Research

Broadly speaking, my work interrogates historical attempts to reconcile democracy with various forms of hierarchy, with a view toward illuminating contemporary political problems. At present, I am exploring these themes through several projects that focus on late 19th and early 20th century Spain.

The first of these projects is my book manuscript, The Liberalism of Loss: José Ortega y Gasset in the Ruins of Empire, which examines Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s political and social thought and its relation to the development of liberalism, fascism, and democracy in early-twentieth-century Spain. Through engagement with Ortega’s political thought, I argue that his liberalism was heavily impacted by the loss of the Spanish Empire in 1898, and that this experience of imperial loss fueled a “new liberalism” that, decades later, informed and inspired fascism in Spain. In order to make this case, I forward original and contextually-grounded readings of Ortega’s corpus, with special focus on how contemporary political concerns shaped his major political writings. I begin by demonstrating the connections between Ortega’s early ‘new liberalism’ and the loss of Spain’s final overseas colonies in 1898, before moving on to examine the political origins of his critique of ‘the masses’ and, relatedly, the antidote he proposes to their ‘revolt’ (up to and including his most famous text, The Revolt of the Masses [1930]). I then show how these major themes in Ortega’s liberalism were synthesized and deployed by various figures crucial to the development to Spanish fascism. This study thus encourages a re-evaluation not only of the historical relationship between fascism and liberalism, but also of whether these distinct ideological traditions might remain symbiotic with one another in certain respects. Research from this project has recently been published in the journal Political Theory and History of Political Thought.

I am also preparing a second book project that scrutinizes conceptions of democratic self-defense within Spain’s so-called ‘first democracy’ (1931-1936). Whereas political theorists and intellectual historians writing on democratic self-defense have drawn primarily from the Weimar experience, this project – tentatively titled “The Shipwreck of State: Disintegration and Democratic Self-Defense in the Second Spanish Republic” – excavates the theoretical contributions of a range of interwar Spanish intellectuals and politicians who sought to neutralize illiberal and antidemocratic threats. More specifically, by focusing on contemporary diagnoses of the dangers facing the Second Republic prior to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), as well as ‘real-time’ prescriptions for their resolution, the book sets out to construct a ‘phenomenology of democratic disintegration’ that avoids the tendency to privilege ex post facto explanations and accounts. Individual chapters will center on the diplomat Salvador de Madariaga’s theoretical prescriptions for countering political extremism through liberal moderation; the parliamentary conflict between Clara Campoamor and Victoria Kent over whether extending the suffrage to women would undermine Spanish democracy; the jurist and pedagogue José Castillejo’s attempts to employ educational reform in the service of democracy’s consolidation; and the debate between socialist intellectuals Luis Araquistáin and Julián Besteiro concerning whether democracies can remain liberal in the face of illiberal threats. In addition to offering novel interpretations of these historical figures and their ideas, “The Shipwreck of State” will contribute to current political theory debates concerning the nature of political moderation, the role of education in containing political extremism, the democratic value of suffrage, militant democracy, and, more broadly, the appropriate means for combatting illiberal and antidemocratic forces. In doing so, it will offer not only the first book-length study of the political thought of the Second Spanish Republic within the ambit of political theory, but also the first sustained attempt to examine how the political ideas of the Second Republic can serve as resources for theorizing and engaging with twenty-first century democratic crises.