WHAT WAS AT STAKE:

[P]erhaps the most forceful advocate of Spanish traditionalism was the political theorist Ramiro de Maeztu. Maeztu was a member of the "Generation of '98" that faced the reality of Spain's decline after the Spanish-American War.

He lamented the acceptance of "humanism" that by the end of the sixteenth century had dominated Europe, which led to a loss of consciousness of man's living in sin. That in turn shaped the idea of the "state" as supreme.

Maeztu traces the idea of the state from Hobbes, who argued that the state was founded on necessity, through Rousseau, who asserted man's natural goodness and gave to the state, in Maeztu's words, "supreme, unique, and absolute power."

The unity of the power of the state, which all the political theories of the modern age affirm, worked against the principle of subsidiarity. In Spain, stability had been given to political order by socially corporate institutions--the family, Church, guilds--which were dissolved by the discovery of human personality in the Renaissance. There were consequences: "the clergyman left the Church to become a humanist, a heretic, or the minister of a king." The landlords neglected their duties and saw in their properties only a source of income, which they needed in order to live at the royal court.

In Germany the state eventually became an ethical ideal, and German children were taught that "goodness is immanent in the State." The "hedonistic ideology" of France also came under Maeztu's critical eye, as did laissez-faire economics.

Maeztu lamented a lost opportunity to reshape Spanish university education: he felt that General Primo de Rivera, as prime minister of Spain from 1923 to 1930, was too busy "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 tradition."

Maeztu's enemies were not too busy that they forgot him. He was murdered by Republican soldiers in 1936 after the Nationalist uprising against the Second Republic.

Dynastic turmoil that included the murder of Catholic priests, and the dominance of L'esprit revolutionnaire among the intellectuals, had contributed to the departure of King Alfonso XIII in 1931 and the proclamation of the Second Republic. The brutal Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was fought between Spanish leftists defending "the Republic" and traditionalists who joined forces with the Spanish military led by Francisco Franco, who subsequently established an authoritarian regime that satisfied few except Franco sympathizers.

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