Spanish Conservatism: A Selection

Donoso Cortés was an odd duck. He is generally considered a counter-revolutionary but he supported the revolutionary overthrow of the legitimate king, Carlos V.

From The European Conservative

By Carlos Perona Calvete

A look at three representatives of Spanish conservatism: Donoso Cortés, Ramiro de Maeztu, and Elias de Tejada.

We are now between the 12th of October, Día de la Hispanidad (Day of Hispanicity), and the Spanish Conservatism conference, co-sponsored by The European Conservative and CEU-CEFAS, to be held on the 20th and 21st of the month.

To honor the former, and by way of introduction to the latter, it may be of interest to reproduce a few choice passages from some of Spanish conservatism’s major luminaries on the question of Spanish conservatism.

These are neither comprehensive nor even representative of the main work these authors produced, but they are relevant to the attempt to understand them in the context of a European conservative project.

Donoso Cortés, against the nameless region

We begin with Donoso Cortés, a brilliant expositor of Catholic political theology and opponent of the revolutionary ideas in vogue during the first half of the 19th century, when he lived.

From his essay on “Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism,” his proposed reform:

The fundamental error of liberalism consists in giving importance only to questions of government, which, compared with those of the religious and social order, are of no importance at all. This serves to explain why liberalism is completely eclipsed from the moment when socialists and Catholics propose to the world their tremendous problems and their contradictory solutions. When Catholicism affirms that evil comes from sin, that sin corrupted human nature in the first man, and that, nevertheless, good prevails over evil, and order over disorder, because the one is human and the other divine, there is no doubt but that, even before being examined, it satisfies reason in a certain way, providing the greatness of the causes to that of the effects and leveling the greatness of what it proposes to explain with the greatness of its explanations. When socialism asserts that man’s nature is healthy and society sick; when it puts the former in open struggle with the latter to extirpate the evil that is in it with the good that is in it; when it summons and calls upon all men to rise in revolt against all social institutions, there is no doubt but that in this way of posing and settling the question, if there is much that is false, there is something gigantic and grandiose, worthy of the terrible majesty of the matter.

But when liberalism explains evil and good, order and disorder, by the various forms of governments, all ephemeral and transitory; when, disregarding, on the one hand, all social problems, and on the other, all religious problems, it puts its political problems up for discussion, as the only ones that are worthy of occupying the statesman, there are no words in any language with which to praise the profound incapacity and the radical impotence of this school, not to solve, but even to raise these dreadful questions. The liberal school, enemy at the same time of darkness and light, has chosen for itself some uncertain twilight between the luminous and the opaque regions, between the eternal shadows and the divine dawn. Placed in that nameless region, she has undertaken the enterprise of governing without people and without God; an extravagant and impossible enterprise: her days are numbered, because on one point of the horizon, God appears, and on the other, the people appear. No one will be able to say where he is on the tremendous day of battle and when the field will be full of Catholic phalanxes and socialist phalanxes.

The solution to the misconceptions of both liberalism and socialism is to be sought, then, in the health of the society itself, its norms, and its institutions, which ought to render it strong enough to resist:

As regards evil, it is either in the whole universe or it does not exist. The forms of governments are little enough to engender it: if society is healthy and well constituted, its constitution is powerful enough to resist all possible forms of government; and if it does not resist them, it is because it is badly constituted and sick. Evil can only be conceived as an organic vice of society or as a constitutional vice of human nature, and in this case, the remedy does not lie in changing the government but in changing the social organism or the constitution of man.

Regarding such a “healthy and well-constituted” society, whose “constitution is powerful enough to resist all possible forms of government,” Donoso Cortés elsewhere discusses this constitution as having its center of gravity in “intermediate societies,” relying on neither privilege nor popular upheaval:

The constitutional traditionalist wants a Monarchy supported by the intermediate classes, [so] that it may not perish in the arms of oriental despotism, nor in the abyss of a [barbarous] democracy. He wants, in the final instance, that the representation and political formula of these intermediate classes be an independent magistracy, which represents the glory and preserves the traditions of Spain. 

We should specify that “constitution” here refers to social structure (what constitutes a society) and not principally a document like the U.S. constitution. 

Of course, today, resisting the wrong-headed policies of either liberals or socialists can scarcely be left to the proper constitution of a society, given the recent period of social entropy to which Westerners have been subjected. 

The question of regenerating, indeed, of generating afresh, such a healthy constitution, is what should occupy us.

Ramiro de Maeztu, Spain as the ecumene

Ramiro de Maeztu was a prolific writer who died in 1936 at the hands of leftist militants. His influence is particularly marked in the formulation of the concept of ‘Hispanidad,’ or Hispanicity.

In an article published in the first issue of Acción Española on the 15th of December, 1931:

Then we perceive the spirit of Hispanidad as a light from above. Disunited, dispersed, we realize that freedom has not been, nor can it be, a bond of union. Peoples do not unite in freedom, but in community. Our community is not geographical, but spiritual. It is in the spirit that we find both the community and the ideal. And it is History that discovers it for us. In a certain sense, it is above history, because it is Catholicism …

There is another, purely historical part, which shows us the capacities of the Hispanic peoples when this ideal enlightens them. A whole system of doctrines, of feelings, of laws, of morals, with which we were great; a whole system that seemed buried among the ashes of the past and that now, among the ruins of liberalism, discredits Rousseau and the utopianism of Marx, rising again before our eyes to force us to admit that our [Spain’s] 16th century, despite all its oversights, was right. That it [the Empire] carried with it the future.

We are tempted to rewrite that last sentence, “carried with it a future,” adding “a possible future yet to come,” for de Maeztu seems to be invoking the Spanish and Portuguese empires (more properly, the trans-oceaning Monarquía Hispanica) as a call to “return forward,” to move “back to the future.”

Indeed, the centuries Spain spent overseas, her vice-regencies, her “Repúblicas de Indios,” and preservation of local culture even as these were evangelized, for all this period’s faults, provide us with a model for a neo-medieval, associationist, future global politics.

In the same essay, de Maeztu explores the familiar theme of that fecund duality which the Iberian soul is frequently described in terms of that “civil war” of the soul projected onto our discordant 19th and early 20th centuries, and whose psychic tension represents a synthesis. 

And although it is very true that History reveals to us two different Hispanities … the one was that of El Greco, with his mysticism, his dreaminess, his reverie, and the other of Goya, with his realism and his fondness for the “scoundrel,” and which could also be called the Spain of Don Quixote and that of Sancho, that of the spirit and that of matter, the truth is that the two are but one, and the whole question boils down to determining who should govern it, whether the sighs or the eruptions. Here, for the moment, Sancho has triumphed; I will not be surprised, however, if the peoples of America end up following Don Quixote. In any case, both will find their hope in History: “Ex proeterito spes in futurum.”

The question of “who should govern” in the synthetic union of dichotomous opposition is exactly the right one. The complementarity of dyads consists of one being the director and the other the actor; one governs and the other generates; one witnesses and the other walks. The right hand is traditionally identified with “rectitude,” the left with the “sinister,” and yet they are mirror images. 

In this regard, however, we should not accept Don Quixote as an appropriate driver, as de Maeztu proposes. I would suggest that, here, we find an excess of romantic verve.

Likewise, I see the suggestion that the Americas are a repository of tradition, of “old Spain,” less polluted by French Jacobinism or English mercantilism, even for the decade in which de Maeztu was writing, as wishful thinking.

Cervantes, for his part, has a lot more to say on the topic of proper government and personal development in The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda (which remains underread and understudied and must be counted as among Spanish education’s more obvious failings).

Elias de Tejada, tradition or Europe

Francisco Elias de Tejada y Spinola was a scholar in the tradition of Spanish Carlism and defender of natural law, who died in 1978.

The tendency we have noted in de Maeztu of imagining a neo-imperial, idealized America accompanies a desire to emphasize Spanish idiosyncrasy with respect to political modernity and, specifically, European modernity. From endorsing the general orientation of a Donoso Cortés, then, and noting the excess romanticism of de Maeztu, we can cite Elias de Tejada as quite explicitly articulating certain vices that Spanish conservatism continues to cultivate (obviously this does not function to discredit the main of the scholar’s thought). This vice concerns Spain’s historical development and her future geopolitical orientation.   

In Traditional Monarchy he describes Spain and the ‘Hispanidad‘ as “representing nothing less than the Catholic conception of life in its most fruitful form … the Spanish Tradition is robust enough in itself as not to need foreign grafts.” Here, a particular national identity is viewed as, principally, a universal principle; a nation is identified with its faith and one-time empire.

Having so identified Spain, he goes on to contrast her:

Many interpreters of the history of Spain have judged that our condition was that of Europeans. For reasons of geography or the desire not to elude [simplistic] criteria … they were guided by a partition of the universe, in which Spain was part of the Iberian Peninsula and the latter was located in the extreme southwest of the European continent. They did not realize that Europe had long ago ceased to be a geographical concept and had risen to the level of a historical concept. It is not licit to see in Europa the daughter of Agenor abducted by Jupiter, nor the sister of the Argonaut Euphemus, nor the oceanic twin of Asia, as the ancient classical mythologies pretended. … When we speak of Europe today … the word is given a cultural, and therefore historical, meaning … a type of civilization. … Europe was not born in the circle of Charlemagne, with the restoration of the Christian empire in an organic hierarchy of peoples, later presided over by the Germanic emperors …

Rather, says Elias de Tejada, “Europe was born, on the contrary, as a conjuration of quintessentially modern ideas.” Europe, then, is modern, liberal, and un-Christian, to which our author adds that “the Western Middle Ages did not know of the concept of Europe, because it knew only of its antecedent: the concept of Christendom.”

This bespeaks some ignorance of the Middle Ages and what came before. The concept of Europe occurs as more than mere geography, but as, in some ways, a spiritual community, from the Book of Jubilees to St. Jerome’s commentary on Genesis and St. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies to the Estoria of Castile’s Alphonse X. This is often obviated by the broad brush of an understandable but intellectually and spiritually unfounded Spanish resentment towards the ideas and events that built European modernity.

It is difficult to write of Spanish conservatism without noting how conditioned by certain historical circumstances it has recently been. The reader of its key figures may often feel called upon to recalibrate their sentiments away from certain prejudices with regards to America and Europe; to compensate their pronouncements with his own understanding of American and Europe as they are today.

My intention in this essay, however, has been to make certain points I consider relevant while also recommending these writers to unfamiliar readers. The above is a paltry and somewhat polemically-chosen selection from the work of three thinkers who deserve to be read. 

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Click here for more conference information & to register for “Conservatism today: Preserving Freedoms, Traditions and Culture,” October 20 & 21 in Madrid, co-organized by The European Conservative and CEU-CEFAS.