Approaching the Thought of Dalmacio Negro Pavón

Attempting to expound someone else’s thought is always a high-risk endeavor. But when the thought in question belongs to someone whose erudition and intelligence far surpass those of the expositor, the undertaking seems almost destined for failure. With my having recently declared that Dalmacio Negro Pavón is the most significant political thinker in Spain in recent decades, is this not precisely my predicament? There is considerable likelihood that my words might impoverish his rich political thought. To this is added the inevitable subjectivity with which one receives a thought that is not one’s own, for, as the old scholastic principle asserts, things are received according to the mode of the receiver (ad modum recipientis recipitur). What is learned from the master will always be shaped by the vital and intellectual conditions of the disciple, whatever these may be. I vividly recall how Negro Pavón himself would repeat that Marx was not a Marxist, suggesting that a thought vulgarized by followers inevitably distorts, to a greater or lesser degree, the authentic thought of an original author. At this juncture, what is one to conclude? Should one remain silent and refrain from attempting to convey the richness of thought of someone like Negro Pavón, precisely at a time of profound intellectual poverty in Spain regarding true political thought, when its dissemination and communication could do so much good? In short, we face a genuine aporia. But having reached this point, one must cut the Gordian knot; so, with all due caution, I will outline what I consider to be some of the interpretive keys to Negro Pavón’s thought. These revolve around two concepts that, in my view, underpin his intellectual project and were paradigmatically expressed in his inaugural address to the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and later published as a book: La tradición liberal y el Estado (The Liberal Tradition and the State, 1995).

In Negro Pavón’s thought, the concept of the ‘liberal tradition’ is a deep current originating from ancient sources which, over time, has acquired remarkably broad margins. It is a stream of thought in the history of the West that, chronologically, flows from Plato to Hegel, and from Hegel to Carl Schmitt. Over time, this current has been enriched by countless tributaries, highly diverse among themselves, such as Thomism, the Scottish Enlightenment, English empiricism, and the Austrian School of Economics. Equally included are the entire tradition of European conservative thought—from Burke and Tocqueville to Michael Oakeshott and Bertrand de Jouvenel—as well as Spain’s own contributions, for this Great Liberal Tradition, or Tradition of Liberty, incorporates the Spanish School of Natural Law, Traditionalism, and Carlism. To these must be added the more strictly liberal-conservative Spanish tradition of the 19th century and the thinkers associated with the former Instituto de Estudios Políticos (IEP) in the 20th century. This breadth of scope will undoubtedly surprise many. Two of his most notable traits were his refusal to uncritically accept clichéd interpretations of great thinkers, and without falling into vulgar eclecticism, his avoidance of narrow, illiberal thought. Curiously, it is precisely in this regard that Negro Pavón—the person, and his thought—converge. Liberal when dealing with ideas, he was equally so when dealing with people.

Yet, if the margins of this tradition are so broad as to encompass such heterogeneous authors—many of whom have traditionally been regarded as illiberal, if not anti-liberal—what, if anything, lies outside ‘the liberal tradition’? This is undoubtedly a significant question, yet the answer is straightforward: all forms of utopian thought—what Negro Pavón himself termed the “ideological mode of thinking”—are excluded. Excluded is any thought that presumes to possess the power to transform reality, whether in its social and political dimensions or in its more fundamentally human and personal ones. Here, his most paradigmatic work is El mito del hombre nuevo (The Myth of the New Man, 2009). By contrast, any author who has sought or seeks to adhere to existing reality with a degree of intelligence has, in Negro Pavón’s view, something intelligent to say and deserves to be heard. Naturally, this attention to reality gives rise to a chromatic plurality of interpretations and emphases. Yet all of them possess a degree of truth insofar as they prioritize the epistemological primacy of existing reality over the unreal and nonexistent. What Negro Pavón consistently rejected were unreal mental constructs—unrealizable by their very nature—whether they stemmed from a Promethean will to power, a romantic dream of transforming the human condition, or a blend of both. Conversely, all those who have thought from the standpoint of existing reality and sought to adhere to it, regardless of their achievements, are worthy of attention and study, for they contribute to the great Tradition of Western thought. As realistic thinkers, they will have pointed to something worth considering and, where appropriate, recovering. Utopian thought, insofar as it is utopian, is rejected precisely because its premise lies in an arrogant disdain for reality.

Does this realist thought align with a ‘right-wing’ perspective? It hardly seems forced to answer in the affirmative. And conversely, is utopian thought inherently ‘left-wing’? That is, indeed, our contention. In any case, for him, there exists a subtle correspondence between the (liberal) tradition of limited government and the tradition of thought limited by existing reality.

We now turn to some observations on the second major category noted at the outset: the state. Two writings appear to have held particular significance in Negro Pavón’s thought on this matter. The first is a 1937 article by Carl Schmitt titled “The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes.” The second, more recent, is by the Spanish jurist-political theorist Álvaro d’Ors, titled “Sobre el no-estatismo de Roma” (On Non-Statism in Rome), published in 1963. Let us attempt to outline some key points, beginning with the latter.

The two great categories bequeathed to us by Roman political thought are populus and ius. Regarding the former, it must first be clarified that ‘people’ (pueblo) is not equivalent to ‘population’ (población). In Spain, for instance, the population continues to grow, yet the people continues to wane. Population is a quantitative, statistical concept—it speaks of numbers. The people, in contrast, speaks of community, of interwoven lives, of neighborliness, and of shared histories, elders, and traditions. As Cicero would say, a people is a plurality made one through law. But this law is woven from customs (mores maiorum), born and preserved through the reverence owed to the gods (fas), and anchored in a handful of fundamental leges that delineate and order a distinctly Roman space and time. Thus, from a Roman perspective, ius united with fas, lex, and mos constitute the four pillars or cardinal points upon which the existence of a populus rests. From this people, constituted by law, derives the existence of things that belong neither to this nor that individual but to the people as such—things that become the ‘property of the people,’ that is, the res publica.

In this regard, Negro Pavón always retained d’Ors’ insight regarding the priority in Rome of the cives over the civitas, in contrast to Greece, where the term polites was derivative, and polis was the root term. Thus, a republic can only exist when there is a people juridically structured, and where the whole law rests on law, custom, and religion such that these four categories form an inextricable whole. This law-centered thought also dominated medieval thought. With the state, however, as Negro Pavón teaches us, law is replaced by ‘legislation’—a set of coercive orders and regulations issuing from an authority external to society, with the aim of imposing an ‘order’ that society is presumed to lack. Thus, the modern notion of the ‘rule of law’ distorts the legacy of tradition, insofar as the State submits to law, but to a law—or rather, legislation—that it creates at will. Assuming that society is merely an aggregate of individuals occupying a space—now reduced to a “non-place,” in Marc Augé’s term—and constituting a mere ‘population,’ the state, like Ockham’s voluntarist God, creates an artificial and voluntarist order so that this amorphous, malleable mass, conveniently termed ‘society’—an abstract and colorless category—may possess a specific internal order.

It could be said, therefore, that the transition from people to society entails moving from something defined by an internal political-juridical endoskeleton to something defined by an externally imposed state exoskeleton. If the people is replaced by the population, by analogy, the historical nation is replaced, through the state’s agency, by the political nation. This idea of the nation, defined since the French Revolution as an abstract set of ‘free and equal citizens,’ consists of individuals with no attributes beyond formal freedom and equality, devoid of history, tradition, or hierarchies. A nation so conceived, liberated from tradition, is indeed in a position to ‘self-determine’ at any moment, acquiring a so-called ‘constituent power,’ as if a nation, by its mere existence, were not already constituted. In keeping with this, Negro Pavón never believed in so-called constitutional patriotism, a category—or rather, a slogan—that, in his view, amounted to a feeble and lifeless parody of true patriotism, incapable of seriously mobilizing anyone.

This impotence for sacrifice becomes clear when one considers that the state is a rival to the sacred and, ultimately, to the Church. This rivalry is far from mysterious and is easily understood, as statism historically emerged as a rational response to the conflict sparked by the Protestant Reformation and the need felt by European nations to establish a power above the conflicting confessional factions (per Carl Schmitt). It was precisely the state’s demonstrated ability to neutralize religious civil war that made it the great historical victor over religion. From that moment, faith in a transcendent and superhuman power, far from being seen as a source of unity and concord for peoples, as had traditionally been thought, came to be viewed with suspicion. Faith began to be regarded as a source of division and conflict, having led European societies to unprecedented levels of discord, hatred, and strife. Consequently, faith was relegated to a private sphere with no social or political consequences, as a prerequisite for social peace—a peace that became the state’s great objective. But this was only a first step. Alongside the conflicting religious confessions, the state proceeded to disarm and subdue all other social powers that might challenge it, monopolizing both military and police force and the power to extract resources directly from citizens, bypassing traditional intermediary powers, whether estates or communal authorities. This unique and uncontestable power was named ‘sovereignty’ by Bodin. That the state, through the subjugation, absorption, or neutralization of all traditional powers—most especially the Church’s auctoritas—was incompatible with the Western political tradition of liberty was, for Dalmacio Negro Pavón, beyond doubt. However, he never deduced from this that the state should simply be abolished, if such a thing were even possible. The state has fulfilled—and the question is whether it still does—an undeniable historical function. What he proposed, and what he proposed to those of us who heeded his teachings, was a thorough understanding of it. This is by no means obvious. Yet it remains true that a social or political phenomenon becomes fully intelligible only when its historical cycle has concluded.

This essay appears in the Winter 2025 issue of The European Conservative, Number 37:53-56.