Attempting to expound someone else’s thought is always a high-risk endeavor. But since I recently declared Dalmacio Negro Pavón the most significant political thinker in Spain in recent decades, with all due caution, I will outline what I consider to be some of the interpretive keys to Negro Pavón’s thought.
“What is government but the greatest reproach to human nature?” asked the American Federalist James Madison. The work of Dalmacio Negro Pavón reveals that politics cannot be understood without anthropology: the various conceptions of humanity throughout history are not mere theories but paradigms that have shaped the lives of peoples and conditioned political thought. In the current crisis of modernity, marked by the dissolution of human nature, reflecting on these anthropologies becomes an indispensable task.
Negro Pavón’s thought is distinguished by its focus on the metapolitical foundations of politics, particularly the interplay between religion, the history of ideas, and human nature. In works such as El mito del hombre nuevo (The Myth of the New Man, 2009), Negro Pavón develops a typology of anthropological conceptions that have structured the history of Western political thought. Far from being mere doctrinal frameworks, these visions express comprehensive views of humanity and its destiny, determining how community, authority, and legitimacy are understood. The political order, as the overarching framework encompassing all other social orders, is decisively shaped by ideas about humanity, which serve as interpretive syntheses of both mundane and transcendent life. While these ideas need not be strictly political anthropologies (i.e., designed specifically for political analysis), they are pre-political, often drawing inspiration from religious foundations or moral assumptions. Yet, as Negro Pavón emphasizes, every political order is oriented toward an idea of human perfection. This insight was articulated in a seminal 1957 work, El hombre, animal político (Man, Political Animal), by the Spanish jurist and professor Francisco Javier Conde (1908-1974), whose lectures Negro Pavón attended during his early university years in the late 1940s.
It is therefore essential to explore the socio-historical genesis of the grand epochal ideals embodied in various anthropological models. As Joseph de Maistre suggested, humans are not merely Italians, French, or Russians, but also Greeks, Romans, ancient, medieval, and modern. In the words of Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila, “The definition of man creates man, and is therefore an endless process.” Here, the history of ideas is crucial, explaining the emergence, expansion, crisis, decline, and destruction of the major anthropological paradigms that inspire political forms and what Negro Pavón termed the “modes of political thought.”
Negro Pavón’s methodological premise is that certain metapolitical concepts—liberty, justice, equality, or immortality—form the presuppositions of politics. Typically implicit, these concepts become politicized in specific historical moments, gaining intensity and generating conflicts capable of reshaping the social order. For Negro Pavón, the contemporary crisis of politics and religion stems largely from the neutralization or manipulation of these concepts, particularly the idea of human nature. Following Marcel Gauchet, Negro Pavón argues that politics emerged from the sacred and retains not only a foundational but a metaphysical link to it. Politics arose to ensure the observance of sacred rules within the religious order, based on a division of labor. Its aim was to prevent the disorder inherent in humanity’s sinful condition, the hubris arising from freedom.
Following Carl Schmitt, Negro Pavón maintains that a pessimistic anthropological stance is best suited to the needs of political analysis. Schmitt noted in The Concept of the Political that political theories can be classified based on whether they assume humanity is good or evil by nature. Negro Pavón echoes this when he states that, “Political realism distinguishes itself from other modes of political thought by its skepticism about human nature.” With these precise words, he opens one of his most significant later works, La ley de hierro de la oligarquía (The Iron Law of Oligarchy, 2015). Political realism is somber, embodying the “imagination of disaster.” Thus, Negro Pavón observes, “Great political thought often emerges when things are going frankly wrong.” As Ovid wrote, “Ingenium mala saepe movent” (adversity often stirs the mind).
Methodologically, then, anthropological pessimism is the most fitting tool for political analysis, as it is best equipped to describe, anticipate, and prevent the conflicts that naturally arise from human coexistence. Negro Pavón often justified the ontological inevitability of such conflicts by drawing on René Girard’s mimetic anthropology. “Politics is always more than politics, influenced by desires and passions,” wrote Negro Pavón. Due to mimetic desires, rivalry among humans is inevitable, leading to escalating conflict (intensity, Negro Pavón insisted, is a cardinal concept in politics). The primary function of politics, from its pharmacological origins in Greece and Rome, is to prevent and remedy these conflicts, offering protection against the disorder and civil war encapsulated in the Roman maxim Salus populi suprema lex esto (the safety of the people shall be the supreme law).
Negro Pavón reminds us that politics as an independent activity has not always existed across all cultures. It was a Greek discovery, born of the transition from myth to logos, which posited human nature as fixed and immutable and man as a political animal. This metahistorical shift revealed politics as an anthropological possibility, inherent to the human condition, inseparable from its moral character and mortality. However, with modernity—marked by Romanticism, the French Revolution, and Darwinian evolutionism—this stable conception of human nature began to be questioned. Humanity came to be seen as a mutable cultural and biological product, opening the door to new anthropologies that shifted from political to impolitical or even radically antipolitical.
Negro Pavón identifies five major versions of political anthropology that have shaped Western history. While all respond to the reality of evil, these anthropologico-political conceptions can be classified by their degree of ‘politicality.’ The most political are those that focus on liberty as the source of conflicts: politics, thus defined, seeks the common good by balancing the human passions that disrupt coexistence and cause social disorder. Less political are those that attribute the origin of evils to nature itself.
Michael Oakeshott identified three traditions of political thought. Originally, politics was tied to what he aptly called the tradition of “reason and nature.” Initiated by the Greeks with the discovery of logos, where the natural was the norm, Negro Pavón distinguishes two variants within this tradition. First, the politological, rooted in Greek thought, centers on communal life and man as a political being limited by mortality. Second, the eschatological, inspired by Christianity, integrates the former into the perspective of salvation and eternal life. Both view humanity as finite and contingent yet open to infinity through immortality. The Greeks discovered political liberty as collective liberty. Christianity, while not rejecting politics, does not elevate it either, accepting it as a secondary function (tranquilitas ordinis, per St. Augustine) and commanding men to “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” Up to this point, Negro Pavón argues, the framework of reason and nature holds.
Even Machiavelli, Negro Pavón emphasizes, did not break with this tradition, adhering to a Roman conception. “Machiavelli,” Oakeshott noted, “never lost the sense that politics is, after all, diplomacy, not the application of a technique.” Negro Pavón adds, “What Machiavelli did was study political action by establishing a new anthropological premise.” This was the cratological anthropology, which, in the long run, justified the artificial reason of the state order and fundamentally altered the idea of politics, replacing the art of the common good with the natural science of the common interest. Machiavelli described man as deeply corrupt, evil, and selfish, seeking only personal gain. Yet, Negro Pavón clarifies, he was not describing human nature as such but the human condition of the Italian oligarchies of his time. Machiavelli thus depicted only the homo politicus of his era. However, the Protestant Reformation and Luther’s associated view of corrupted humanity intensified anthropological pessimism, predisposing salvation to be sought in earthly political power and thus affirming the State. In this context, Hobbes elevated fear to a fundamental anthropological category. For Oakeshott, Hobbes’ man is “a creature civilized by the fear of death.” While Machiavelli’s aim was descriptive and methodological, Hobbes’ (with a similar methodology) was constructive. With Hobbes, radical immanentism began to take an ontological direction, heralding subsequent political anthropologies. Morality became a creation of political power alone. Hobbes thus inaugurated the innovative tradition of “will and artifice,” a new mode of thought shifting from a sub specie aeternitatis to a sub specie temporis perspective, steering history toward the disenchantment of the world identified by Max Weber. Paradoxically, or perhaps consequently, in response to the void of Hobbesian statist artificialism—“the coldest of all cold monsters,” as Nietzsche called it—which confines religion within politics’ borders, an antagonistic path emerges in the modern political world. With the impetus of the Calvinist “revolution of the saints” (per Michael Walzer), which Hobbes opposed, the politics of faith, in Oakeshott’s terms, gradually supplants the politics of skepticism.
Thus, the religious crisis of Christendom closes on a falsehood. Another model Negro Pavón analyzes, inconceivable without this historical premise, is fallibilist anthropology. Inheriting the methodological interest in rational knowledge, this democratic fallibilist anthropology views man as fallible, limited in knowledge and decision-making. Politics becomes a field of trial and error, characteristic of pluralist perspectives. Locke marks a decisive shift: no longer starting from a corrupt or dangerous human nature, he emphasizes the need for tolerance and humanity’s capacity to reason and self-correct in freedom. The principle of authority is replaced by public opinion and rational dialogue. Politics is conceived as a process of trial and error in pluralist societies that recognize no official creed, paving the way for the doctrine that power is inherently evil. This vision underpins modern constitutionalism and democratic liberalism, perhaps the swan song of the politics of skepticism.
From this point, a slide toward collectivist utopianism begins, rooted in artificialism. Angelist conceptions emerge, denying the real human condition in favor of a natural man. These anthropologies dissolve anthropological realism, speaking not of man as he is but as he was before a supposed alienation, and thus as he should be. With this new cultural substrate, thought becomes increasingly impolitical and antipolitical. This leads to various ideological modes inspired by the myth of the new man, a Christian idea politicized by modern ideologies. Rousseau is the father of this emancipatory version.
With the French Revolution and Romanticism, this radical collectivist angelist conception gained ground. It assumes man’s natural goodness, effectively denying original sin. Politics is no longer about containing passions or managing error but about realizing a new world, a regenerated humanity. This utopian, perfectionist model imagines harmonious, conflict-free communities, unlike the realist anthropological premise, and manifests in revolutionary and totalitarian ideologies. Politics, once disdained in its traditional medicinal role, assumes the revolutionary task of redeeming man on earth. Collectivism thus represents a decisive commitment to the politics of faith, opposing fallibilism: while the latter accepts human fallibility, the former denies or deems it temporary, trusting it can be overcome.
The fifth and most characteristic contemporary version is scientistic anthropology. Influenced by Darwinism and positivism, it denies a fixed human nature, viewing man as a malleable cultural or biological product. Transhumanism, its most radical expression, aims to create a ‘new man’ capable of overcoming mortality through technical immortality. For Negro Pavón, this conception introduces a new paradigm by politicizing immortality, not as a religious promise or collective aspiration but as a scientific and technical project. In this sense, scientistic anthropology paves the way for bio-ideologies (extensively studied by Negro Pavón) and marks a rupture with prior models: it seeks not only to perfect politics but to radically transform humanity itself. With this paradigm, biopolitics seals the death of traditional politics—not just Hobbesian mechanism but also revolutionary Prometheanism.
The unifying thread of these political anthropologies, for Negro Pavón, is the relationship between mortality and immortality. As the only being aware of its mortality, humanity seeks to transcend its earthly condition, giving rise to culture, law, and religion. The cult of the dead, the first cultural act, establishes the political community as one rooted in land and memory. Religion, Negro Pavón argues, is inseparable from politics, as both serve to bind, providing cohesion to human communities. He interprets late modernity as a time dominated by nihilism. The dissolution of human nature and the neutralization of immortality have led to fragmentation and the weakening of politics. When religion weakens, politics assumes ‘binding’ functions, giving rise to political religions. But when politics empties in a nihilistic horizon, the myth of the new man merges with bio-ideologies. Thus, the anthropological question, now reframed by biotechnology, artificial intelligence, or transhumanism, replaces the 19th-century social question as the core of political debate. Political anthropology cannot, therefore, be detached from the religious horizon.
In a 1942 essay, “Why We Cannot But Call Ourselves Christians,” Benedetto Croce wrote:
Christianity has been the greatest revolution humanity has ever undertaken; so vast, comprehensive, and profound, so fruitful in consequences, so unexpected and irresistible in its operation, that it is a marvel it has seemed or may still seem a miracle, a revelation from above, a direct intervention of God in human affairs, which received from it entirely new laws and direction.
Building on this reflection, Negro Pavón suggests that it is not incorrect to view the French Revolution as a ‘Great Counterrevolution’ against the de-divinization of the world initiated by Christianity:
Established as a mindset, it replaced theology in the 19th century, determined the impolitical or anti-political futurism of the 20th century, and continues to drive that of today.
The French counterrevolution, also marked by anticomania, prioritized the external man, the political man as the Calvinist citoyen liberated from original sin: the ideal human type of ideological thought. As Chesterton noted, the modern world was full of Christian virtues and ideas, wandering in the collective imagination until they went mad. This madness, in the realm of political anthropology, lay in the utopian aspiration to transform the nostalgic idealization of the Greek polis into a new Kingdom of God on earth. Indeed, with the modern political world, we witness what Spanish jurist Álvaro d’Ors (1915-2004) called the “revenge of Greece against Rome,” an expression Negro Pavón frequently invoked for its profound hermeneutic value.
Against the new ideological and utopian myths, Dalmacio Negro Pavón’s political logos extends the demythologizing light of classical philosophy and Christian faith, the “Roman way” (per Rémi Brague) traversed by Europe. Against the sclerosis of soft thought and the paralysis of ideological chatter, his work and thought offer a first-rate political antidote in the present historical moment—a lethal poison to the nihilist, moralist, and decadent elites entrenched in the anti-European Minotaur State.
This essay appears in the Winter 2025 issue of The European Conservative, Number 37:61-65.
