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 PhD dissertation, 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.
I am also preparing a second book project that explores the theoretical connections between European integration, liberal democracy, and imperial decline in the political thought of Spanish diplomat and Oxford professor Salvador de Madariaga. A prominent supporter of the Second Spanish Republic who went into exile at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Madariaga played a key role in the formation of such postwar liberal institutions as the Liberal International, the College of Europe, the Mont Pèlerin Society, and the European Movement. However, my focus is on how Madariaga’s internationalist political views – which championed European unification and the propagation of liberal democracy – were informed by his interpretation of Spain’s imperial past, communicated in his extensive writings on the topic. On one level, my intention is to excavate Madariaga’s historically distinctive theorizations of liberalism, democracy, and European unification. But I also aim to bring this project’s historical inquiry into conversation with contemporary debates surrounding the European Union and its foundations. I hope to build upon current scholarship that scrutinizes the imperialist logics that have historically guided the European Union and stresses the need for awareness of such legacies to mitigate their continued power.
In addition to this second project, I am also laying the groundwork for a study of the Spanish Civil War’s influence on the development of a distinctively ‘dystopian’ political ethos. Through contextually informed readings of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, and Richard Wright, this study will weigh the extent to which a ‘dystopian consciousness’ – rather than liberalism, realism, or idealism – provides an effective lens for grappling with today’s political crises.
Alec Dinnin 