Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora

In this Spanish name, the family name is Fernández de la Mora.

Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora
Minister of Public Works of Spain
In office 13 April 1970 – 4 January 1974
Prime Minister	Francisco Franco
Preceded by	Federico Silva Muñoz
Succeeded by	Antonio Valdés González-Roldán
Personal details
Born	Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora y Mon (1924-04-30)30 April 1924 Barcelona, Kingdom of Spain
Died	Madrid, Spain
Political party	People's Alliance

Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora y Mon (30 April 1924 – 10 February 2002) was a Spanish politician, diplomat, essayist and political philosopher. From the 1960s, he was the main ideologue of technocracy in Spain and one of the main exponents of the "immobilist" line of the Franco regime. Minister of Public Works under Franco's dictatorship (1970–1974), he was a staunch defender of Franco's political legacy. During the transition he was one of the founders of the People's Alliance party, from which he eventually left because of a disagreement between him and the organisation on the approval of the 1978 Constitution, which Fernández de la Mora strongly opposed, considering it to be typical of what he called a "partitocracy".

Biography

Ealy life and education

Fernández de la Mora was born in Barcelona into a deeply Catholic and monarchist family, which moved to Madrid when he was just two years old. He had just begun his secondary studies at the Colegio del Pilar when the Civil War broke out, and caught him on holiday in Galicia. It was in Galicia that he completed his secondary education, at the Colegio de Santiago Apóstol (today the Colegio de San Jerónimo) in Santiago de Compostela, a school ran by the Society of Jesus, through whom, according to his memoirs, he was introduced to the "ideal construction of the future" and imbued with the need for "strict moral discipline" in intellectual research and in life. His father, a colonel, held a position in the Military Legal Corps and the (largely honorary) title of Gentleman of the Chamber of King Alfonso XIII. His mother, of Galician origin, also belonged to a Catholic monarchist family. His Asturian ancestors included prominent political figures such as Alejandro Mon (head of government and Minister of Finance under Isabella II, under the Moderate Party label) and Alejandro Pidal y Mon, leader of the Catholic Union and, among other positions, Spanish Ambassador to the Holy See and Minister of Public Works in the government of Cánovas del Castillo.

Once the Civil War was over, Fernández de la Mora returned to Madrid and in 1940 began studying law and philosophy and literature (specialising in pure philosophy) at the University of Madrid, graduating in both subjects with first class honours (premio extraordinario) in 1945. At university, where his favourite teachers were Federico de Castro, Francisco Javier Conde, Juan Zaragüeta, Leopoldo Eulogio Palacios and José Camón Aznar, he came into contact with the Young Monarchists, then led by Joaquín Satrústegui, and with the survivors of Acción Española, and soon joined the political and intellectual circles campaigning for the restoration of the traditional monarchy. At that time, monarchism was the cornerstone of Fernández de la Mora's thinking, at a time when the new state that had emerged from the Civil War was headed by Ramón Serrano Suñer, a follower of fascist ideology who did not accept any of the pre-Civil War political movements. The Young Monarchists, who had enjoyed a certain influence under the leadership of Joaquín Satrústegui, were thwarted in university circles by the preponderance of the Spanish University Union (SEU, the official Phalangist student union) — which led to frequent clashes with Phalangist students — and by the hostility of Franco's authorities towards monarchist movements.

In 1945, at the Satrústegui logis, he gave a lecture entitled La soberanía y el Super-Estado (literally, "Sovereignty and the Super-State"), in which he advocated European unity and the overcoming of the nation-state. An admirer of José Ortega y Gasset, he had a meeting with the philosopher, but came away disappointed. Nevertheless, he continued to hold Ortega in high esteem, particularly appreciating his elitism and aversion to socialism and democracy. He also took an interest in the character and work of Xavier Zubiri and attended his private philosophy classes, where he was introduced to the ideas of Auguste Comte and the "new physics".

Fernández de la Mora's militancy within the Marian Congregations of Madrid and in favour of their conception of public morality took the form of shock groups that carried out acts of street vandalism. Similarly, his membership of the Young Monarchists led him to take part in banned public demonstrations in praise of the King, one of which earned him a 72-hour stay in a Directorate General of Security prison on 4 February 1945 and a fine of 25,000 pesetas for distributing leaflets on the Gran Vía announcing the King's arrival in Estoril and bearing the rallying cry "The King is coming, long live the King".

As a young man, Fernández de la Mora was already in contact with a number of leading figures in the monarchist milieu, including José María Pemán, José Ignacio Escobar, Joaquín Calvo Sotelo, Juan José López-Ibor, José de Yanguas Messía and Torcuato Luca de Tena. At the age of 20 he published his first book: Paradoja, which was praised by Azorín.

Fernández de la Mora's monarchist stance remained unchanged throughout Francoism, to the extent that he was involved in the main monarchist initiatives, even though, during the political transition, he disavowed the figure of Juan Carlos I, whom he accused of being one of the driving forces behind the change of political regime. However, Fernández de la Mora's monarchist militancy should not be interpreted as an attitude of opposition to Francoism and does not call into question his loyalty to the Spanish State. The monarchy advocated by Fernández de la Mora, far from being a means of challenging the regime, was the traditional monarchy theorised by the members of Acción Española, and not the democratic and liberal one heralded by Satrústegui and part of the Young Monarchists.

Career overview

Diplomatic service

After obtaining a degree in pure philosophy, he enrolled at the Diplomatic School in 1946, an institution he was to head a few years later. He was also a member and librarian of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and a member of various foreign academies: in Geneva, New York, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, etc.

On 4 June 1948, at the age of 23, Fernández de la Mora entered the diplomatic service by competitive examination and was appointed secretary to the embassy in the European zone, insisting on being sent to the Federal Republic of Germany to learn German.

As a diplomat, he served as Vice-Consul of Spain in Francfort-sur-l'Oder (1949) and then, after the Spanish diplomatic staff had been transferred to Bonn, as chargé d'affaires in that city, which had become the capital of the new republic (1949–1951). In Germany, he completed his philosophical training by attending courses at the University of Cologne, where he had the opportunity to study Husserl and Heidegger and where he became acquainted with the constitutionalist Carl Schmitt. At the University of Bonn, he studied the works of Curtius, Benn and Rothacker, deepened his knowledge of Kant and immersed himself in Max Weber. At the same time, he became involved in a major campaign to improve Spain's image in German universities and the press. In December 1951, due to his father's declining health, and despite having recently been promoted to the post of Second Class Secretary at the Bonn embassy in February of that year, Fernández de la Mora requested and obtained a transfer to Madrid, where he joined the Directorate General for Cultural Relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

He represented Spain at UNESCO General Assemblies in New Delhi and Paris, and at conferences of European ministers of education in London, Vienna, Strasbourg and Versailles. He taught at the Diplomatic School and the School for International Civil Servants in Madrid.

He was appointed cultural attaché at the Spanish embassy in Athens (1961–1962), where he was closely involved in the talks aimed at resolving the religious incompatibility between Prince Juan Carlos, a Catholic, and Princess Sophie of Greece, an Orthodox.

Into the intellectual arena: Arbor and ABC

In the 1950s, Fernández de la Mora's activities intensified in the context of the confrontation between the two most influential cultural fractions of the Franco regime: on the one hand, a number of Phalangist intellectuals (Pedro Laín Entralgo, Antonio Tovar, José Luis López Aranguren, Dionisio Ridruejo and others), which, under the auspices of the Minister of Education Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, had begun to move towards democratic liberalism, albeit in their own way, and on the other hand, the supporters of the traditionalist tendency, most of whom belonged to Opus Dei and used magazines such as Arbor and Atlántida, or the publishing house Rialp, as a vehicle for their ideas. Although Fernández de la Mora did not belong to Opus Dei, he adopted its ideological line, along with figures such as Rafael Calvo Serer, Florentino Pérez Embid, Vicente Marrero, Vicente Rodríguez Casado and Antonio Millán-Puelles.

In particular, the cultural magazine Arbor, founded in Barcelona in 1943 by Calvo Serer, Raimon Panikkar and Ramón Roquer, with the financial backing of the National Research Council (CSIC, where Fernández de la Mora was appointed vice-secretary of the Modern Cultures department in 1952), and whose first issue appeared in January 1944, aimed to achieve a synthesis and intellectual unity of the political and social sciences framed by a solid cultural vision. The magazine evolved ideologically, and from 1948 onwards, in accordance with the wishes of Calvo Serer, its main contributor, it became the intellectual vehicle and support for a neotraditionalist monarchist group wishing to play a united role in Spanish cultural life. The magazine's editorial team, whose articles took on a much more doctrinal tone, aimed to influence the political and cultural configuration of Spain as it emerged from the Civil War, in other words, impregnated with Christian counter-revolutionary thought. Faithful to the ideas of Menéndez Pelayo, the Arbor group believed that the only authentically Spanish path was the identification between Hispanicism and Catholicism; division and heterodoxy had been fatal for Spain, as its history attests. The Civil War had led to the victory of the traditional vision and marked the end of a conflict that had lasted for centuries.

On the other hand, the group of "liberal phalangists", driven by a desire for synthesis, advocated national integration under the superior concept of Hispanicity and considered it essential to recover a certain number of authors who had ideologically belonged to the defeated side of the Civil War and whose thought, although considered pernicious by Arbor's neotraditionalists, was deemed fully compatible with his project for a new Spain. According to Menéndez Pelayo, the necessary unity of Spanish culture around the traditional Catholic vision was to put an end to the inferiority complex that had gripped the Spanish people in the aftermath of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and had led them to experience their national being as problematic. Spain, once again proud of itself, had to exclude heterodoxy and remain faithful to its organic Catholicism. The antinomy between the two groups was made clear in an article by Ridruejo in 1952, in which the Arbor representatives were described as "excluyentes" (exclusionary) and the liberal Phalangist group as "comprensivo" (inclusive).

Fernández de la Mora, in arguing that Spain's problem stemmed from a psychological factor (the inferiority complex) but that the country's economic progress augured a prosperous future, departed from Arbor's strict orthodoxy, according to which the solution to Spain's problem lay in its assuming its Catholic essence, and not in material and economic progress. Despite these disparities, by 1953 Arbor could pride itself on being a compact pressure group with a notable doctrinal coherence among its members. The group controlled the magazines Ateneo and La Actualidad Española, and several of its members were prominent in the newspapers ABC and Informaciones. It also published a collection of books, the Library of Contemporary Thought (BPA, Biblioteca de Pensamiento Actual), and was well established within the CSIC. The journal Ateneo, which Fernández de la Mora co-founded, brought together monarchist and traditionalist intellectuals around a coherent political project capable of offering an alternative to both Phalangism and political Catholicism. Its contributors, while wishing to preserve tradition, advocated the modernisation of economic and administrative structures, without jeopardising the stability of the regime born of the Civil War, and called for an agreement between Franco and Juan de Borbón with a view to a traditional monarchy. On a cultural level, he aimed to build a "unitary national consciousness" in the sense of Menéndez Pelayo, and on a socio-economic level, to reconcile capitalist modernisation with traditional Catholic principles.

However, at that time the government, which had been Christian Democrat from 1951 and was favourable to left-wing phalangism, included several ministers who were ideologically closer to the "inclusives", including Ruiz-Giménez, which meant that censorship tended to target members of the group, to the extent that Calvo Serer eventually gave up and the group ceased to exist as such in 1956. Calvo Serer had proposed that the leading political role should fall to the "third force" embodied by the Arbor group, which was to arbitrate between right-wing and left-wing phalangism; but by 1953, the political and cultural project that aimed to provide the regime with an ideological framework, in which Don Juan was put forward as the legitimate heir to the order established after the Civil War, and in which many intellectuals had invested themselves, had been abandoned. Fernández de la Mora, who had played a leading role in this cultural battle, was personally and deeply affected by the rejection of Arbor's neotraditionalist project. Faced with this state of affairs, some, realising the impossibility of reconciling the monarchical project with the current regime, joined the opposition, while others, like Fernández de la Mora, deduced that Franco's will was the only factor capable of restoring the monarchy. As a result, Fernández de la Mora took the path of greater integration into the regime, without abandoning his monarchist affinities.

Fernández de la Mora also became a regular contributor to ABC, and even one of its most prolific contributors, after his friendship with Torcuato Luca de Tena, with whom he had become acquainted during his military service, opened the newspaper's doors to him. In fact, in September 1952, at the same time as Torcuato Luca de Tena was appointed head of ABC, Fernández de la Mora was appointed head of the collaborations section, with a view to giving new impetus to the paper, which was in danger of stagnating. Between 1953 and 1959, he was in charge of book reviews, an activity he would later compile in the seven volumes of his Spanish Thought series (1964–1970). Thus placed, despite his youth, at the doctrinal helm of one of Spain's most influential periodicals, Fernández de la Mora was to write dozens of editorials for it, at the same time as fulfilling his duties at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, the stranglehold of Franco's censorship continued to tighten around ABC, until Torcuato Luca de Tena was removed from the management team. Although Fernández de la Mora subsequently resigned as head of the contributors' section, he continued to contribute regularly, and some of the articles published in the paper were later included in his book The Twilight of Ideologies. Fernández de la Mora's relationship with ABC finally came to an end when Luis María Anson, who had previously opted for monarchism in opposition to Franco's regime, took over as editor in 1983.

Monarchist militancy

In 1956, Fernández de la Mora became a member of Don Juan's Privy Council, in line with the latter's desire to favour the traditionalist line in his circles of collaborators. He took on the task of bringing Don Juan closer to the Head of State and the Carlist branch, and persuading each of them of the desirability of a "Catholic, social, representative, national and hereditary monarchy". By this time, Fernández de la Mora had become convinced that the restoration of the monarchy could only be achieved by bringing Don Juan closer to the Caudillo, as he did not see the monarchy as an alternative to the regime, but rather as a continuation of the work accomplished by Franco. The Council continued to favour traditionalist elements, reducing the Liberal Democrat group to a minority.

The Congress of the European Movement, held in Munich in June 1962 and denigrated by the regime as the Munich concubinage, brought to light the split within Spanish monarchism between those who remained attached to Franco's regime and those who had taken the step towards more open opposition. Fernández de la Mora, who continued to believe that the traditional monarchy was the best way to continue the work of modernising Franco's state, wrote an article criticising the meeting, focusing his attacks on Madariaga.

Fernández de la Mora remained convinced that the return of the monarchy could only take place through Franco's will, and not as a result of the Crown's own dynamism, and also realised that Don Juan was now emerging as an opponent of the regime in democratic and liberal colours, Alongside other like-minded monarchists, Fernández de la Mora spearheaded the so-called "Operation Prince", aimed at popularising the figure of Juan Carlos I, who showed no fault in his attitude, and thus promoting his appointment as Franco's successor. Franco's appointment of Juan Carlos as his successor in 1969 meant, in Fernández de la Mora's eyes, the victory of the collaborationist monarchists, among whose ranks he counted himself. (It is true, however, that several years later, following the transition to democracy, Fernández de la Mora was to stigmatise Juan Carlos I as one of the main dismantlers of the State as derived from the Fundamental Principles, in which he had retained absolute faith).

According to Fusi, "Fernández de la Mora, under the pseudonym of Diego Ramírez, launched violent diatribes against aperturismo and democracy". He was constantly hostile to liberal democracy, and instead defended what he called "organic democracy", which "is more authentic and has been more effective in our country" (referring to Franco's regime). In his memoirs, he also described Franco as "the most honest and effective ruler Spain has had since at least Philip II".

Jurist for Franco's government

In the spring of 1957, in the aftermath of the 1956 crisis and the government reshuffle of the following year which had sealed the radical reversal of the Franco regime's economic policy (at the expense of the autarkic policy followed until then), Laureano López Rodó, who, according to Fernández de la Mora, "was already Carrero Blanco's éminence grise", proposed, at Carrero Blanco's request, that "in absolute secrecy, we draft bills for fundamental laws to complete the institutional system that previous laws had already begun to put in place", taking into account the new governmental direction. This collaboration took concrete form in the Law on the Fundamental Principles of the National Movement, promulgated in 1958, and in the Organic Law of the State, conceived at the same time, although, by Franco's decision, it did not see the light of day until 1966.

In particular, the first draft set out two fundamental points: on the one hand, the emphasis on the dignity of the individual and the restrictions imposed on the State to ward off any accusation of totalitarianism; on the other hand, Title VII established the traditional monarchy as the political form, thus achieving a synthesis between phalangism and traditionalism; finally, while adopting the social doctrine of the Church, the draft guaranteed the confessional nature of the State. Unity, Catholicism, Hispanicism, the family, the army, the commune and the vertical union were reaffirmed as the foundations of the regime. The new body of doctrine created by this rather innocuous text (even though it quoted some of Primo de Rivera's phrases almost verbatim) gave the regime other ideological foundations and confirmed its democratization.

In the second of these two fundamental laws, Fernández de la Mora's influence was felt above all in the method of appointing the head of government, namely the procedure by which the Council of the Realm would submit a trio of candidates to the King; the text sanctioned the organic representation of the people through the Council of the Realm, established the legislative powers of the Cortes and the executive powers of the government, and introduced the possibility of appeal on grounds of unconstitutionality (contrafuero). Once the battle over the definitive configuration of the State had been settled in favour of the traditional monarchists, including López Rodó as well as Fernández de la Mora, work began on giving the regime a representative system based on organic representation, a point of convergence between the traditionalists and the Phalangists and one of the pillars of Fernández de la Mora's political thinking. The first draft, first sent to Carrero Blanco in July 1957, was presented in January 1958, in summary form, to Franco, who proclaimed the Law of the Principles of the National Movement in May 1958; on the other hand, it would not be until 1966 that the Organic Law of the State was promulgated on the basis of the work carried out by López Rodó and Fernández de la Mora at El Escorial in 1957. Fernández de la Mora can therefore be considered one of the main architects of the constitutional and legal configuration of Spain.

With Franco's regime now seeking to base its legitimacy on economic success, the 1957 government reshuffle was also an opportunity to allow so-called "technocrats" to come to power, some of whom, with links to Opus Dei (to which Fernández de la Mora also felt close), asked him to take up important positions, including a post as under-secretary in the Ministry of Trade, then headed by Alberto Ullastres — an offer Fernández de la Mora declined.

Fernández de la Mora spoke as a Spanish delegate at two UNESCO General Assemblies and at a number of sessions of the Council for Cultural Cooperation of the Council of Europe (1958–1969). In 1969 he left the Privy Council of the Count of Barcelona because of the direction it had been given by José María de Areilza, and that same year, as a career diplomat, he was appointed Under-Secretary for Foreign Policy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then headed by Gregorio López-Bravo, where he worked intensively to disseminate Spanish culture abroad, gradually gaining access to the upper echelons of Franco's government. Fernández de la Mora took it upon himself to professionalise the Ministry by ensuring that its staff belonged to the diplomatic career, regardless of their political affiliations. In 1970, he was promoted to the rank of Minister Plenipotentiary First Class as part of his diplomatic career and was involved in the preparatory negotiations for the treaties with the United States, which were finally signed in 1971, by which time Fernández de la Mora had already left the Ministry. He remained convinced of the superiority of Franco's government over most governments in Spanish history.

At the same time, Fernández de la Mora was writing his best-known work, The Twilight of Ideologies, an indirect legitimisation of Franco's regime, published in 1965, in which the author proclaimed the obsolescence of ideologies in politics as a result of the technification and development underway in much of the world. "Ideologies", he wrote, "proliferate in modest cultural spheres and in critical economic conjunctures; but we find ourselves in an era of fabulous material and cultural development".

Minister for Public Works (1970–1974)

His introduction into the technocratic circles of the regime and his concomitant distancing from the political groups that followed the Count of Barcelona had paved the way for his appointment in April 1970 by Franco, on the proposal of Carrero Blanco and replacing Federico Silva Muñoz, to the post of Minister of Public Works, a portfolio which he accepted despite some initial reluctance and to which he was reappointed by Carrero Blanco in June 1973. The new government that emerged from the reshuffle of April 1970 was distinguished firstly by the technical nature of its members, a sign of the rationalisation of Spanish politics, and secondly by the common denominator of the ministers' support for Juan Carlos, the newly appointed heir and continuator of Franco's government. It was a "government of concentration" (of loyalties, families and technicians), defined as "technocrat-monarchist", and charged with preparing a dynastic establishment in accordance with the prescriptions of the Fundamental Laws.

Between 1970 and 1974, in the final phase of Franco's dictatorship, Fernández de la Mora worked to complete and amplify the policy followed by his predecessor, in particular through his Plan de Accesos a Galicia (aimed at opening up Galicia), the Plan de Autopistas (Motorways Plan), and then his Motorways Act, promulgated in August 1972. Under his mandate, almost 500 km of motorways (60% of those then existing in Spain) were opened to traffic, and in 1973 the Renfe rail company made a profit for the first time, thanks to more efficient operation (particularly for freight transport) of several underused lines. Around sixty dams (some of them high-capacity) were built, including the El Atazar dam, which was designed to solve the problem of supplying water to the city of Madrid. He endeavoured to improve Spain's water balance, among other things by completing the Tajo-Segura diversion canal planned in 1966 by the previous incumbent. In 1971, his ministry drew up a plan to triple the Madrid metropolitan network, while in Barcelona a similar plan was implemented to double the number of kilometres of the network. In 1972, he succeeded in obtaining approval for his Plan de Puertos (Port Plan), which provided for the creation of several major maritime centres, the most famous of which is the Bilbao superpuerto.

After Carrero Blanco's assassination in 1974, Fernández de la Mora was no longer part of the new government formed by Carlos Arias Navarro and resumed his diplomatic career, being appointed Director of the Diplomatic School in Madrid in January 1974, where he undertook a number of substantial reforms during his five-year term of office. Moreover, he was highly critical of Arias Navarro, especially after the latter's speech of 12 February 1974, which, by introducing certain "aperturist" practices and ruling out any "technified and neutral policy", constituted the beginning, in Fernández de la Mora's eyes, of the liquidation of the State organised according to the fundamental laws. Henceforth, Fernández de la Mora called for an "intellectual rearmament of the Nation" in the face of the "current battle of concepts", citing as an example "the resurrection of 1936" which had made "intellectual rearmament possible" thanks above all to the followers of Menéndez Pelayo. Fernández de la Mora, for his part, theorised this rearmament in the form of the political concept of the "State centred on works" (Estado de obras, i.e. the State as a neutral and technical institution) and a philosophical theory of the State, the "State of reason", in conjunction with the fundamental trend law of the de-ideologisation of technically and culturally developed societies.

In 1972, he was also admitted as a member of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, where his inaugural address was entitled Del Estado ideal al Estado de Razón (literally, "From the Ideal State to the State of Reason").

Democratic transition

The day after Franco's death, Fernández de la Mora published a highly eulogistic article, including the following passage:

In the context of history, Franco is the most important statesman Spain has had since the prudent King. He took an impoverished and invertebrate country and transformed it into a great industrial power and a properly institutionalised Monarchy. He took in a nation with an overwhelming proletarian majority and transformed it into a middle-class society. He eradicated illiteracy and hunger, our two century-old scourges.

Under the Statute of Associations, promulgated in December 1974, in the final years of Francoism, Fernández de la Mora founded the Spanish National Union (UNE), a group in which the doctrinal heritage of Acción Española was combined with Spanish traditionalism, with the aim of preserving the "perfective continuity of the State of 18 July", within a political framework whose essential elements would be: national unity with administrative regionalisation; unitary trade unionism; a limited monarchy; bicameralism; the separation of legislative and executive functions; organic representation; "intellectual rearmament"; private initiative with subsidiary state action and economic planning; absolute equality of opportunity; co-management of companies; generalised social security; and the redistribution of responsibilities.

In 1976, at his instigation, the UNE was absorbed by the People's Alliance (AP), a party of which he would become vice-president. That same year, 1976, after the death of Antonio Iturmendi, he was co-opted as procurator (deputy) in the Cortes and appointed, by direct appointment from Franco, as a member of the National Movement's Council. With regard to Spain's political future, he resolutely rejected any break with the past, opting instead for what he called the "perfective continuity" of the regime. Because of Fernández de la Mora's desire for independence, the UNE was always reluctant to merge fully into the PA and remained a federated party, unlike five of the seven parties making up the coalition.

Although the process of political transition had been set in motion, it remained under the control of the most conservative factions of the Spanish political class. Arias, still President of the Government, appointed a commission to initiate a moderate path to change, with Manuel Fraga as its main driving force. Fernández de la Mora played an important role in that he took an active part in the discussions on the commission's report, proposing amendments to prevent the framework of the Law on Associations from being overstepped, as this would open the door to particracy, and to maintain the single trade union so as not to allow the proliferation of trade union and professional organisations that could later become political parties. In this way, Fernández de la Mora demonstrated his preference for a system of organic representation and his repugnance for the party system.

Fernández de la Mora, although aware that change was inevitable, still counted on the firmness of the armed forces in the face of the transition process and took it upon himself to ideologically bolster the positions of the sections of the army most resistant to change, testing the pulse in particular of Gabriel Pita da Veiga, Minister of the Navy, and Fernando de Santiago, Vice-President of the Government, trying to get them to lead an open demonstration of the army's opposition to political change at the meeting that Adolfo Suárez had called for 8 September 1976 with the senior military commanders, but during which the army confined itself to blocking the legalisation of the Communist Party, making Fernández de la Mora understand that the transition was unstoppable.

Nevertheless, he continued to plead with Adolfo Suárez for the need to preserve, during the transition process, the legitimacy and legality of 18 July, as well as the Estado de obras, which had enabled the "greatest progress in our history"; He pointed out that "the Spain born on 18 July is today closer to the average levels of Western Europe than at any other time in its contemporary history", if we assess the situation according to the criteria that "truly measure the effectiveness of government management, which are order, distributive justice, respect for individual freedom and per capita material and cultural income".

On 10 September 1976, the Suárez government drew up a bill on political reform, which was submitted to the National Council of the Movement for discussion. Fernández de la Mora reacted strongly against the bill, which he considered even more disruptive than the previous one. He tabled several amendments, including one aimed at preserving organic representation, following the example of the Fraga draft. Although these amendments were accepted, the evaluation report was not binding and the government disregarded it, thus giving one of the final pushes on the democratization process.

At the first democratic elections in 1977, called to elect an assembly that Fernández de la Mora felt would act as a de facto Constituent Assembly, if not in name. Fernández de la Mora stood for the province of Pontevedra, conducting a campaign that was made difficult both by shortages and by opposition from the authorities and certain sectors of society. He was elected and subsequently sat as a member of the Galician Junta before the introduction of regional autonomies. He was attached to the Finance and Constitution Committees, on which he opposed the transition underway, particularly with regard to regional autonomies and the powers now devolved to the Head of State, while those of the King tended to be strengthened.

He left the AP and the UNE leadership after the majority of the party had decided, in line with Fraga's position, to support the 1978 Constitution, which Fernández de la Mora voted against, given that, in his opinion, "Spain does not need a constitution, being a perfectly constituted state". As well as the parliamentary group's vote in favour of the new constitution, Fernández de la Mora also pointed to Fraga's personalism and his glances towards the left as the causes of this definitive split within AP.

In 1979, together with Federico Silva Muñoz, he founded the Spanish Democratic Right (DDE), but this initiative ended in abject failure and was Fernández de la Mora's last foray into active politics. He went on to become a relentless critic of Spain's transition to democracy, as documented in his book The Errors of Change (1986).

Withdrawal from politics and intellectual activity

After definitively turning his back on the political arena, Fernández de la Mora devoted himself to philosophical reflection and political history, which took shape in 1982 with a new and original philosophical movement, razonalismo. In this way, he created a new interpretation and political projection of national conservatism based on liberal and technical presuppositions. According to González Cuevas, Fernández de la Mora was "in reality the only intellectual on the Spanish right capable of reflecting on the theoretical and epistemological foundations of a new conservatism, and who tried to give alternative answers to the new social and political situation without falling back on old formulas".

Contributions to cultural magazines

Before his retirement, and in parallel with his political activities behind the scenes and his diplomatic duties, Fernández de la Mora's links with the newspaper ABC, which he maintained until 1980, and with its then director, Torcuato Luca de Tena, led him to carry out a sustained review and criticism of Spanish cultural production between 1963 and 1969, the fruits of which he compiled in a series of seven volumes under the generic title Spanish Thought. He was co-founder of the Asociación de Amigos de Maeztu, which set out to disseminate the ideas of the thinker Ramiro de Maeztu, and wrote for the magazines Reino and Círculo, as well as for the magazine Atlántida, founded in 1963 by Florentino Pérez Embid.

In 1983, having withdrawn from active politics, Fernández de la Mora, at the behest of the Balmes Foundation, founded his own conservative "think tank", Razón Española, which he ran until his death. Fernández de la Mora's aim was to provide Spanish conservatism with a doctrinal point of reference that would enable it to intervene in public debate with the necessary tools. The weapon used here was reason (razón), which he felt had been exploited in Spain by progressivism, while conservatism had often resorted to clerical or religious arguments that were inoperative in the current state of society. The appeal to reason was to provide the new legitimisation for political conservatism.

The magazine, for which Fernández de la Mora wrote around a hundred editorials, was conceived as the vehicle for an attempt at the intellectual renewal of conservative humanism, and would in particular defend the figure and government of Franco. The journal's main function for Fernández de la Mora was to provide him with a platform for deploying his razónalista teaching, in other words, to serve a doctrinal project that brought together his earlier political, sociological and organicist reflections under the "reasonalist" philosophical paradigm, a neologism coined and used by the author in opposition to abstract rationalism, and which includes the idea of "reason" as the sole criterion for freeing thought from myths, judgements and passions in order to "discern truth from falsity, the exact from the inaccurate, the clear from the confused, the actual from the hypothetical, the existing from the illusory, the factual from the desired". Fernández de la Mora neglected, however, to set about systematising the original theory he had sketched out in this way in the form of a volume.

Private life

Fernández de la Mora married Isabel Valera Uña in Noia in 1950, with whom he had four children. He donated the land on which the Poio Town Hall now stands (in the province of Pontevedra, Galicia). During his lifetime, he was awarded 14 Grand Crosses, both national and foreign, including the highest Spanish decoration, the Order of Charles III. In recognition of his work at the Ministry of Public Works, he received a gold medal from twelve different provinces.

In his last years, and until his death at the age of 77, although he kept away from public commitments, he continued his intellectual activity through books, articles, courses and lectures, and by editing the journal Razón Española. Fernández de la Mora died of a myocardial infarction at his home in Madrid. He had previously donated his valuable silver collection to the Pontevedra Museum.

Thought

Fernández de la Mora's thinking is unique among Spanish conservative doctrines in that he abandoned the traditional counter-revolutionary position based in particular on Catholicism, and instead advocated a new liberal conservative vision, centred on arguments of economic and technical development. His thinking is important for understanding the orientation of the Franco regime in the 1960s and beyond.

Obsolescence of ideologies

A key element of Fernández de la Mora's political thought is his criticism of ideologies, which he believes should be rejected for functional as well as structural reasons. They exalt passion and, through a sham of rationalisation, give it political legitimacy.

Definition and characteristics of ideologies

Fernández de la Mora defines ideology as "a [...] simplified and popularised political philosophy" and as a "popular and pragmatic version of a system of ideas". The most significant rectification he later made to this original definition was the addition of dramatism or pathos as a consubstantial element of ideologies, which the rationalisation of history he set out to achieve would have to eliminate.

Despite their rational appearance, ideologies carry a strong pathetic charge, which has two dimensions: the first, insofar as they appear as a rationalising element of the ideologues' designs or emotional impulses, and the second, in relation to the desired effect, which is to trigger passionate responses. The ideologue is distinguished from the authentic intellectual by his great thirst for power; his intellectual appearances and cultural productions are all in the service of this single goal, and ideologies are nothing other than pseudo-intellectual creations designed to satisfy this thirst, and whose modus operandi is to project the desires of their creators in the form of supposedly scientific schemes. The rational appearance acts as an element of legitimisation capable of concealing the primacy of the pathetic in ideologies at the same time as the real private designs that preside over them.

Through this interference of pathos, ideas become ideologies, which in turn make it possible to instrumentalise intelligence and thus corrupt intellectuals, who become ideologists as soon as they place their intellectual work at the service of an irrational political desire, that is to say, abdicate their mission to seek the truth in favour of the satisfaction of this desire. So the ideologue, the creator of ideas, betrays himself by pursuing a goal that belongs to the realm of the passionate and the non-rational, and is alien to the very nature of ideas. The will to power is also irrational in that it is capable of corrupting the technical mechanisms of reason; the subordination of reason to personal interests unleashes its potential for malignity.

Since ideologies emerge as a political instrument to mobilise the masses, they cannot be complex systems of ideas, but a set of simplistic recipes for how society should be organised. Their emotional power reflects their function of persuasion and mobilisation, as an instrument in the service of class interests. Their effects and emotional potential are channelled through two concepts: enthusiasm and tension. They are dressed up logically to conceal their obviously emotive nature under the guise of a scientific statement. Ideologies are not coherent, complex systems of ideas, but epistemologically flawed schemes made up not just of 'simplified' or 'elementary' ideas, but often also of 'pseudo-ideas'. The veneer of rationality that covers them turns them into "party spells", and thus determines their condition as "political lies". Certain elites, in their quest to satisfy personal desires, exploit ideologies as false patterns to spur the masses into action. The corollary of the vulgarity of ideologies, however, is that the march of history, which is accompanied by an increasing complexity of existence and, for the author, is confused with a progressive rationalisation, makes their perpetuation questionable; what the author envisages, therefore, is a functional death of ideologies, as a result of their loss of social relevance and force of mobilisation.

Ideologies function fundamentally by inoculating the masses with passions, in order to serve their primary objective, which is to arouse enthusiastic reactions and support for the ideology in question, a process in which the pathetic effect is the condition of their success. Ideologies have a way of provoking polarisation and violence. The mobilisation they seek requires maximum support, which is why they cultivate an extremist and bellicose attitude. "They have their prophets and their martyrs", says the author, "and they are the most powerful driving force behind the most violent international tensions and military conflicts". Their maximalism and fundamentalism lead to an inability to understand in proportion to their vocation for absolute accomplishment, and maintain their pugnacity in the face of opposing positions. The passionate and emotional side of ideologies eliminates any positive aspects of their tension-creating function as social accelerators. Interests, on the other hand, although they also act as factors of tension, do so to a relative extent and have the characteristic of keeping open the possibility of compromise; ideologies, on the other hand, do not admit compromise solutions because of their maximalism, which is not a factor of tension, but of hypertension, and hence of sociological dysfunction. This sacralisation of ideologies leads, because of their character as beliefs and their maximalism, to a system of dogmatic instructions which treats dissent and heterodoxy in the same way as religions.

An enthusiastic people, made partial, ingenuous, dogmatic, obsessive and elementary, who have alienated themselves from rational values, now have three characteristics. Firstly, having abdicated their critical capacity, they are easy prey for tyranny. Secondly, while enthusiasm is conducive to all types of totalitarianism, it lends itself more to revolutionary totalitarianism, since revolutions need enthusiasm as fuel. Thirdly and finally, enthusiasm is more easily obtained where there is less economic development, since a developed people sees its capacity for enthusiasm dulled.

Ideologies have a number of distinctive features that distinguish them from any system of ideas in the true sense of the term, and cannot be considered as philosophical or theoretical knowledge. Rather, given their clear political component and their function of regulating public life, they represent instrumental thought, oriented towards action and subordinate to it. They emerge in the lowest strata of society to incite action, and their popular nature tends to demonstrate their primarily militant purpose, their theoretical ambitions being only secondary. At the same time, however, they endeavour to maintain a state of non-achievement in terms of the ideal they are supposed to promote, since they do not in themselves contain any concrete, elaborate plan for attaining the said ideal, and provide only a series of modalities of action that are only incidentally related to the goal put forward.

Ideologies are a set of presuppositions and recipes accepted acritically, by which ideology is alien to reason. As soon as these collective prejudices have been imposed by setting reason aside, they are projected onto reality, distorting it and rendering reason impotent. It is ideologies that have prevented the sphere of politics from being rationalised and a genuine reign of logos from being established in the political field. The prejudiced nature of ideologies makes their acceptance an act of the will and, coupled with this volition ("voluntarism"), leads to a breakdown in the rational processes of examination, which in turn engenders potentially violent reactions on the part of the ideologies' promoters.

The relationship between ideology and opinion is formulated by Fernández de la Mora as follows. Opinion is a transitory response to experience, and in this sense constitutes a case of subjective irrationality of a theoretical type. When opinions, which are eminently private things, become collectivised and extend their hold over a large number of people, they are transformed into ideologies and, losing their flexibility and capacity for change, become dogmatised — the very nature of ideologies being that they are nothing more than opinions about the common good which, once they have become collective, become like militarised reactions to it.

In order to mobilise and win support, an ideology must disguise itself as a rational body of doctrine, a scientific system, capable of concealing the emotional elements and interests that underlie all ideologies. The function of ideologies is fundamentally to ennoble the individual or group passions that infallibly lodge within them, and to camouflage them by their apparent rationality. Unlike Marx, for whom the rational aspect of ideology is purely instrumental and merely an epiphenomenon of economic and material conditions, Fernández de la Mora believes that the camouflage of reality under a logical formalism and an ostensible rationality of ideological assertions can be deliberate but also unconscious. On the other hand, for Fernández de la Mora, it is not a question of disguising class relations, but individual passions, by giving them a rational appearance in order to legitimise themselves; the pseudo-rational scaffolding thus erected has its point of origin in an emotional impulse which, being unavowable, calls on reason for help in order to be able to show itself. The ideological dynamic is originally, and prior to any examination of reality, the result of an emotional stance, i.e. a desire, a passionate impulse that requires the support of the masses in order to be satisfied. To legitimise itself in the eyes of the masses, ideology sets itself up as a dogmatic and theoretical corpus designed to conceal its self-interested nature and pass it off as a universal aspiration. What's more, ideology hardly needs any elaborate theoretical content, since its aim is to convince rather than persuade. It follows that ideologies have an undeniable component of conscious deception, of deliberate dissimulation. Ideology is a tool with which an elite strives to justify certain irrational claims to power and to win the support of the masses by means of a false theorisation of reality.

The emergence of the ideologue, and of ideology as a political tool, coincides with the irruption of the masses into political life. Ideologies then appeared as schemes that could be easily understood by the greatest number of people, and this was accompanied by an epistemological devaluation of these ideologies, which ceased to be complex systems of thought, falling victim to their purpose and their character as products of mass consumption. Highlighting the popularising and mass-market nature of ideologies cannot be dissociated from two of Fernández de la Mora's fundamental and closely related theses. On the one hand, his elitism, which postulates, on the basis of an aristocratic conception of reason, the existence of certain people capable of extending the conquests of reason and appearing as the driving forces of history and the true protagonists of the progress of humanity, for the benefit of the rest of the species. A corollary of this conception is the anti-egalitarianism of the author, who points out that the egalitarian idea, the thing "most invariable in socialist ideals", is a prejudice that awaits the most fundamental functioning of reason. For Fernández de la Mora, ideologies are functionally egalitarian in that they establish a system of thought that is supposedly valid for the whole community without taking into account the differences between its members, and the simplicity of their postulates ignores the hierarchical nature of reason. Moreover, the effect of the masses is to accentuate differences in the capacity to exercise reason, more than the existence of the elites themselves; the masses in fact provoke further inequality by abdicating their use of reason, which makes them more accommodating and quicker to accept the sentences of individuals who appear to them to be worthy of credit.

If rationalisation is in fact the opposite of ideologisation, and given that rationalisation represents progress, it is ethically imperative to contribute to de-ideologisation. Nevertheless, according to Fernández de la Mora, ideologies also fulfil a positive function as a factor of social tension, and contribute, through their own polarisation and on a par with that other important factor of social tension, namely interests, to preventing social sclerosis and guaranteeing the vitality necessary to achieve progress. However, the extremist and fundamentalist nature of ideologies, which makes their effect of tension incompatible with social peace, cancels out this advantage.

Taxonomy

Fernández de la Mora drew up several different lists of the concrete ideologies still in vogue at the time of writing his thesis (1965). Later, focusing on the ideologies that had burst onto the Spanish political scene in the aftermath of Franco's death, he reduced the ideological plurality to just three: liberalism, socialism and communism, while leaving the door open to others. When he added fascism to this list, however, it was without considering it as an ideology in the strict sense: fascism was not a unitary doctrine, nor even a doctrine that could take shape in different historical circumstances; there was an Italian fascist state, but there was no fascism as a socio-political genre.

Socialism and communism are not analysed separately, but considered under the same prism when the ideologies born of Marxism are discussed. Indeed, both modern socialism and communism have Marxism as their theoretical underpinning and can only be understood by reference to this theorisation, even if the historical manifestations of Marxism are manifold. Yet there is one constant in the magma of existing "socialisms": egalitarianism. The author notes that there are two elements in Marxist socialism, one that makes it similar to any form of socialism, and another that differentiates it from it. The differentiating element stems from a certain ideological fracture which emerged within socialism and gave rise to divergent Marxist currents. The unifying element lies in the economic-administrative techniques, namely the nationalisation of the means of production in a centralised economy, which is characteristic of socialisms and is advocated as a tool for achieving the egalitarian ideal.

As for liberal ideology, the ideals it aspires to champion are individual self-determination and government of the people by the people. It defends the primacy of the individual over society. Its historical incarnation is the liberal democratic state, and its ideological axes are pluralism, parliamentarianism, economic liberalism, politicisation, and the minimisation and collectivisation of executive power, which entails a certain inversion of liberalism. For Fernández de la Mora, liberalism only has value insofar as it claims Man as a permanent value, i.e. insofar as it possesses ethical substance. Conversely, however, its a priori nature, its alliance with the democratic method and the dogmatisation of its ideals tend to invalidate it.

Post-industrial society and the obsolescence of ideologies

According to the author, from the last third of the twentieth century onwards, the State has been tending towards de-ideologisation or political rationalisation, as the level of development of Western societies has increased. From both a scientific and a functional point of view, ideologies are becoming less and less valid and are losing their vigour, and there is every reason to believe that circumstances will become increasingly unfavourable to them. Fernández de la Mora's thesis, in addition to being a factual analysis — the facts indicate that ideologies, by their very nature, are encountering resistance that is leading to their gradual replacement — also has a normative dimension in that it invites the public to speed up this process of attrition. "The people no longer want ideologists, they want experts", says the author, and he calls for a doctrinal and public response to those who show "blind obstinacy and insist not only on reviving anachronistic panaceas, but also on trapping the political community of their compatriots in the twilight dialectic of ideologies". Fernández de la Mora points to the fact that "Spain's degree of ideologisation is much lower than it was thirty years ago, but slightly higher than it should be given its current cultural and economic development". Given these two observations, "denouncing the decadence of ideologies is not an ideology, but an idea; it is, exactly, the neutral description of a fact. It does not start from any ideological presupposition: socialism, liberalism and communism seem to me to be in equal measure in degeneration".

The "law of de-ideologisation" (ley desideologizadora) stems, according to Fernández de la Mora, from the objective observation that "ideologies are in crisis; fascism has disappeared, progressivism has grown old, socialism and conservatism have come closer together to the point of losing many of their distinctive features, and the great duality of liberalism and communism is losing its relevance". He also points out that even in the West, "the haughty myth of freedom, which was the basic ingredient of the dominant ideology, is giving way to a modest and concrete aspiration, which is fundamentally an interest: well-being and social security". According to the author, we are witnessing "a shift towards realist dimensions, towards modest, concrete and measurable political values. Ideologies, that is to say pseudo-social philosophies with their trail of big words and caricatured concepts, are going through a crisis of widespread disinterest and mistrust".

The twilight of ideologies is seen as a gradual but irreversible process. Ideologies are on the wane, but for the time being, their definitive end is only a glimpse on the horizon. It is clear, however, that the current process will culminate in the total disappearance of ideologies, or at least their relegation to the fringes of social pathology.

Spain in the 1960s was at a turning point, with the emergence of what the author sees as a new type of society. The twilight process took place in a new social context characterised by a change in the production model, the predictability of social phenomena and the renewal of administrative and political structures. The twilight of ideologies is nothing other than a political corollary of a new social model, a new type of so-called post-industrial society, which in a certain sense imposes a new model of rationality, and whose emergence is part of a process of rationalisation in tune with the march of history.

Fernández de la Mora sets out to detail the cardinal features of this post-industrial society. Firstly, the emergence of a knowledge economy, leading to a new stage in the process of rationalisation, and the pre-eminence of theoretical research over purely productive activity, the corollary of which is a revitalisation of theoretical reason, a factor in the dissolution of ideologies. Secondly, Fernández de la Mora refers to "intellectual technology", with six characteristics: 1) production is steered and planned by a technostructure, and the economy is therefore no longer subject to the dictates of demand; 2) the sovereignty of the consumer is replaced by the aegis of the technostructure; 3) the relationship between big business and the state is strengthened, as a result of their need for global demand, price stability, trained specialists, etc.; 4) the objective of the state is to ensure that the economy is not subject to the dictates of demand. 4) the objective of the economy has ceased to be the maximisation of profits, since technostructures are more interested in "business expansion and technological refinement", hence the shift from an economy devoted to profits to an economy of innovation, better linked to an information society; 5) the technostructure is more concerned with benefiting the community as a whole, the country as a whole, and is not subservient to any party; 6) the technostructure can take its place in a socialist as well as a capitalist economy. The phenomenon of the technostructure as a ruling class reflects the "intellectual technology" of post-industrial society. Post-industrial society also corresponds to the transition from a goods economy to a service economy, a process interpreted by Fernández de la Mora as a "dignification of necessities", resulting in a relative expansion of the tertiary sector at the expense of industry and agriculture. This transition contributed to the decadence of ideologies in that it led to an extension of property ownership and a rapprochement of groups around the concept of interest. To sum up, post-industrial society is a major factor in the dissolution of ideologies, particularly through the emphasis on and revaluation of intelligence, the high level of technicality, and the diminishing importance of concepts belonging to industrial society.

On the other hand, post-industrial society is also characterised by the highly technical nature of social processes, which makes social analysis and control highly complex, and renders the schemes proposed by ideologies obsolete because they have become inaccurate. This technicalisation is reflected in the high degree of mathematisation of the social sciences, due in particular to the desire to predict and anticipate social trends using statistical data. Conversely, ideological analyses appear over-simplified and fail to meet the need for rigour and accuracy required in a highly technified environment, where ideologies and their rigid, simplistic recipes are proving incapable of predicting new trends, grasping a complex, highly technified reality, and serving as tools for decision-making.

However, Fernández de la Mora makes it clear that the critique of ideologies is aimed at defending not technocrats, "but experts, that is to say, those who know something about what they are dealing with"; technology and development thus appear as the most striking features of our time, and as the elements destined to replace ideologies.

Symptoms of the decline of ideologies

Fernández de la Mora identifies the signs that ideologies are losing their impact. The first is political apathy, defined by him as indifference to the struggle for power, in other words to the ideological battle, an attitude which does not necessarily imply a lack of interest in politics or an abdication of the whole of society, nor a suspension of judgement on what the common good is; it indicates that disinterest in the ideological dialectic leads people to refrain from taking part in elections. Another sign that ideologies are losing their power to mobilise is the decline in membership of political parties and party activism, at the same time as other organisations, such as trade unions and leisure associations, are seeing their membership grow. Added to this is the decline of the political press.

Thanks to the general rise in the level of culture, the masses are now gifted with a greater capacity for criticism, are no longer content with the summary condemnations and sanctions emanating from ideologies, and are demanding rigorous arguments, technical projects and relevant solutions. From a social point of view, the emotional tension that ideologies generate is reduced to harmlessness. Enthusiasm, the "amplifier of emotionalism", is increasingly replaced by consensus.

The ascendancy of managerial techniques over ideologies is reflected in the dehumanisation of the State, in other words in the specialisation of the State apparatus, in the distancing and depersonalisation of political and administrative authority, in the procedural nature of relations with the State, in the mechanisation of State responses, and hence in the breakdown of emotional ties between those who govern and those who are governed.

Yet another symptom is what Fernández de la Mora calls the "convergence of ideologies". The loss of dogmatic vigour of the main ideologies is conducive to socialism and liberalism tending towards a confluence, in other words towards an intermediate point where, renouncing an essential part of their ideological project, they come to stand on a notably more realistic plane. As a result, the economic and administrative techniques of socialism were able to impose themselves throughout the world, and regimes supposedly opposed to socialism adopted these techniques, succeeding in practice in implementing them more effectively, as shown by the example of the German SPD at the Bad Godesberg Congress. Socialism renounced its main dogmas, including collective ownership of the means of production, and accepted the market economy. In return, liberalism was forced to abandon some of its principles, including the myth of freedom and representation, both of which were gradually repudiated in favour of security and judicial control (fiscalización) of power. The current trend, accepted and practised in liberal countries, is towards the legalisation and legislation of all activities, with the result that individual freedom is gradually being curtailed and transformed into a "negative freedom", i.e. one that is limited by the freedom of other citizens.

The theoretical and practical shortcomings of liberal economics force it to accept a degree of state intervention in the economy. In Fernández de la Mora's view, neoliberalism is a correction of pure liberalism, which has accepted state control as a kind of synthesis with socialism. There was a change of mentality among the masses, who opted for security at the expense of freedom. As a result, the distinction between left and right has been relativised, stripped of its ideological dimension, though it has certainly not been deprived of any objective content, determined by the degree of statism retained in each political position. "Very recently", noted the author in 1965, "the adverse symptoms have been exacerbated and multiplied. One of the most striking is the gradual replacement of ideologies by technical and economic plans in government programmes".

Apology of reason

Characterisation of reason and reasonalism

Fernández de la Mora posits that "the proper nature of reason is systematic veracity and permanent revisionism", and calls for intellectuals to be required to apply pure reason, whatever their field of knowledge. Politics, economics, sociology and administration should be considered "sciences and not dilettantism".

The author draws a distinction between rationalism (racionalismo) and reasonalism (razonalismo), a neologism of his own invention. In rationalism, the burden of discovering the truth certainly falls on reason, but reality remains, at least to a large extent, marginalised, since rationalist reason hardly feels the need to refer to reality, which is devoid of meaning except through its relationship to a conceptual universe. For the reasonalist, on the other hand, the truly rational path presupposes that reason proceeds in a back-and-forth movement from the real to the conceptual, correlating these two aspects with each other through deduction and induction. In the reasonist view, the real retains pre-eminence over the conceptual, and reason sets itself the task of exploring the real world, which is given a priori, and into which it must plunge in order to provide the conceptual system with foundation and confrontation, which is why reason remains ancillary to the ontological universe; it cannot therefore be the creator of reality, but is constitutive of it.

Fernández de la Mora denounces the anti-empiricism of rationalism, for which the real centre of interest is reason itself, and for which the real only appears as a horizon for the projection of ideal entities. For all that, reasonalist reason, which pursues no practical goal a priori, is not a utilitarian or instrumental reason at the service of a specific praxis, unlike ideological reason, where practicality takes precedence. Fernández de la Mora does not, therefore, ignore the cognitive value of reality, emphasising that thought is not constructed in the solipsism typical of pure rationalism, but that knowledge is a process of confrontation between reason and reality; conversely, if for reasonalism the theoretical level remains central and practice a corollary of it, and not its guide, this does not lead to an abstract drift, i.e. a disconnection from reality and from the conditioning of practical action. What distinguishes reasonalism from ideologism is the fact that the theoretical impulse is substantive and determinative of action. Reason possesses a certain autonomy in relation to reality; once "affected" by a content imposed on it by reality, reason operates, up to a certain point, autonomously.

Reasonalism starts from the observation that human beings harbour large doses of irrationality, as a result of undue or defective use of reason. This irrationality is a harmful consequence of the need for reason to collude with the will, since reason needs a prior impulse from the will in order to get going; this need, however, "can be directed towards deception and sophistry". Rationality is only potentially present in human beings and is not inherited genetically, but is a personal conquest: the exercise of reason requires a voluntary decision, rather than a particular initial aptitude. Reasonalism, while postulating the superiority of reason, admits a certain operative pre-eminence of the will. However, the will, which uses reason as a tool to illuminate a particular area or objective to which it has fixed its attention, can direct reason towards non-rational goals, as is the case, for example, with ideologies in their theoretical and justificatory phase.

The misuse of reason to justify one's own interests rather than to seek the truth is a breach of ethics. It follows that ethics constitutes a necessary framework for configuring a will that is oriented towards the good and the truth, and for blocking the arbitrariness of volition acting as a blind mechanism for action. For Fernández de la Mora, reason is eminently ethical.

Allowing freedom, which is misunderstood and celebrated as a supreme value, to have free rein has ended up removing all rationality from the field of ethics, and diluting any definition of the good, since, as soon as freedom is deified, any subjective moral position is legitimised. Ethical rationality implies a more or less stable definition of the good, which in turn imposes itself as a coercive element on the individual. Faced with the normative weakness of an ethics unbound by reason, the prescriptions of reason offer security and unity. In contrast to libertarianism, reason is imperative in the sense that it univocally dictates what is good and what is certain. This despotic side of reason echoes realism, which shows us the narrow limits of man's freedom of action. In reality, it is reason that provides the greatest freedom, because freedom is enhanced when our actions are brought into line with the prescriptions of reason, which allows us not so much to choose as to calculate the consequences of our choices.

The project of reason is always unfulfilled, without this in any way calling into question its validity. For the author, rationalism also implies, in a general way, a religious agnosticism.

The connection between development and the prevalence of reason

The conception of history as a process of gradual establishment of rationality, in other words of expulsion from the public sphere of man's passionate dimension, is one of the key theses of Fernández de la Mora's thought.

According to the author, rationalising progress is closely linked to the level of development of a given society, which is why the most advanced societies deploy more rational, in other words more de-ideologised, policies. Economic development and rising material well-being are accompanied by a decline in the capacity for social enthusiasm, the latter remaining confined to societies with the lowest levels of prosperity. Economic development goes hand in hand with a rise in people's cultural level and, as a corollary, with a gradual discarding of ideologies. Any progress made by a society is due first and foremost to its ability to analyse reality rationally with a view to subjugating it. Economic progress derives from cultural progress, and development is therefore not only economic, but also the sublimation of what is noblest in man, which is reason. The greatness of the exercise of reason lies in man's ability to dominate himself and the world around him through science and technology.

Reason versus ideology

Given that ideologies are a source of regression and dysfunction, Fernández de la Mora sees it as a moral imperative to help speed up their demise. For Fernández de la Mora, the search for the good of the human species is the foundation of ethics and the fundamental criterion of morality; standards of behaviour must relate not just to the individual, but to the species as a whole. This identification between the individual good and the common good needs no laborious metaphysical explanation.

The revised and expanded edition of The Twilight of Ideologies (1968) introduces the notion of the 'new ideal' and emphasises even more strongly the ethical dimension of de-ideologisation, which it is morally necessary to stimulate. The author does not doubt the inexorable nature of the de-ideologisation process, despite the resistance of various factors, such as the inertia of customs, ideological parties, old rhetoric, politics as a luxury and pastime, and other braking devices. Fernández de la Mora's twilight thesis thus includes a well-founded social prognosis, based on a philosophical system that approaches history from a rationalising angle and deploys an optimistic vision of human progress.

The concept of the "ideological twilight" is thus embedded in a well-established conception of reason, but this is done a posteriori, given that this conception was barely sketched out when Twilight of Ideologies was published (1965) and that it was only after the founding of the journal Razón Española that his philosophical thought began to take shape. His rationalism is fundamental to understanding — albeit in retrospect — his political thought. The author considered reason to be the central concept of his work and his life. In a way, his political theory can be categorised as "political rationalism", reason being for him the main pillar on which to build a genuine analytical theory of the state and society. This important political-philosophical intuition did not take shape until the author had set about elaborating his philosophical project in the 1980s, which unfortunately did not receive a structured and systematic form in the form of a volume.

The dialectic of reason and the ambition for a total rational synthesis

Reason orders reality by integrating it, through an almost "surgical" action, into a system, with the ultimate aim of absorbing the whole of reality, or man's knowledge of it, into a coherent system by means of which man would be able to account for the relationships that govern reality. The aim of reasonalist reason, pushed to its most radical consequences, is to build an exhaustive explanatory system of the interrelations of reality. Yet Fernández de la Mora's thinking is far removed from such optimistic maximalism, given that the capacities of reason, although incalculable, are not infinite and that the elusive complexity of reality makes it impossible to know reality in its entirety and to conceive of an absolute correlational system. Added to this is the provisional nature of the instruments of reason, and the fact that reason sometimes seems to suffer setbacks, when some of its postulates held to be certain are subsequently shown to be false, either by experience or by the appearance of a correlative explanation that is more encompassing and more rational.

The products of reason are stable laws that attempt to account for a reality which, as well as being complex, also appears dynamic and changing, which is why reason is not constructed by static accumulation, but by dynamic adaptation to reality. There is an irreducible gap between the dynamism inherent in reality and the static nature of the products of reason, which must therefore be subject to constant revision, criticism and updating. The lack of critical capacity on the part of individuals entails a high risk of distorting initially rational content.

Consequently, reason progresses dialectically, which implies a constant overtaking of previous intellectual products; however, the dynamic of overtaking is not destructive and what has been overtaken is destined to be reintegrated into the system. Through this dialectic, in which nothing is taken for granted once and for all and every truth has to be continually justified, reason adopts a polemical attitude towards its own products, which allows it to adapt gradually to reality and to the emergence of new elements. One of Fernández de la Mora's properties of reason is that it incorporates all knowledge of the world into its system, without this leading to the annihilation of existing knowledge. But conversely, reason, in its ceaseless effort to perfect itself, demands the constant revision of the knowledge housed in its system. This dialectic can be suspended whenever the will decides to do so, which is why volition (voluntarism) is one of the greatest threats to reason. These limitations accepted, the fact remains that reason expands without restriction, that its deployment is in perpetual growth and that nothing in reality is totally beyond its reach; however, if reason embraces everything, it is only in potential, according to a potential that can only be partially realised.

Reason and language

To act, reason needs the mediation of language. Thought is articulated linguistically in that its products, the ideal entities, must be enunciable in words and signs, hence the need for both a language that obeys the laws of logic and a thought that can be formulated in this language. Only a language capable of being structurally attuned to reality, that is to say, a language whose correlations, like the reality before which it is presented, are logical, makes thought possible.

Although language is man's great tool, since it is the basis of communicability and thus the condition for the possibility of dialectic and the constant revision of thought, it has major shortcomings. Like thought, it functions in an approximate and assertive way; like reason, it can never fully adjust to reality and thought, and needs to be purified so that its denotative capacity is as rigorous and logical as possible.

Reason and passion

The desires, suppositions, beliefs, feelings and other irrational elements that inhabit every human being, far from being of marginal importance, play a fundamental role in man, but in no way detract from the primacy of logos over pathos. The information provided by feelings and emotions is anarchic and rudimentary and is hardly more elaborate, either theoretically or practically, than movements of attraction or repulsion. The substantive value of emotions lies in their motor and secondary action, in the sense that they are likely to set in motion the action of the intelligence. Emotion is not entirely contrary to reason, just as reason is not alien to the pursuit of happiness.

Works

Main article: Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora bibliography

Fernández de la Mora was a prolific writer and renowned orator, with a broad cultural background and a wide range of interests. He authored 22 books, 14 opuscules and 116 essays, and edited a magazine, Razón Española. From 1983 onwards, having retire to private life after realising the political course taken by Spain and having come to terms with a reality that was now irrevocable, he turned his attention to literature and study. His last four books, apart from his memoirs, deal with political, philosophical, anthropological and ethical subjects. The author of two novels (including Paradoja, an aesthetic novel that is tacitly autobiographical), Fernández de la Mora paid a great deal of attention to the stylistic quality of his writings, writing in a pared-down style, cultivating enunciative clarity, and occasionally displaying the gifts of an aphorist.

Fernández de la Mora's work as an essayist focused on a number of themes, most of them philosophical and political, including: organic democracy, particracy, traditionalism, conservatism, technocracy, ideologies, totalitarianism, Krausism, regenerationism, novecentismo, the crisis of 1898, German and Spanish philosophy, the uprising of 18 July, Francoism, and so on. His main works are:

• Ortega y el 98 (1961), Fernández de la Mora's first major work of intellectual criticism. Although the author proclaims the total superiority of Ortega y Gasset's thought over that of the representatives of the 1898 generation, whose methods Fernández de la Mora criticises in passing and in relation to whom Ortega's work would appear to be "a veritable avalanche of pure reason", he nevertheless detects in this work a certain aestheticism, Fernández de la Mora therefore publicly broke with Ortega, dismissing him as an example of a philosopher to follow and calling for other models, in particular that of Xavier Zubiri, which rely on rigour and systematic analysis rather than literary posturing. The book was awarded the National Prize for Literature.

• Pensamiento Español (1964–1970). A collection of articles and reviews, published until 1970 and amounting to seven volumes. In each of these volumes, the author has included, by way of an introductory chapter, a number of studies, which taken together have the value of a complete theory of literary criticism.

• El Crepúsculo de las Ideologías (1965). This work, which went through seven Spanish editions between 1965 and 1973 and was translated into Catalan, Greek, Portuguese and Italian, is undoubtedly the most polemical, commented on and original work by the author, and gave rise to lively debate in Spanish intellectual circles, to the extent that the book was described as the "polemic of the year". The author's thesis is that the traditional political ideologies — liberalism, socialism, Marxism, nationalism, Christian democracy, etc. — are being replaced by strictly managerial analyses in the economically and culturally developed countries of the West. Accused of plagiarising Daniel Bell's 1961 book The End of Ideology, Fernández de la Mora defended himself by pointing out that, in addition to his earlier reflections on Bell's work, Bell did not postulate the end of ideologies, but the replacement of the old ideologies of the nineteenth century by new ones.

• La Partitocracia (1976). Fernández de la Mora sets out to demystify party democracy through a sociological analysis of parties. In the author's view, and following the example of Michels, Pareto and Schumpeter, political parties are oligarchic organisations embodying the opinions of a ruling minority in search of power, and used by it to manoeuvre the masses. Not only does the introduction of such a regime not make a state more democratic, it can also lead to a corruption of democracy: "Partisanship is an evolutionary form of democracy that cancels out its essential characteristics".

• El Estado de Obras (1976). The author advocates de-ideologising the idea of the State and substituting ideocracy for ideology as an epistemological pillar, in other words, basing the State on rigorous and exact ideas derived from the social and human sciences, on the action of an expert elite and on a political legitimacy derived not from national or popular sovereignty, nor from any social utopia, but from new ideas and criteria of effectiveness, namely the capacity of the technical State to guarantee order, justice and development.

• La Envidia Igualitaria (1984). Egalitarianism, referred to by the author as the main postulate of the Left, is correlated with envy; in other words, the main postulate of the political Left is the fruit of a vice that is part of man's passionate dimension, according to the passion/reason dichotomy that is characteristic of Fernández de la Mora's conception of man. It is also argued, following Hayek and Aron, that egalitarian aspirations lead to excessive growth of the state, which is likely to compromise freedom. It also expresses a number of recurring points in his thinking, such as elitism and the plea for meritocracy. "Instead of counting on an expansion of intellectual superiority through quality education", he wrote, "propagandist hatred of what is superior is spread, calling for the belittling of what is superior and the forcible demand for equality". The instrumentalisation of envy, embodied in the binomial particracy and egalitarianism, has become the driving force behind the left-wing parties as a "political slogan", in defiance of the hierarchical foundations necessary for any effective organised national society. Fernández de la Mora names the antidote, emulation.

• Los Teóricos Izquierdistas de la Democracia Orgánica (1985). In this historical study, the author reviews those who were the main promoters of organic democracy in Spain, in particular the Krausist school.

• Los Errores del Cambio (1986). Fernández de la Mora sheds light on the real factors behind the democratic transition, arguing that, contrary to the common view that it was Spanish society that demanded democracy, the change was wanted and carried out from above, with the aim of destroying the Right. This "false consensus" led to "the dissolution of the national conscience, the gigantism of the public sector and the bureaucracy, the destruction of the industrial fabric, the enormous debt, foreign colonisation, the paralysis of justice and the deterioration of the rule of law". This is the broadest and most elaborate critique of the Spanish democratic system, from a post-Franco perspective. For the author, the cambio has led to a socio-economic crisis, a crisis of the State and a moral crisis, as a result of the weakening of the principle of authority. Political reality is now dominated by parochial machiavellianism and politicking, in which only the minority interests of the promoters, executors and followers of change count.

• Filósofos Españoles del Siglo XX (1987). Presenting an overview of the figures who, in the author's view, constitute the pinnacles of contemporary Spanish thought, the book consists of monographs on the philosophy of Amor Ruibal, D'Ors, Ortega, Morente and Zubiri, with an aside on that of Millán-Puelles. The aim of the book is to elucidate this or that obscure point in the theory of these authors, though the primary intention remains to assert the existence of a Spanish philosophy: "I consider it not only false, but also perverse, to deny the existence of a profound metaphysics in the Spain of the last hundred years. And I find it distressing that a great poet like Unamuno, whose emotional and contradictory cries make it impossible to include him in the list of philosophers, has been so elevated and betrayed".

• Río Arriba. Memorias (1995). These memoirs by Fernández de la Mora, written when he was a former diplomat and minister, and awarded the 21st edition of the Espejo de España Prize, are literary and evocative rather than strictly historical, although their historical accuracy is felt on some occasions.

• El Hombre en Desazón (lit. Man in Disarray, 1997). In this book, Fernández de la Mora aims to be a realist, acknowledging that man is an imperfect being and that countless things are beyond his reach in every field. Having thus demystified modern optimism, the author warns that if man does not lend himself to the catharsis outlined in the book, after becoming aware of his nature as a being of finitude and imperfection, he runs the risk of falling into all sorts of fictions and evasions, making him an accursed being. The book overflows on an ethical level in favour of a certain stoic restraint.

• Sobre la Felicidad (lit. On Happiness, 2001). Fernández de la Mora's final work analyses happiness, which he defines as the balance between what we possess and what we desire. The best thing is moderation, or stoicism.

References

Álvarez, Carlos Luis (25 de diciembre de 1965). "Pensamiento español, 1964," Blanco y Negro, p. 124.

Ayuso Torres, Miguel (2002). "In memoriam. Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora," Anales de la Fundación Francisco Elías de Tejada, No. 8, pp. 259–61.

Cueva Merino, Julio de la (2022). "A Quiet Secularization: Secularization Processes during the Late Franco Period, 1960–1975." In: Julio de la Cueva, Ana I. Planet Contreras & Miguel Hernando de Larramendi, eds., In Religious Landscapes in Contemporary Spain: The Impact of Secularization on Religious Pluralism. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 31–54.

Díaz-Plaja, Guillermo (17 de noviembre de 1966). "Pensamiento español 1965," ABC, p. 34.

Espada, Arcadi (16 de febrero de 2002). "El Último de Franco," El País.

Fernández Riquelme, Sergio (2009). "Técnica y Política en Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora," Razón Española, No. 154, pp. 163–92.

Fusi, Juan Pablo (2001). "El régimen autoritario (1960–1975)". In: Jover Zamora & Gómez-Ferrer y Fusi Aizpúrua, eds., España: sociedad, política y civilización (siglos XIX y XX). Madrid: Debate.

González Cuevas, Pedro Carlos (2007). "La Aufklärung Conservadora: Pensamiento Español de Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora," Revista de Estudios Políticos, No. 138, pp. 11–65.

González Cuevas, Pedro Carlos (2015). La Razón Conservadora. Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, una Biografía Político-intelectual. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.

Goñi Apesteguía, Carlos (2009). "Pasión y Política en Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora," Razón Española, No. 157, pp. 173–93.

Goñi Apesteguía, Carlos (2013). Teoría de la Razón Política: El Pensamiento Político de Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales.

Goñi Apesteguía, Carlos (2014a). "Aristocratismo y Razón en Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora," Res Publica. Revista de Historia de las Ideas Políticas, Vol. XVII, No. 1, pp. 199–217.

Goñi Apesteguía, Carlos (2014b). "Las Influencias en el elitismo en Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora," Contrastes. Revista Internacional de Filosofía, Vol. XIX, No. 2, pp. 301–18.

Molina Cano, Jerónimo (2011). "El Realismo Político de Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora," Co-herencia, Vol. IV, No. 6, pp. 67–86.

Movellán de la Riva, Luis Sánchez de (2003). "El Corporativismo de Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora," Empresas Políticas, No. 3, pp. 53–66.

Neira, Jesús (2008). "Estado y Gobierno en Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora," Razón Española, No. 148, pp. 157–77.

Rodríguez Jiménez, José Luis (1997). La Extrema Derecha Española en el Siglo XX. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

Soro, Javier Muñoz (2019). "Public Opinion and Political Culture in a Post-Fascist Dictatorship (1957–77)." In: Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer, ed., From Franco to Freedom: The Roots of the Transition to Democracy in Spain, 1962-1982. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 101–36.

Tusell, Javier (11 de febrero de 2002). "Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, un Reaccionario Ilustrado," El País.

Velo de Antelo, José María (2012). "Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora: El Diplomático," Razón Española, No. 173, pp. 342–47.

Zuleta, Emilia de (18 de septiembre de 1969). "La Crítica Intelectual en la obra de Fernández de la Mora," ABC, p. 103.

External links

• Spanish Congress site
• Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora
• Works by Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora at Dialnet
• Works by Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora at National Library of Spain

Political offices
Preceded by Federico Silva Muñoz	Minister of of Public Works 1970–1974	Succeeded by Antonio Valdés González-Roldán
Preceded by —	Member of the General Courts in the Congress of Deputies 1977–1979	Succeeded by —