which have overthrown anti-Communist governments, as in South Vietnam. But the necessities of the worldwide struggle against Communist ideological expansion are forcing us toward accepting allies when and where we may find them. The just government is the government that is against Communism. We are slowly, but it might seem with certainty, moving toward the acceptance of army systems of legitimacy. We can accept them as not inconsistent with “democracy” since we regard them as transient governments, which will give way to some version of civilian government at least remotely related to the nineteenth-century representative and party governments.33 (B) When the French Revolution and its filiated political explosions destroyed the thousand-year-old system of hereditary, monarchic, and aristocratic legitimacy, there was in fact nothing to put in its place. There were the ancient principles of elected rulers (or oligarchies) and the democratic system which was beginning to take shape as a part of the republican ideas at the base of American and French doctrines. The people have a right to give themselves a government, indeed they have no right to refrain from doing so; but at the same moment there is the idea that the people must represent reason, and obedience to a constitution or to a system of fundamental law. The nineteenth-century vision of the Doctrinaires of a new legitimate order in society was deeply rooted in the past. The system of parliaments and parties was to be the expression of the sovereignty of reason, for reason would be the pre-condition of all systems of legitimate republican government, as well as constitutional monarchies. Royer-Collard’s vision of nineteenth-century legitimacy is one of the most moving of his time. He was one of the Doctrinaires who believed in the sovereignty of reason as the foundation of the Charte and of a new constitutionalism. His ideas influenced thinkers outside of France—for many of the early ideas of Juan Donoso Cortés in Spain—in his constitutional and liberal period were drawn from Royer-Collard. For Royer-Collard, it was necessary to formulate a principle of legitimacy in order to remake society. The democracy which he saw under Louis XVIII was a strong current which was bringing prosperity, industry, and riches into the new France. But democracy was not limited, simply because there had been a destruction of the principles of legitimacy. Democracy might return to its primeval nature of violence, war, and the bankruptcy of the state. It was said of Royer-Collard that he wept neither for the Bourbons nor for the past; he despaired of the future, and one day he addressed to one of his political conferees the saying: “To perish is also a solution.” If one struggled as did many a European leader of the nineteenth century to restore

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society through the sovereignty of reason, it had to be done through copying the British system of parliamentary government. One must hope that the political parties, the new factions in politics, might behave in a manner something like the Liberals and the Conservatives (or Tories) of the British political forum.34 As the century wore on, the experience of France, Spain, and Italy, became more and more disturbing to the students of politics who thought of themselves as leaders in a new age of economic and social progress. Such a study is the core of Ferrero’s analysis of legitimacy. The nineteenth century is an example of the wavering between the new theories of legitimacy, the democratic and the elective principles. Men simply did not learn to accept restraint in relation to those they hated. They did not love political parties, the freedom of elections, the right of the opposition to speak in the press and on the floor of parliament; withal they did not love the parliamentary system of majority control which had emerged in England and which was being “borrowed” in Western Europe. Where the parliamentary system could be combined with monarchy—the acceptance of kings who sometimes reigned but did not govern—the parliamentary system seemed to take root. Democracy and monarchy worked well together, though the principle of legitimacy was not primarily hereditary, aristocratic, or monarchic. Even the aristocracy and the monarchy were grounded in the system of elective government. Where parliamentary legitimacy did not work, the seedlings of revolution and a totalitarian system began to grow; the newer systems were only quasi-legitimate at best. The corruption of the democratic legitimacy has often been recounted. Friedrich Meinecke, among others, observed the growing unscrupulousness of the politicians, their Catalinian natures, their rascality, their stupidity, their brutal phantasy as directed against their political enemies, and their willingness to lie and to live with fraud. The campaign process itself had often been a corroding experience. But in the present time, “ideologies no longer sit so very securely at the stage where a culture has shadowed out into a civilization.” It is the age predicted by Jacob Burckhardt, the age of the “terrible simplifiers.”35 The political party has tended to become a conspiracy of interest, or the coalition of interests that it has represented. As Montesquieu observed of political behavior under the Roman Republic, every public meeting became a conspiracy against the orderly existence of the government. In the practice of such party factionalism, every effort was made to bring about the servitude of the masses to the new forces which were seeking power. Votes could be stolen, but there can be a generalized corruption of the electoral system, including the failure to count the votes or to count them incorrectly. The pistoleros and the preparation for the revolution marched together shot by shot. But where money would serve, violence was unnecessary, and propaganda often assumed the office of corrupting education and civic organization. The political party became, thus, a “political sect” with no sense of responsibil-

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ity to the total society. It has bordered on revolution very often, and the use of violence has been justified by ideology. The Rome of Pius IX illustrates the process of violence used to corrupt the election, and the madness of political claims as henchmen were led shouting into the streets. There is a strange lunacy in much of the Italian Risorgimento patriotism in the nineteenth century, but much the same might be said of France and Spain. The principles of opposition, discussion, criticism, and the free press were honored in the breach. Finally, in the mass movements of the twentieth century, these ideas were either destroyed or forgotten.36 It is quite possible that the democratic principle must turn back to an earlier system of legitimacy, to the rejected children of politics of another time. In Europe the operation of democracy has been best served with a monarchical system as a symbol of the whole society. For many Europeans an elective legitimacy may be associated with the hereditary and aristocratic principles of monarchy and aristocracy. It is here, it would seem, that the balance of social forces can be praised and in measure preserved. With the monarchy of moderation, the king as a symbol stands above politics and is thus related to the standards of society. Many Europeans say they are on the way to the creation of the social monarchy, the popular monarchy, or the monarchy of democratic regeneration. In the spirit of moderation there can be both opposition and criticism, and the political party ceases to be simply conspiracy and narrowed interest group politics. Moderation itself is based on a stringent criticism of the people as participants in politics. It recognizes that in elections there is a fictional, purely symbolic character, to the expression of the will of the people; that in the political activity of citizens there is much ignorance behind majority action; and there is political cronyism, caciquismo, and corruption. But with the moderation of imperfection, the wilder claims of the Don Quixotes of politics are held in abeyance. The hope flowers that social foundations for honest elections, intelligent criticism, and responsible opposition can create the democratic legitimacy of tomorrow. Even the most democratic may well say that the proper system of order in society cannot put its trust in the “heroic quality” of political factions. If order seems to survive in the more “advanced societies,” the practice of extending the democratic procedures to underdeveloped peoples led to confusion. It has led to the dictatorial perversion of emerging institutions of parliamentary government and public administration. In many of the African countries, we have put responsibilities on a limited and partially trained ruling elite which it can hardly accept. Those who once were doctrinaire democrats in their advocacy of parliamentarism are slowly but inevitably formulating principles which will limit democracy without returning to the antidemocratic criticism which followed World War I. Some, like Seymour M. Lipset,37 believe that the conditions for the existence of democracy are remarkably limited, but still it is assumed that the world is moving toward the maturity we have in our society. It

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is like the proposition of Immanuel Kant that we must act, quite regardless of fact or experience, as if the world is attaining the rationality of perpetual peace. Or, quite recently, Gabriel Almond has proposed that we use the Whig solutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the underdeveloped peoples: We will assume they are moving toward democracy, but we will also restrict their political freedoms until they are ready to exercise them fruitfully. We are here in the presence of the modern myth, of republican legitimacy, much, indeed, as Sir Henry S. Maine in Ancient Law spoke of the fictions of the law which are leading toward the more progressive societies. The will of the people must be expressed for a legitimate society, but will it not be in the Whig theory a little like the popular legitimacy of the lex regia of Imperial Roman days? Let us admit then that the most notable crisis today in democratic legitimacy is the underdeveloped country, where one may use the sophisticated fictions of Western Europe in the atmosphere of tribal disorder. With the failure or decline of parliamentarism in Europe, except in Great Britain (and Ireland), West Germany, Switzerland, the Commonwealth countries, the Scandinavian monarchies, and in the United States, the legitimacy which blossomed from the French Revolution has fallen on barren soil. Rather, legitimacy as it may be embodied in a totalitarian party, that is, a system which transvalues the will of the people, or in an army which stands for the formalities of a constitutional order, is frequent in our world. There is, however, another set of fictions that may be used. New and sophisticated systems of social classification may be invented and applied to the new tribal states of the world. It is not necessary to use the ideological or traditional vocabulary of Western Europe, where democracy, fascist, racist, and totalitarianism have had more or less identifiable meanings. In the jargons of social science, as the late Richard Weaver in his The Ethics of Rhetoric spoke of them, we have a double standard. One standard, the new one, which attempts to describe the underdeveloped states, covers up the barbarism of the new systems, while the old one still denounces much milder behavior in Western Europe and North and South America. We have thus in our social sciences a double standard of legitimacy which correlates with a double standard of political morality. We seem to be playing in our public utterances a kind of universal game of political pretendence. It is a political or Kantian symbol, and perhaps it is neither the truth of philosophy nor of experience. Or, one might say that, indeed, the meaning of democratic legitimacy is changing rapidly in the light of nationalistic insurgency which has accompanied the end of the colonialism of the recent past. It is our mythology against other formulae of alternative systems of legitimacy. These are systems which are being created as alternatives to the liberalism of the nineteenth century.

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VI Much of the crisis of regimes which followed World War I was set in the mold alternative to the parliamentary, capitalistic and democratic systems. The revolutions and near revolutions of defeated and victor led the way. First, there was the rise of the Marxian-Communist system, in which a totalitarian and ruthless regime managed to survive in Russia. With the apparent failure of the Communist drive in Europe, the new mass movements got under way as a propaganda remedy for the problems that the democratic state did not succeed in solving. Fascism and Communism have stood unalterably opposed to the parliamentary spirit of national life. The Revolt of the Masses has taken the form of international socialism, and nationalistic revolts against the liberal system. One wonders what might have happened if the Second Republic in Spain had proved moderate in its leadership and respectful of the national religious and educational tradition. A liberal polity in Spain could have combined all moderate elements in order to create a regime of freedom. However, as Gregorio Marañón argued, the liberals always support those farther to the Left, and thus they are destroyed by their own revolutionary children. They scorned the Right in Spain and did nothing to resist the advance of the Communists. Any Leftist seemed always preferable to any rightist.38 The profound study of the revolution is always in order in a troubled age. If we turn from the principle of hereditary monarchy, ancient estates of the kingdom, modern parliaments, or the system of democratic legitimacy which must include the rightful opposition and free and uncorrupted elections, where shall we go for legitimacy? The majority must be real, said Ferrero, and there must be fair play for the minority.39 Numberless intellectuals have followed the course of Marañón. It has meant turning away from the old movement to hope for something in the leadership of the mass governments under a new governing minority or elite. As the liberal program (which seems to have very little exclusively its own) is consumed by the extreme Left, nothing remains save disillusionment. The turn away from the revolution has occurred because it was perceived that the modern revolution destroys both local autonomy and the traditional social hierarchies of groups, functions, and regions. The intellectual who became a Communist, and then a fascist of some sort in one of the many nationalist movements, is incomprehensible to American intellectuals who have suffered only the minor disorders of the prevailing democracies. But such incomprehension is clearly mutual. The alternative systems were defeated in World War II, except for Communism which gained enormously throughout the world, including Asia and Africa. Still, the ideology of the alternative, or antidemocratic, systems has not been forgotten. Should the failure or disintegration of European parliamentary life continue, or should further victories be gained by the Communists, the appositeness of the alternative forms might again be more clear. What seems

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common in all the proposals for a legitimate society from Socialism-Communism through a multitude of new forms, is the criticism of parliaments and political parties. According to Donoso Cortés, the parliamentarism of the 19th century had its origin in the spirit of the revolution, and the continental system arose neither from the medieval system, nor from the model in Great Britain. The parliamentarism which the liberals and socialists wanted demanded unlimited power and it has often had little love for the liberty of those who might be part of the opposition.40 People like Donoso turned to the Church and to the military for the effective and valid expression of authority, obedience, and charity as the basis of civil society. Critics of liberalism began in the nineteenth century to return to the older theory of natural groupings or corporations in society. The modern revolution sought to destroy the ancient hierarchies of group life, which began with the family as the primary groundwork of legitimate government. When the family was undercut, some have said flatly that legitimacy was lost.41 Against the theory of natural groupings in society, one may consider the radical and revolutionary individualism that extends from Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Supreme Court’s decision in Baker v. Carr and subsequent decisions. The critic of liberal, socialist, or parliamentary, individualistic legitimacy will turn to the orthodoxy of the natural group, the natural corporation and the region, asserting the rights of groups and regions to be recognized in the structure of society. But, in nineteenth-century thought of a traditionalist nature, there is also the defense of the monarchy as the symbol of unity in society, as a governing or moderating force amid social pressures. For republicans, as Americans are, the devotion to monarchy in Western Europe today is beyond our understanding, except for the monarchy in Britain. Moderate liberals in Europe have tended to be monarchists—at times—but they have also desired to reject a group, estates, and corporative foundation of society, which is predicated on the religious and economic protection of the family. One must say, indeed, that Americans have almost no understanding at all of the theory of monarchical and familial society. The group and interest structure of society has been recognized in Catholic thought as in the Quadragesimo Anno encyclical of 1931, though in Europe the same idea was expressed in the medieval notion of the corporation, or universitas. 42 One of the deeper forces for the traditionalist rejection of the parliament and the parties has been clearly the violence of the programs of “democratic” and “liberal” parties.43 The defenders of the natural hierarchies to be found in any traditional and orderly society stand opposed to the liberal demands which would seek to absorb all such groups into the structure of the state or the government. VII Every political society seems to have moments when the legitimacy of its political order becomes doubtful. There seems to be a number of such periods

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in the history of the United States, when owing to public disorder there has been clearly an approach of semi-legitimacy. And semi-legitimacy suggests the emergence of constitutional crisis. Ferrero has argued that much of government in Europe in the nineteenth century after the revolutions was government by quasi-legitimacy, especially in Italy under its faltering parliamentary order. Crisis was often the agenda of the day. In America with the increasing conflict between races and numerous other social conflicts, it might seem that a constitutional crisis is possible. If disorder and violence become more prominent there is no possibility of the rational discussion of political issues and there is also an increasing resort to force, ultimately to the army as the carrier of a wavering principle of legitimate order. It was Edmund Burke who said to the French: “Everything depends upon the army in such a government as yours; for you have industriously destroyed all the opinions, and prejudices, and, as far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government.”44 Oakeshott has seen the crisis in the personality manqué of the mass-man of contemporary days, the man who is incapable of doing what is necessary for the maintenance of representative government, as John Stuart Mill once suggested as a necessity of orderly government.45 It means the breakdown of the three elements of order mentioned by Barth—consensus, sanction, and authority. There is conflict between law-enforcing agencies; conflict between races, cultural, and religious groups; respect for the Constitution seems to disappear and it becomes but a weakened symbol of evolution and growth; corruption in politics is accepted in stride, and then it is covered up to protect those in high places; power is gained by lies and the defrauding of voters; and there is attack on moral tradition by the emancipated. Though the symbol of elections remains, the exercise of sovereignty tends more and more to be simply recognized or accepted rather than created by election. In many historic situations, thus, sovereignty has tended to become fixed or immovable, and elections become simply extraordinary and subsidiary devices. In America we have insisted that consensus is the pre-condition of democratic action. Before the Civil War the breakdown of consensus was a mark of approaching political storm. Legitimacy was descending into semi-legitimacy, and finally into what we might call prelegitimacy. Alternative creeds are offered for consensus—race, nationalism, tradition in culture or religion—but there is seldom any good substitute for historical experience. The profound hope for legitimacy in America has been universal suffrage and honesty in the political process. We have assumed consensus is compatible with opposition and political discussion. We have believed the suppression of opposition as an organ of popular sovereignty would suppress the sovereignty of the people. There must be political fair play, and then the majority will be real, instead of a parliament pretending that it is not composed of irreconcilable minorities. It has been argued that the people do not really want to be sovereign, and when possible they have, like Caesar, refused the crown. In effect, one

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might argue that there was more desire for universal suffrage in America than in most other countries, but still, it was the leaders, the “political aristocrats,” who taught the people this; and thus they thrust universal suffrage on the masses. In the traditional representative orders of the continent, the estates were composed of cities (the bourgeoisie), the clergy, and the nobility. In the shambles of the French Revolution, traditional representative government was destroyed violently and with brutality, though in England the old and the revolutionary were blended together. In America, we had the representation of regions in both Congress and the state legislatures, and group interests brought the functional forces of society into the representative order. The doctrinaire position of Baker v. Carr and other cases suggests the final culmination of the individualism of the French Revolution, more, indeed, than existed in the individualism of rights characteristic of American political life in the eighteenth century. A student of the history of legitimacy might suggest that this was one of the more profound reasons for the debacles of parliamentarism on the continent. England preserved a traditional order and stood at bay the friends of the French Revolution. Even the extension of suffrage in the nineteenth century was carried on with the traditional formalities of British parliamentary order. Baker v. Carr overthrew a legislative tradition that began with the representation of the New England town in the seventeenth century. It may be long before our legislatures have arrived at the radical, Rousseauistic individualism that is implicit in such a decision. We must now ignore the natural groupings of society in so far as possible—though gerrymandering seems not to be inconsistent with the decision— and such social hierarchy as we were developing in relation to politics must now struggle on without the support of the state. Social forces will either not let such a legislative or parliamentary order work, or the new order will itself become some kind of a formality. There may be the emergence of tension in society in which Giant Ideology will more and more lash the ship of state. And this is nothing in the end but the revolutionary diet of the unwelcome public orthodoxy. 46 For some, we approach the tragic alternative which has occurred so often: legitimacy or revolution. Notes 1.

2. 3.

Authority has been defined as an accepted capacity for reasoned elaboration of judgment in a specific situation. It must be distinguished from coercive power because it is consensual power. Authority in effect tends to equal legitimacy. See Carl J. Friedrich and Morton Horowitz, “Some Thoughts on the Relation of Political Theory to Anthropology,” American Political Science Review, LXII (January, 1968), pp. 536-545. The Ruin of the Ancient Civilization and the Triumph of Christianity, trans. Hon. Lady Whitehead (1921), pp. 6, passim. Whether one agrees with the historian or not, this volume is one of the best on the issue of legitimacy. See a notable article by Nathaniel Weyl, “Aristocide as a Force in History,” Intercollegiate Review, III (May-June 1967), pp. 237-245, in which the author argues that

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

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one cause of the decay of the Roman aristocracy was the dysgenic use of lead vessels, especially used to heat wine in the colder weather. Lead poisoning is a cause of sterility. There was a decay of every aspect of Roman civilization except technology, and technology was the prerogative of the slave and artisan classes. Weyl also urged that as creative minds gathered in the cities the destruction of the cities, as by the Mongols, was a profound force for social decay. Jaspers, Philosophy and the World, Selected Essays, trans. E. B. Ashton (1963), pp. 72; and Ferrero, op. cit., p. 187. Lorenz von Stein, The History of the Social Movement in France, 1789-1850, intro., edit., and trans. Kaethe Mengelberg (1965), pp. 324, passim. Obras completas (1946), II, p. 210. Cf. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964). In this sense, any of the standard principles of legitimacy may be a symbol of the acceptance of order. Guglielmo Ferrero, The Principles of Power; The Great Political Crises of History, trans. T. R. Jaeckel (1942), pp. 21, 277, 138; The Two French Revolutions, trans. S. J. Hurwitz (1968). See also David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965), pp. 278-310, for an analysis based on current ideas in political science method. See Angel López-Amo, El poder político y la libertad: la monarqúia de la reforma social (Segunda edición, 1957), pp. 104. Hans Barth, The Idea of Order (1960), pp. 190-191. See Carl Schmitt, Politiche Romantik (Zweite Auflage, 1925), p. 38; Eugenio Vegas Latapié, Romanticismo y democracia (1938), p. 41. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953), p. 119; “What is Political Philosophy,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 19 (August, 1957), pp. 343 ff. On Hippodamus “who was the first person who made inquiries about the best form of government,” see Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1932), II.v.1; 1267b (p. 121). Xenophon, Memorabilia, trans. E. C. Marchant (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1923), III.v.14 (p. 197). Ibid., III.ix.10 (p. 229) . Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. III: and Plato and Aristotle (1954), pp. 300 and 303. For a different perspective, see Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (rev. ed., 1950), passim. See Glenn Morrow, ed. and trans., Plato’s Epistles (1962), pp. 49, and 163-164. Laws, 690 A-D. (Editors’ Note: Wilson is referring to the Loeb edition of the Laws translated by R. G. Bury [Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library 1923], pp. 210215). See Léo Moulin, “Les Origines religieuses des techniques électorales et déliberationes modernes,” Revue Internationale d’Histoire Politique et Constitutionnelle, (N.S. No. 10, Avril-Juin 1953), pp. 106-148; “Une forme originale des gouvernement des hommes: Le gouvernement des communautés religieuses,” Revue Internationale de Droit Comparé (Anée 7, No. 4, Octobre-Décembre 1955), pp. 473-771. Ferrero, op. cit., p. 221. Jaime Balmes, Obras completas, Vol. IV: El protestantismo comparado con el catolicismo (Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1949), passim. Balmes, op. cit., pp. 718-20, cites St. Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, Bk. I, Ch. VI. This is a frequently cited passage from St. Augustine. When James II in England tried to effect toleration, it produced disorder, and finally revolution. The Whigs did a smear job on James which has lasted into the present

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24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

Order and Legitimacy age. See Richard E. Boyer “English Declaration of Indulgence of 1687 and 1688,” Catholic Historical Review, L (October, 1964), pp. 332-371. See François Masai, Pléthon et le Platonisme de Mistra (1956), pp. 80, in which Georgius Germistus proposed in one of his fifteenth-century memoirs that there should be a virtuous prince who is effective. Masai notes that this is the modern state. The “divine monarchies” of the past might be cited for their claims to legitimacy. In China, Japan, and in Islam, the divine law was asserted to be the basis of the state. Today, the kings of Ethiopia claim to be in the Solomonic-Judean succession. There has been a transfer of religious mission from Rome to Ethiopia because of the corruption of Rome. The Ethiopian Emperor is regarded as a successor of Constantine, as well as the anointed king in the Jewish tradition. See Modern Age, 9 (Fall 1964-65), for Klaus Epstein’s review of recent literature dealing with Pius XII and the Church in Germany under the Nazis. See Friedrich Gentz, The French and American Revolutions Compared, trans. John Quincy Adams (1955). Adams and Gentz held that the two revolutions were radically different. See, for example, Enrique Gil Robles, Tratado de derecho político según los principios de la filosofía y el derecho cristianos (Third ed., 1961-1963), Vol. II, Ch. VI, pp. 336-355. It is characteristic of our day, however, to seek the reconciliation of the Christian principles of legitimacy and legality of the French and continental liberals. Such a view is characteristic of the Popular Republican Movement, antecedent to the election of Charles de Gaulle. See Ernest Barker’s introduction to his translation of Otto von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500-1800 (1934, 1957), pp. xxi. See Introduction to The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitution, trans. Clyde Pharr (1952). See Charles N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Civilization (1925), p. 493. He cites Georges Sorel, the revolutionary syndicalist, Réflexions sur la violence: The army is the clearest manifestation of the foundation of the state. See Manuel García Morente, Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España (1957), passim; and Jorge Vigón, Hay un estilo militar de vida (1953). Some have gone so far as to say that all of the governments of Hispanic America are so closely related to the military that the military is actually the foundation of the governments, no matter what the trappings and the formalities may be. At times such a situation is praised and defended as a civic virtue, as in Morocco in 1964 on the eighth anniversary of the creation of the armed forces. It was stressed for publicity that the army had an unbreakable loyalty to Hassan II. Contemporary ideologists have criticized the West German army because it has failed to be a democratic organization and a democratic social force. The Bundeswehr had not progressed ideologically toward democracy, it is said; but one might ask when, if ever, has such been the case. The army may be a school for virtue, but it is hardly a preparation for the traditional contests between parliamentary factions. Some Latin Americans have asked American leaders (especially after our armed intervention in the Dominican Republic) why Americans are so unwilling to accept military governments? If the United States intervenes, is it not a military government? Is one army different from another? See Philippe Sénart, “Royer-Collard,” La Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 Juin 1963, p. 568. See Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, trans. Sidney B. Fay (1950), pp. 92, passim.

Order and Legitimacy 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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See Willmoore Kendall, “Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side, A Review,” Stanford Law Review, 16 (May, 1964), pp. 755-767. Kendall is reviewing a book by Leonard Levy by the same title, published in 1963. Jefferson’s tactics against the Federalist illustrates the use of the traditional common law to suppress the criticism of his political party. The history of modern parliaments has shown that they may often be used to foster the revolution. The revolutionary conspiracy may work within parliament as well as without. Parliament may be caught in a whiplash of pressures which will amplify the general political distrust of the parliamentary leader. While the revolutionary party has obviously sought to use parliament to enact laws of various sorts, including reforms, which would aid in destroying the bourgeoisie, the contemporary Communist conspiracy has followed the tactics of its ancestors, the earlier socialist movements. One of the most notable of documents explaining such tactics is Jan Kozak, And Not A Shot Is Fired; The Communist Strategy for Subverting a Representative Government (The Long House, New Canaan, CT, 1962). This document was originally written in Czech, and it was called “How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the Transition to Socialism, and the Role of the Popular Masses.” It was apparently presented to the Communist Party’s political University in Prague in 1957, and it was smuggled out and published in English in London in 1961. Kozak made it clear that his purpose was to show how parliament may be changed from an organ of bourgeois democracy into “an organ of power for the democracy of the working people, into a direct instrument of power for the peaceful development of the socialist revolution.” Parliament may thus become an instrument of the revolutionary democratic will of the people and an instrument for the development of the socialist revolution. Seymour M. Lipset, Political Man (1960); see also his “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review, LIII (March 1959), pp. 69-105. Marañón’s essay Liberalism and Communism in Spain was first published in the Revue de Paris, December 15, 1937. It was republished in Argentina, and has been republished in Spain in Punta Europa. It was published in book form in Paris and Madrid, in 1961, and the first American edition appeared in 1964. It is one of the most notable of the classics of the Spanish Civil War. See The Liberal in the Looking-Glass (The Long House, Inc., 1964), with an essay on “Background” by Edwin F. Klotz. Op. cit., pp. 174 ff. Donoso Cortés, Obras completas, (1946), II, pp. 644, and pp. 313-314. Alvaro d’Ors, Forma de gobierno y legitimidad familiar (1960), pp. 39-41. In a later papal statement the suggestion of a corporate order in the reconstruction of the social order was dropped. See Garry Wills, Politics and Catholic Freedom (1964), pp. 174; see also n.17, p.216. Left-liberal parties in the nineteenth century tended to demand the destruction of the Church and religious education, but they also wanted to destroy the ancient corporations which controlled unreasonably at times the movement of economic goods. The free flow of food into cities was one of the liberal demands, and it is here, indeed, that we get one of the sources of the liberal principle of laissez-faire. In Spain, many of General Franco’s actual supporters do not think he has a moral right to rule. Franco has tried to combine democratic legitimacy (the plebiscites in 1947 and 1966) with monarchic and aristocratic principles from the past. The problem of the “restoration” in Spain would be comparatively simple if there had been no Carlist issue, and if there were no strength in Carlist feeling today in Spain. Supporters of “the Movement,” for example, the present formalistic Falangist Movement,

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44. 45. 46.

Order and Legitimacy have often urged that out of the Civil War a constitutional consensus has emerged, which is now embodied in the statements of principle re-adopted periodically by “the Movement.” Reflections on the Revolution in France (Everyman Edition), p. 217. See Michael Oakeshott, “The Masses in Representative Government,” in Albert Hunold, ed., Freedom and Serfdom (1961), pp. 151ff. See Willmoore Kendall and F. D. Wilhelmsen “Cicerón et la Politique d’Orthodoxie publique,” La Table Ronde, No. 159 (Mars 1961), pp. 70-100.

Index A B C: comments on Acción Española, 116117 Acción Española, 62, 80, 85, 105 Alfonso XIII, 80 Almond, Gabriel, 174 “An Anchor in the Latin Mind”: unpublished manuscript by Wilson, xv Anarcho-syndicalists: mentioned, xvii Antonio, José: appeal to common man, 84-85 attacks liberals and Rousseau, 88 blames liberalism for Spanish condition, 88 calls Second Republic the reality of Rousseau, 89 considers Inquisition of minor importance, 89 defends private property, 88 defends regional societies, 88 defends Spanish Church and monarchy, 88 executed (1936), 79 holds elections in contempt, 80 ignores French conservatives, 90 on loss of political and social truth, 83ff on Rousseau, 82-83 rejects parliaments, parties, and elections, 88 revolutionary traditionalist, 79 speech to judges at his trial, 85 surveyed, xiv mentioned, xiv, xvii Aranguren, Jose Luis, xix Arbor, 62 Aristotle: mentioned, xii, 165 on legitimacy in government, 165-166

part of conservative thought, 11 Atard, Palacio: on decline of seventeenth-century Spain, 62 Ateneo Español: mentioned, 27 Augustine, St.: on sin as origin of civil institutions, 52 replaced by Aquinas, 52 Azaña, Manuel: replaces Zamora, 81 Azorín, pen name of José Martiñez Ruiz: Clásicos y modernos (1913), 99 defines Generation of 1898, 99-100 Baker v. Carr, 176, 178 Balmes, Jamie: Catholic-Protestant comparison, 49ff defense of Christian history and Catholic Spain, 44 economic propositions, 44-45 El Criterio, 54 El Pensamiento de la Nación, 54 inquisitor of modern Europe, 43 mentioned, xiii, xvii Obras completas, 45 on Christian influence upon European civilization, 49 on Church’s role in ending slavery, 50 on economics, 55ff on education of the classes, 56 on effects of Protestant Reformation, 49ff on marriage of Isabel II, 44 on proper form of government, 5354 on sociedades anónimas (corporations), 57 183

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on women and the family, 51 rejects absolute human equality, 56 rejects notion of the goodness of man, 52-53 restatement of Catholic political thought, 51ff Roman Catholic priest, 47 subsidiarity in his writings, 55 suggestions for organic representative government, 47 surveyed, xiv Barcia, Pedro Calderón de la, 64 Baroja, Pío, 92, 92n18 Barth, Hans: three elements in the conception of order, 163, 177 Battle of Lepanto (1571), 63, 110 Benda, Julien: The Treason of the Intellectuals, 139 Bergson, Henri, 149 Bolloten, Burnett: The Grand Camouflage, xvii Bolshevik Revolution: mentioned, 17 Borrow, George: The Bible in Spain, 133 Burke, Edmund: Thoughts on French Affairs, 73 Burkhardt, Jacob, 172 Carlist Wars: start of, 26 Carlos II, 83 Cazala, Augustín, 74 CEDA, 81 Cervantes: Don Quixote (1605), 63 Chardin, Teilhard de, 70 Charles IV, 71 Christianity: concerned with economic and social order in peace times, 168 concerned with religious survival during war times, 168 debate over its role in history, 166 ability to adjust to any system of government, 166 Christian philosophy: part of conservative thought, 11 Community: essential to political survival, xii fundamental to Spanish politics, xii Communists: presence in Spanish politics, xvii-xviii

conservadurismo, 10 Conservatism: according to Edmund Burke, 11-12 confusion of terms after World War II, 113ff revolutionary against Second Spanish Republic, 9, 9n4 symbiosis of Aristotle, Plato, and Christian philosophy, 11 theory of community, 12 two types, 10-11 Constituent Assembly, 80 Constitution of Cadiz, 1812: mentioned, 25 Corwin, Edward S., 99 Cossío, Alfonso de: comments on Donoso, 37 Costa, Joaquín, 69 Croce, Benedetto: praises Inquisition, 73 criticism of post-Risorgimiento politicians, 134 Democracy: no longer revolutionary, 38 Donoso Cortés, Juan, Marqués de Valdegamas (1809-1853): admired by Metternich, 36 awarded noble title (1846), 27 defense of dictatorship, 29 Discurso sobre la Dictadura (1849), 27, 29 Discurso sobre Europa (1850), 27 Discurso sobre la situación de España (1850), 27 elected to Cortes (1837), 26 Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo (1851), 27, 30 formulates Spanish traditionalism, 24 and influence of De Bonald, 28 Lecciones de derecho político (Nov. 1836 – Feb. 1837), 27 letter to Conde de Montalembert, 162 letter to Count Raczynski, 25 letter to María Cristina, 34 Memoria sobre la Monarquía, 26 mentioned, xiii, xvii, 23 neglect of Spanish political philosophy, 37 on charity, 34 on evil in humanity and society, 33-34

Index on liberty, 32 on origin of parliamentarism, 176 on sin as basis of human solidarity, 34-35 on Spanish exaggeration, 25 prophet of crisis, 23-24 return to conservatism, 28-30 Spanish ambassador to Paris, 36 supports Napoleon III, 24-25 supports strong monarchial powers, 28 surveyed, xiv voluntary exile (1840-43), 26 d’Ors, Eugenio: comments on Donoso, 36 comments on Pelayo, 72 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: “The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man” from The Brothers Karamazov, 154 Duguit, Léon: French exponent of Solidarisme, 102 professor at University of Bordeaux, 102 influence on Maeztu, 102 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: mentioned, 6 Phi Beta Kappa address, 4 Entralgo, Pedro Laín, 65 Esquerra, 81 Ethics in politics, 168-169 European politics: subject of interest for Americans, xi Falange Española: mentioned, xiv, 79, 88 assimilation into Spanish government, 114 Federalist No. 10, 152 Feijóo, Father, 48, 62, 69 Fernando VII: restoration of, 25 Ferrero, Guglielmo: attacks Germans economically and politically, 150 Between the Old World and the New (1914), 143 four basic principles of legitimacy, 162-163 Four Years of Fascism, 142 invited to White House by Theodore Roosevelt, 142, 159-160

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Le génie Latin et le monde moderne, 142 mentioned, 134 on Italian fascism under Mussolini, 145 on origin of European and American civilization, 143 principles of legitimacy in, 135 Franco, General Francisco, 4, 84 fuero: defined, xviii Fuero del Trabajo (Rights of Labor), xviii Fuero de los Españoles, xviii Fundamental Law on the Principles of the National Movement, xviii General Narváez: mentioned, 29 Generation of 1898 defined by Azorín, 99-100 Germino, Dante, 92, 92n17 Gibbon, Edward, 73 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: appealing to all men, 151 thought immersed in Latin sources, 151 Golden Century, the: and education, 7 Gracian, Baltasar: mentioned, 14 Haile, H.G., 151 Heraclitus, 153 Hispanidad, 65 Hooker, Richard: mentioned, 54 Hulme, T.E., 102 Husserl, Edmund, 102 Ibarruri, Dolores: female Communist member of Cortes, 115 known as La Pasionaria, 115 predicts Sotelo’s assassination, 115 Ibor, López, 137 Inquisition, the: did not retard intellectual progress, 6972 established, 64 Pelayo’s defense of, 69ff praised by Benedetto Croce, 73 Isabel II: mentioned, 26

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Izquierda Republicana, 81 Jaspers, Karl: on destruction of German spirit of independence, 160 on the “axial period” of human development, 153 Jovellanos, 62, 69 Knox, Monsignor Ronald: mentioned, 49 “Krausism,” 64 Lara, Ortí y: coments on Donoso, 37 Law for the Defense of the Republic, 80 Law of the Succession of Chief of State, xviii Legitimacy: Crisis of in politics: since French Revolution exalted reason over tradition, 171-174 under heavy militarism, 169-171 Leo XIII, 55, 57 leyendas negras (black legends), 13, 68 Lipset, Seymour M., 173 Livingston, Arthur, 146 Lull, Ramon, 62 Maeztu, Ramiro de: Authority, Liberty, and Function in the Light of the War, 99 correspondent in England, 100 counterbalance to Antonio, xiv creator of Hispanidad, xiv criticism of Primo regime, 100-101 critic of the revolution, 99 critic of Second Republic, 101 deputy in Cortes, 100 dominated in late life by Hispanidad, 100 executed, 101 favors Costa’s political ideas, 100 influenced by Nietzsche and Kant, 100 invited to Middlebury College, 100 lack of faith in parliamentary governing, 106 leader of Renovación Española, 100 love for English and American continuity, 101 member of “Generation of 1898,” xiv mentioned, xiv, xvii, 11

moves toward conservative nationalism, 101 multitude of English and French influences, 102 on literary symbolism, 110 Spanish ambassador to Argentina, 100 Spanish traditionalist, xiv suggestions to counter the revolution, 106ff supporter of General Primo de Rivera, 100 surveyed, xiv thoughts on capitalism, 102-103 Maine, Sir Henry S.: on the fictions of the law in Ancient Law, 174 Malthus, Thomas R., 56 “Manifesto of the Persians,” 25 Manzanares, Carlos: Wilson’s letter to, xiii Marañón, Gregorio: “Liberalismo y communismo: reflexiones sobre la revolución española” (1937), 16 liberals destroyed by supporting those more liberal, 175 on resistance to revolutionaries, xviii warning to Popular Front, 17 María Cristina, Queen Mother: forced into exile, 26 Donoso’s support of, 26 Marques de la Ensenada: attempts to improve Spain, 36-37 Marrero, Vicente, 106 Maura, Don Antonio, 85 Maurras, Charles: Spanish Catholic rejection of, 62, 90, 94 Meinecke, Friedrich, 172 Mella, Juan Vásquez de: restorer of tradition, 116 creator of Hispanidad, 116 Mendizábel: and confiscation of Church property, 26 Mendoza, Juan de: bibliographer of Balmes, 45 Michels, Robert, 134 Miranda, Archbishop Bartolomé de Caranza de, 74 Moltke, Count Helmuth James von, 86 Moore, G.E., 102

Index Montemolín, Conde de: the Carlist Pretender, 46 Mora, Gonzalo Fernández de la: mentioned, xvii Morality: as judge of history, xiii Mosca, Gaetano, 134, 146 Nationalism: strongest force in Spanish Civil War, 17-18 “New Conservatism,” 113ff Opus Dei, 124-125 Orage, A.R.: editor of New Age, 102 influence on Maeztu, 102 Organic Law of the Spanish State: surveyed, xviii-xix Ortega y Gasset, José: mentioned, xv, 64, 134 España invertebrada (1921), 12 La rebelión de las masas, 86, 161 Orwell, George: Homage to Catalonia, 115 Owen, Robert: leading European socialist, 43, 56 mentioned, 35 Pareto, Vilfredo: “Karl Marx of the bourgeoisie,” 134 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 44, 62, 83 Pelayo, Don Marcelino Menéndez: according to d’Ors, 72 comments on Balmes, 57 defense of the Inquisition, 69ff defense of Spanish scientific achievements, 69 “Dos palabras sobre el centenario de Balmes,” 45, 66, 66n7 “el gran polígrafo,” 61 elected to Cortes, 65 Españolismo, 66 Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, 66, 66n6, 74 La ciencia española (1876), 65 mentioned, xiii, xvii on Henry VIII, 71 professor at University of Madrid, 65 surveyed, xiv Pidal, Ramón Menéndez, 3, 5 on the “two Spains,” 3

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Pius IX: revolt against, 26 Plato: Laws, 165 on legitimacy in government, 165-166 on the intellectual in politics, 139, 141 part of conservative thought, 11 Statesman, 165 Political Thought in National Spain: surveyed as Part I, xiii-xv Popular Front: 1936 electoral victory, 81 Pragmatic Sanction, 31 March 1830: mentioned, 25-26 Protestant theory of history: explained, 48 mentioned, 44 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph: leading European socialist, 43,56 on God, 33 Quadragesimo Anno (1931), 57, 116, 176 Ramos, Ramiro Ledesma, 82 Redondo, Onésimo, 82 Regulations of the Cortes, xviii Religion: central to national cultures, 13 Rerum Novarum, xiv, 55, 57, 116 Río, Julían Sanz del: brings Krause to Spain, 67 Pelayo’s dislike of, 67 Rivera, General Primo de, 80 Robinson, James Harvey, 151 Robles, Enrique Gil: on social groups, 12, 12n8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on popular sovereignty, 52-53 Social Contract, 82 symbol of opposition to conservatism, 52 symbol of political original sin, 164 Royer-Collard, Pierre-Paul: influence upon Donoso, 171 vision of 19th-century legitimacy, 171 Ruggiero, Guido de, 134 Salic law of mail succession: repeal of, 25 Santayana, Jorge Ruiz de (George): attacks Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche, 150-151

188

Order and Legitimacy

Dominations and Powers (1951), 135 included in Generation of 1898 by Sender, 150 mentioned, xv, 134 not concerned with historical proofs, 149 suggests majority rule causes national disaster, 135 The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, 148 Sartori, Giovanni: Democratic Theory, 134 Sender, Ramón J. Seneca, 62 Serer, Rafael Calvo: Las nuevas democracias, 54 Smith, Adam: mentioned, 87 Wealth of Nations, 44, 56 Snow, C.P., 136 Sorel, George: Réflexions sur la violence, 134 Sotelo, José Calvo mentioned, 81 criticism of the Republic, 115 revered today, 116 Soviet Union: influence in Spanish Civil War mentioned, xiii Spain: American interest in, 4 caricatures of, 3 conservative theory of welfare in, 122 contemporary conservative opinion of, 115 contemporary economic struggles, 120-122 contemporary neoliberal positions in, 126-127 contemporary suggestions for, 118120 influence of Falange today, 114-115 regarding foreign ideas and practices in, 124-126 shifting position of religious leaders today, 127 similarities with modern America, 1415 syndicalist thought in, 81ff transformation of liberals to conservatives in, 128

Spanish Civil War: historical sketch, 80-81 Wilson’s sympathy to Nationalists, xiii Spanish conservatism: three trends of, xvii contemporary positions, 116ff movement toward the Falange, 122-124 Spanish traditionalism: compared with American, 6 mentioned, xii, xiii synonymous with Carlism, 126 Wilson’s devotion to, xiii Wilson on recovery of, xv-xvi Spanish War of Independence (1808), 63 Sturzo, Don Luigi: leader of “Christian democracy” movement, 31 Subsidiarity: as means of perpetuating the republic, xi contemporary debate on, 123-124 Symbolism: as defining a national character, 3-8 “Theoretical illiteracy,” xiii Thibon, Gustave, 87, 87n12 Tocqueville, Alexis de: mentioned, 141 on religion and American democracy, 13 Tovar, Antonio, 65 Toynbee, Arnold Joseph: mentioned, 136 Study of History, 120 Tracy, Destutt de, 56 Tradition: aid to future generations, xiii relationship with conservatism, 9-10, 19n17 Traditionalism: defined, 8-9 revolutionary against Second Spanish Republic, 9, 9n4 Unamuno, Miguel de: mentioned, xv, 64, 134 Tragic Sense of Life, 6 Unión República, 81 United States, the: twentieth-century transition to liberal dominance, 139

Index Vauvenargues: Reflexions et maxims, No. 221, 19 Vives, Luis, 62 Voegelin, Eric: mentioned, 54 on “theoretical illiteracy,” xiii Order and History, 11 von Stein, Lorenz: analysis of 19th-century French society, 161 finds capitalist class to be foundation of government, 161

189

Weaver, Richard: The Ethics of Rhetoric, 174 Weil, Simone, 87, 90 Wilson, Robert Rawdon: mentioned, xv Zamora, Niceto Alcalá: demands abdication of Alfonso XIII, 80 president of Spanish Republic, 80 replaced by Azaña, 81