Plessner in Spain: defending the Schelerian sociology of knowledge against weber

Exiled in Groningen after being removed from his Cologne chair in 1933, Plessner diagnosed a “Spanish inability” to collaborate “in the creation of modern European values,” arguing that Spain lacks “a proper state idea” because “without the Renaissance and Reformation” it remained “pending the foundations of the medieval ordo.”Footnote ¹³ Plessner started his analysis of Spain as a European “periphery” with the idea of a supra-dichotomy between Mediterranean and European mentalities, referring to the director of the Revista de Occidente.Footnote ¹⁴ In his Meditaciones del Quijote (1914), Ortega had explained this historical antagonism in terms of a typical southern materialistic emotiveness (pathos) versus a typical northern transcendental emotiveness.Footnote ¹⁵ During his stay in Munich in 1922, he discussed this issue intensely with the Husserlian Moritz Geiger (1880–1937), as well as with Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), whose morphology of cultures had an enormous impact all over Europe, particularly in Spain. This was due to a broad transfer through the circle of the Revista de Occidente, which, by the end of the 1920s, aimed at overcoming Spenglerian historical morphology's so-called pseudomorphosis perceived in this circle as a crucial error. In Spain, Spenglerian pseudomorphosis had triggered two opposing resemanticizations: the Spanish left transformed it into a transition-centered concept of Europe's temporary decline, which served as a trans-ideological key reference of the moderate Spanish Spenglerism that was dominant until the mid-1930s; among the Spanish right, on the other hand, it operated as a resistance-centered battle cry for a Catholic Caesarism, particularly highlighting Spengler's corresponding prophecy of renewed religiousness.Footnote ¹⁶ As we shall see in the third and last section of this article, early 1950s critique of Freyerian Wirklichkeitswissenschaft in Francoist Spain was substantially nurtured by the Revista de Occidente's late 1920s efforts to definitively overcome Spenglerian pseudomorphosis through Schelerian material-value ethics and his sociology of knowledge.

Plessner's 1935 critique of Spanish values was framed by sociological, historical, and philological contributions on the Renaissance, including questions of society and education, as well as issues of Spanish scientific history and, particularly, Neoplatonism.Footnote ¹⁷ In his lecture, Plessner followed the Romanist Victor Klemperer (1881–1960), who, some years earlier, had been very skeptical of the idea of a Spanish Renaissance, especially criticizing two prominent defenders of this thesis, namely Américo Castro (1885–1972) and Helmut Anthony Hatzfeld (1892–1979). While appreciating Ludwig Pfandl's (1881–1942) study Die großen spanischen Mystiker (1925) on the importance of asceticism as an “essential preliminary stage of mysticism,” Klemperer defended a continuity of “anti-Renaissance structures” (Antirenaissancehaftes). He did so by relying particularly on arguments from Marcelino Menéndez (1856–1912) regarding the literary conservation of a supposedly popular character in order to underline the idea of a specifically Spanish cultural nucleus essentially defined against any “development of mundane existence” (Entwicklung der irdischen Persönlichkeit).Footnote ¹⁸ Following Vossler, and in contrast to Castro, Klemperer characterized “Spanish realism” as a “peaceful compound between verism and fantasy,” representing a kind of singularity in Europe, whose historical–universal purpose retained the secret of a “second antiquity” for the present.Footnote ¹⁹

Klemperer's arguments stemmed from Vossler's critique of French structuralists’ linguistic formalism and of the Leipzig school. Including associative references to Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), Vossler defended a concept of psycho-cognitive identity between language and culture, insisting that “every conviction and opinion” corresponds “always” (immer) and “exactly” (haarscharf) with a “respective mode of intuition and internal form of language” (bestimmte Anschauungsweise und innere Sprachform).Footnote ²⁰ Described as “organic back and forth between the metaphysical and empirical dimensions of linguistic communities,”Footnote ²¹ Vossler's linguistic determinism strengthened propaedeutic–methodological positions, especially of the early Cologne school of sociology, which aimed at continuing the culturalist approach found in Emil Durkheim's (1858–1917) sociology.Footnote ²² The interwar debate between German Romanists and Spanish philologists was part of a broad scientific exchange that covered the most diverse scientific field ranging from prehistory and psychology to quantum physics.Footnote ²³ In this context, Vossler defended the idea of the “Spaniard in psycho-physical and phenomenological terms,” consisting of a prehistoric human type characterized by “eagerness towards the transcendent and agony towards the immanent” whose cultural-historical response to the “double assault of modern individualism,” i.e. the German Reformation and the Italian Renaissance, led to an exaggerated acceleration of its core social identity, namely the supra-naturalness of honor.Footnote ²⁴ Regarding this new, historically embodied “human ideal” in a “superior military stratum,” Vossler underlined the absence of any economic element as the main cause of historical decline to be countered by a new generation of “Awakeners of Spain” (explicitly mentioning Benavente, Ganivet, Unamuno, and Ortega).Footnote ²⁵

In his 1935 lecture, Plessner focused on the question of sociological concepts, pointing out a “typical error” in Klemperer when “assessing the German Reformation as progress over the Renaissance in the direction of the liberation of man.”Footnote ²⁶ Qualified as typical, nineteenth-century “interpretation ex eventu and from a Protestant point of view,” Plessner insisted that historical concepts should “be neutral in their values and elastic in their content.”Footnote ²⁷ Explicitly in contradiction of Max Weber (1864–1920) (padece mengua la profundidad de la teoría), he argued that, in reality, German Lutheranism, Anglo-Saxon Calvinism and the Spanish Counter-Reformation shared nova instauratio fidei et ecclesiae. Warning that the “affinity between Calvinist ethics and capitalist rationalization should not deceive us about the progressive character of Calvinism,” Plessner qualified as involuntary the liberation of the “productive forces of the modern nationalist and technical–capitalist world,” stressing that they have “nothing to do with the religious–ecclesiastical spirit of their founders.”Footnote ²⁸

The publication of Plessner's lecture in Spain culminated the interdisciplinary modernization process in Spanish social sciences throughout the 1920s and 1930s, driven primarily by the Revista de Occidente, which focused on Georg Simmel's (1858–1918) formal sociology and Max Scheler's (1874–1928) sociology of knowledge.Footnote ²⁹ More than ten years earlier, in 1924, Plessner had contributed as a young Privatdozent to the second book from the early Cologne school of sociology with a study on the modern concept of research and its organization in German universities. This volume was edited by Scheler and, because of its collective nature, was quite influential.Footnote ³⁰ Following the early Cologne school of sociology's focus on “explanatory relations” between a certain “type of society” and “type of knowledge,” Plessner characterized the “modern method of investigation” as a formal rupture and reduction of the unity found in the “Aristotelian–Thomist knowledge system, and the Catholic Church as well,” transforming “autonomous research knowledge into something permanently fragmentary and transitory.”Footnote ³¹ This shift triggered modern society's “double face” found in the “industrialization of science and rationalization of social life,” which is why Plessner argued that the inclination towards research in German universities corresponded to the “open system of a great society of work acting in autonomous disciplines” (Werkgesellschaft der autonomen Disziplinen).Footnote ³² Unlike the medieval “community of work” (Werkgemeinschaft), it was organized by way of the republican–democratic criteria of equality between chairs. However, the German university maintained, according to Plessner, the character of a “superior community of work” (oberste Werkgemeinschaft). It did so by preserving the disciplines’ distinct atmosphere and by integrating “ethnic–cultural particularity” (völkische Eigenart) as a “vital value of education” due to its social appreciation in Germany with an “semi-divine aura” (fast religiöse Weihe).Footnote ³³

Although Plessner was critical of Weber regarding the “decisive influence” of the inner-worldly asceticism found in Calvinist ethics on the development of modern capitalist society, he admitted that today's “unconditional respect for ascetic enthusiasm” had “undoubtedly” emerged from a sufficiently formalistic deontological ethic of love embodied by the system of specialized professions. This professional ethic proceeded, as Plessner highlighted, from “progress's implicit tendency towards infinity,” and was identical with modern research and its character as an idea “achievable only in an asymptotic way.” Unlike Weber's epistemic–logical concepts of sociology, Plessner understood the foundation of modern ethics as a “psychic conviction formulated as an ideal type” (psychische Haltung idealtypisch gefaßt) with a focus of interest leaning toward the future. Channeled through a “logic of inner-worldly ethics” (Logik innerweltlicher Lebensauffassung), this invasion of the future corresponded to the “ethics of an autonomous society” (Ethos der autonomisierten Gesellschaft).Footnote ³⁴

For the early Cologne school of sociology, Plessner's psychological reduction of Weber's sociological concept of the ideal type (Idealtypus) was representative, corresponding, moreover, with the pseudo-Weberian positions of Eduard Spranger (1882–1963), whose pedagogical psychology had significant impact in interwar Spain.Footnote ³⁵ Plessner softened his critique of Weber after 1945 by speaking of the “many misunderstandings” and “rejections” that Weber's thesis on the origin of capitalism in Calvinism had provoked, admitting partial validity “within the affinities that can be demonstrated” between inner-worldly asceticism and the modern ethic of work. According to Plessner, the various schools of sociology represented a “purification of the atmosphere,” finally disconnecting the new discipline from presumed positivist historiographies (associated here with Lamprecht, Breysig, Spengler, Toynbee, and Taine). However, categorical structures of society (Kategorialstrukturen menschlichen, in casu sozialen Seins), in terms of tools for identifying relative aprioristic relationships (Feststellung relativ apriorischer Zusammenhänge), remained a matter of reductive phenomenological analysis. In this sense, Plessner followed Scheler's thesis of an ordo amoris, arguing that “in each of the scientific disciplines the lover is prior to the researcher, preparing the way.”Footnote ³⁶

In 1924, Scheler outlined a broad sociology-of-knowledge program directed specifically against Weber's verstehende Soziologie, including multiple associative references not only to Spengler but also to the political theology of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985).Footnote ³⁷ The same sociology program also appeared two years later as the first part of the book Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (1926), translated without the second and third parts by José Gaos (1900–1969) for the Revista de Occidente's publishing house at the peak of the transfer of Schelerian sociology to Spain prior to the Civil War.Footnote ³⁸ Significantly, Scheler represents a vital backdrop to Schmitt's early impact in Spain, which began around 1929 or 1930, via the circle of the Revista de Occidente.Footnote ³⁹ In the third part of the Wissensformen—focused on the question of university reform previously published in the inaugural volume of the Forschungsinstitut für Sozialwissenschaften in KölnFootnote ⁴⁰—Scheler advocated for a strict separation between university teaching and scientific research, particularly underlining the idea of a synthetic culture based on value judgments as a structural paradigm for science and education institutions.

According to Scheler, each of the institutional levels within public higher education corresponded to a certain type of educator: (1) “excellent teachers” for universities transformed into vocational training centers, (2) “researchers” for specialized research institutes, (3) “intellectual synthesizers” (geistige Synthetiker) for institutes focused on value-based culture (Anstalten/unter dem Lichte der verschiedenen Weltanschauungen), (4) “popular educators” (Volksbildner) for popular schools independent of universities, and, (5) “social and political ideologues” for academies focused on the social and political sciences, meant to establish a dialogue between the third and fourth levels with a focus on major public–political issues.Footnote ⁴¹ This vision of a great national education system directly influenced the idea of the university that Ortega outlined in 1931. But, unlike Scheler, who expressly intended to reactivate the Humboldtian tradition (geistige Synthetiker großen Stils),Footnote ⁴² Ortega not only reduced this vision substantially to a culture–profession–research triad, but also restricted its synthetic cultural paradigm to a kind of simplified charismatic education without further explanation of the modern academic's specific qualities.Footnote ⁴³

Unmutated singularity: values as questio iuris and spanish mysticism

Presented as the first contribution to the historical–philological section, Plessner's reflections on the Renaissance and the Reformation were published in the then newly founded journal of the Asociación Española para el Progreso de las Ciencias (AEPC, 1908).Footnote ⁴⁴ Founded a year after the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (JAE, 1907), this association was part of the largest public initiative for scientific and academic modernization in twentieth-century Spain.Footnote ⁴⁵ Until 1934, the AEPC held the largest national science congress of the interwar years on a biannual basis, which was interrupted at the outbreak of the Civil War. It continued on after 1938 as one of the first major internationalization initiatives of Francoism with scientific delegations present from Portugal, Italy, and Germany, including the German ambassador, Eberhard von Stohrer (1883–1953) and his cultural attaché, Wilhelm Petersen (s.d.).Footnote ⁴⁶ Aiming to “synthesize the state of science,” the AEPC journal was one of the first interdisciplinary scientific publications in Spain to widely address both specialized readers and the “general public.”Footnote ⁴⁷ It was markedly traditionalist in the social sciences and humanities, and included collaborators like José Gascón (1875–1962), former minister of education and culture, and Xosé María Castroviejo (1909–1983), Falangist and, starting in 1937, adviser to the Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, alongside other more moderate Catholics such as the priest and philosopher Juan Zaragüeta (1883–1974) and the Arabist Ángel González (1889–1949).

Remarkably, AEPC's synthetic science program was significantly influenced by the circle of the Revista de Occidente, Ortega in particular. An emblematic case, in this regard, corresponds to the Zaragozan professor of natural law Enrique Luño (1900–58), who had been JAE research fellow in Italy and Germany between 1925 and 1929, becoming rector of the University of Barcelona from 1945 to 1951. In his extensive double essay published in the AEPC journal's philosophy subsection, Luño focused on the legal philosophy of the Galician theologian Ángel María Amor (1869–1930), an expert in canon law and a pioneer of linguistics in Spain, whose criticism of classical scholasticism saw a revival at the end of the 1940s.Footnote ⁴⁸ Luño insisted on a convergence between the “metaphysical orientation of the value theory that Amor supported” and “current phenomenology,” introducing in great detail German keys transferred by the Revista de Occidente.Footnote ⁴⁹ With regard to the “incredible fertility of the issue of values considered in objective terms,” Luño emphatically highlighted that “Professor Ortega y Gasset in his exquisite and suggestive [1923] study,” followed a Schelerian argument (siguiendo a Scheler), by “sharply” observing that value “is not a questio facti, but a questio iuris.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Against this background, Luño defended the “immutability of natural law” by identifying it as a fusion between Thomism and Augustinianism, with “consciousness as an expression of values.” He not only skipped all the differences between new and former natural-law concepts (Kant versus Wolff), but also deformed the Vienna school's modern legal positivism, arguing with a supposedly dominant and continuous concept of “ontological value,” starting from Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and culminating with Hans Kelsen (1881–1973).Footnote ⁵¹ Luño searched for an anti-Roussonian, “organicist” concept of power by insisting that “human authority” can only result from a type of society “immediately in accordance with the collective goal and mediately in accordance with the general plan of divine order.” In this way, updating phenomenology served to defend his idea of a pure society derived from the “verification of the universal order established and ruled by God in the world,” which consequently became manifest when “subjects unite in an inseparable relationship through the legal bond.”Footnote ⁵²

Luño's arguments defending pre-Kantian natural law remarkably converge with Ortega's sociological analysis in El hombre y la gente. Given as lectures in Valladolid (1934–35) and Rotterdam (1936), and developed further in a small seminar at the University of Madrid entitled Estructuras de la Vida Histórica y Social, Ortega presented this sociological analysis as an extended university course in Argentina from 1939 to 1940, leading to the definitive text of the course given at the Instituto de Humanidades from 1949 to 1950 finally published as a book in 1957.Footnote ⁵³ Seeking a “new linguistics,” Ortega referred to the Vossler student Eugen Lerch (1888–1952) in Lesson XI, outlining an ontological identity dimension of “coexistence” prior to the dialectical state of “dissociety” (disociedad) considered as “coexistence of friends and enemies.” It started not only from Husserl's 1931 meditations and those of other prominent disciples (especially Schütz, as well as Fink and Löwith) but, particularly, from the psychology of Karl Bühler (1879–1963).Footnote ⁵⁴ Between two direct references to Bühlerian psychology,Footnote ⁵⁵ Ortega explained the “enormous paradox” of the “withgiven presence of the Other Man” (presencia compresente del Otro Hombre)—explained as “ab initio reciprocative, and, therefore, what is social”—in terms of a vital resistance to the state of “Being a stranger to me, the essential foreigner.” The dis-social dimension of the “pure Other” referred to unknown man present through the “pseudo-life of conventionality.” Here, Ortega highlighted a “constitutively dangerous” character, defined explicitly as a “hostile and fierce” potentiality caused by the quality of all “ex-perience” (associated with the Latin periculum), for being opposed to the “withdrawal” (retiro) of the “authenticity of my life as radical loneliness.” Given the “numbness or dullness” in certain historical moments, “for the obvious and basic truth that every neighbor is ultimately dangerous,” this sociological analysis revealed, according to Ortega, a basic category of universal history: the vital “[state of] alert” (alerta) whose loss caused much “suffering and catastrophe over the last thirty-five years.”Footnote ⁵⁶

In El hombre y la gente, Ortega elaborated on ideas he had been outlining since 1924 on a philosophical anthropology by connecting new psychology (Freud, Adler, Klages, and others) with the early Cologne school of sociology, i.e. mainly the Schelerian doctrine of sympathy developed starting in 1913 and culminating in Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (1923, 3rd edn 1931).Footnote ⁵⁷ In order to specify the philosophical foundation of Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (1924), in 1931, Plessner also expanded on the idea of an “existential–vital relationship of friends and enemies” (urwüchsige Lebensbeziehung von Freund und Feind) towards a “sphere of trust” (Sphäre der Vertrautheit) opposed to the “mysteries of the strange” (Unheimlichkeit des Fremden). But, instead of identifying this Freudian psychology of the unknown in terms of hostility (Schmitt) or with an ontological anchoring in a sphere of authenticity (Ortega), Plessner argued for “existential immanence that is open in a double sense” (in doppeltem Sinne eine offene Immanenz), thus making it possible to “convert the natural  relationship between past and present towards the dimension of reflection on man.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Taking up his ambiguous comment on Weber in Lesson VII of the Argentine course (toma la vía errada)Footnote ⁵⁹, after returning to Spain, Ortega more explicitly presented El hombre y la gente's definitive version in opposition to the “greatest recent sociologist, Max Weber,” whose doctrine he qualified not only as “most vulgar,” but also and simply as “pure error.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This harsh conclusion referred to the initial pages of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1921), where Weber had collected, in a simplified manner, previous analysis Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie (1913), meticulously explaining his fundamental sociological concepts, i.e. erklärendes Verstehen, Sinnadäquanz, Wertrationalität, Idealtyp, and so on.Footnote ⁶¹ According to the table of contents associated with the course he gave at the Instituto de Humanidades, Ortega pretended an even more complete rejection of modern sociology by announcing in its final Lesson XI, “Some sociologists are done for: Weber, Durkheim, Bergson.”Footnote ⁶² Indeed, El hombre y la gente explicitly started out as an effort to remedy Durkheim, presented as “closest to an accurate intuition of the social fact,” but confused by the idea that “society is the true God.” Against this backdrop, Ortega explained his sociological concept of paradoxical coexistence by means of “three different moments that cyclically repeat themselves throughout human history in increasing complexity, and density,” namely alteration, self-interiorization, and action (alteración/ensimismamiento/acción). Following Scheler (deemed “my great friend”), this conceptual proposal came from a rereading of Bergsonian intuitionism and culminated in the Eckhartian metaphor of the “silent desert that is God,” presented not only as the “most brilliant of European mystics,” but also as decisive for understanding inter-individual human dialectics.Footnote ⁶³

With El hombre y la gente's core proposal, Ortega reconnected not only with the Schelerian sociology of knowledge, but also with a key thesis that was intensely debated in the circle of the Revista de Occidente (by Giménez Caballero, Sánchez Rivero, Castro, and others), namely the existence of a Spanish pre-Protestantism in favor of an awakening of the modern individual conscience through Neoplatonic mysticism. It was seen by some as the exemplary religious conscience of sixteenth-century Spanish Catholicism. This debate focused on Spain's historical–cultural singularity (Asín, Sánchez-Albornoz, García Gómez, and others) by including, among other research topics, specialized studies on Salomon Ibn Gabirol (1021–58, known as Solomo), Moisés ben Maimon (1135–1204, known as Maimonides) and Jehuda Leon ben Isaak Abrabanel (1460–1535, known as León Ebreo). Remarkably, Ortega's young assistant, María Zambrano (1904–91), started a doctoral thesis project (unfinished) on salvation ethics in Baruch de Spinoza (1632–77).Footnote ⁶⁴ In this context, Ortega's university course Sobre la Época de Galileo (1550–1650), which took place in February and June 1933, impacted debate.Footnote ⁶⁵ Lesson VIII, on the transition from Christianity to rationalism, was immediately published and collected as a book entitled En torno a Galileo (1933), and Lessons V to VIII were republished separately almost ten years later under the title Esquema de las crisis (1942).Footnote ⁶⁶ In the penultimate lesson, on fifteenth-century European society, Ortega followed Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's (1872–1945) study entitled Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919), which had clear Spengler influences, and was then widely studied in the Revista de Occidente.Footnote ⁶⁷ In it, Ortega identified a secular mutation of Christian religiosity as analogous with ancient Stoicism presented as modernity's origin. According to this perspective, the devotio moderna consisted precisely in a humanization of Christianity through an ambivalent mystique opposed to the world (De comtemptu mundi).Footnote ⁶⁸

The Revista de Occidente's debate on Spanish culture and history also included voices that defended ethno-psychological positions associated with Spanish Neoplatonism, which was again present in the context of Plessner's 1935 critique of Spanish values. The philologist Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez (1897–1986), member of Acción Española and first Francoist minister of education, published an extensive essay, which corresponded to Chapters 1, 4, and 6 of his National Prize for Literature-winning book on Spanish mystical literature, focusing on mysticism's connection “with the psychological and artistic characteristics of Spanish people” in terms of a kind of national essentialism (país de los místicos).Footnote ⁶⁹ Sáinz argued with the convergence between Spanish Neoplatonism (León Ebreo in particular) and the reformed theology of the Middle Ages, highlighting the moral dimension of missionary Catholicism as a direct response to the Renaissance idea of libre arbitrio. Thus practical Catholic moralization became Spain's essence and “national philosophy” according with the idea that “ethics had always dominated metaphysics.”Footnote ⁷⁰ From Sáinz's perspective, Spaniards had never been a “people of contemplatives,” but rather are steeped in the “great social significance” of the “doctrine of love,” even beyond the “cultured mass in general,” a state that originated from Neoplatonism.Footnote ⁷¹

This idea of a Spanish ethno-psychological identity served a year later as the definitive backdrop for La Gaceta Literaria's special issue on “Catolicismo y Literatura,” including essays by Sáinz, Zaragüeta, and “other Catholics of solid faith” (like Ossorio and Arboleya) who represented right-wing traditionalist ideology (including Maeztu, d'Ors, and Salaverría).Footnote ⁷² Together with the Augustinian priest Bruno Ibeas (1879–1957), another Acción Española collaborator and Schelerian philosophy defender,Footnote ⁷³ they joined the Zaragozan historian of natural law Salvador Minguijón (1874–1959), who was elected member of the Tribunal de Garantías Constitucionales in 1933.Footnote ⁷⁴ Responding to the question of “Catholicism's future,” in the face of Spengler's declared “decline of the West,” Minguijón underlined a “double defensive and expansive function” by stressing, above all, “its mystical values” as a basis for the “synthesis of Germanism and Latinism.” Here, he referred to spiritual “superiority” in terms of “Latinism lived out by Germans,” confirmation of which required “scientific study of Catholicism in Spain” (naming Asín, Gómez, Zubiri, Zaragüeta, Amor, and others as representatives thereof).Footnote ⁷⁵ La Gaceta Literaria identified this political education program with a culturally radicalized Catholicism in terms of “defense of the West,” i.e. “Greek–Latin and Hebrew traditions” against the “all-pulverizing Orientalism” embodied by Russia as a historical agent.Footnote ⁷⁶ Remarkably, Pastor (Plessner and Vossler's translator), who also collaborated in the right-wing journal Conquista del Estado, was a noteworthy spreader of this program.Footnote ⁷⁷ In view of Minguijón's vision of Germanized Catholic Latinism, he proposed universal vitalism following a Schelerian “logic of the heart” whose methods he believed capable of “delivering the essences” of a rejuvenating German “spiritual movement” (associated with Keyserling, Spengler, and Otto).Footnote ⁷⁸

Envisioned as a fusion between the “Castilian spirit of superiority” and the “Catalan bourgeois conscience,” Vossler argued for the singularity of the Spanish universal-historical anti-Reformation identity as proof of a specific type of human superior power.Footnote ⁷⁹ The essence of this “Spanish superior man” consisted in a “healthy sense of reality,” which had been incarnated, according to Vossler, in Lope de Vega's (1562–1635) “authentic poetic realism.”Footnote ⁸⁰ This vision of Spain not only promoted Vossler's dissemination throughout the circle of the Revista de Occidente,Footnote ⁸¹ but also engendered favor from the cultural department of the German embassy in Madrid in the context of his invitation to the Santander Summer University in 1933.Footnote ⁸² Two years later, Vossler inaugurated the Lope centennial celebrations, which the German ambassador Johannes Bernhard Graf von Welczeck (1878–1972) organized in Madrid.Footnote ⁸³ And finally, in 1944, he became the first German academic to receive an honoris causa degree from a Francoist university in Madrid.Footnote ⁸⁴

Germanized Latinism and the Spenglerian roots of Freyerian Wirklichkeitswissenschaft

Early Francoist sociology aspired to implement Minguijón's vision of Germanized Catholic Latinism by following German–Spanish interwar cultural transfers revolving around a Schelerian renewal of spiritual communitarianism. As a discipline not “yet definitively constituted,” Catholic sociology was projected as a political–romantic struggle against the “hypotrophy of the self” (hiptrofía del yo/es preciso que el individuo muera, si la persona debe resucitar), a notion explicitly associated with Schmitt and Scheler in order to seek the formation of “rules, types (average types and logical ideal types) and where possible, of laws.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The main weapon of this anti-Spencerian struggle consisted of a neo-Kantian and phenomenological “theory of values” (Rickert, Husserl, Scheler) ultimately meant to reveal the “need for redemption” as a “metaphysical truth.”Footnote ⁸⁶

A young representative of early Francoist sociology and self-declared Ortegian,Footnote ⁸⁷ Salvador Lissarrague (1910–67), taught classes at the Instituto de Estudios Políticos (IEP) from 1942 as an assistant to Gascón. In 1955, Lissarrague was eventually awarded the first chair in political sciences in Madrid.Footnote ⁸⁸ From his wide-ranging research topics, his studies from between 1951 and 1962 dedicated to the three classics of sociology, Weber, Durkheim, and Bergson, stand out.Footnote ⁸⁹ The first focused on Weber's concept of social action elaborated, according to Lissarrague, as a “nucleus of social reality” precisely “prior” to questions analyzed in formal and relational sociology (by Simmel and von Wiese). Notably, Lissarrague offered a private translation of Weber's fundamental sociological concepts for the exclusive use of his students in a seminar he directed on social and political theory.Footnote ⁹⁰ However, in striking contrast to all of that, his 1951 study skipped over Weber's fundamental concepts, basically following El hombre y la gente. Starting from the hostile dimension of “human coexistence” in openly Ortegian terms and considering it the “basic environment prior” to the collective and its “realization through human acts,” Lissarrague even contributed to camouflage the recycling of the early Cologne school's philosophical anthropology when speaking of “man's ontological openness towards others” as if this concept were original to Francisco Javier Conde (1908–74).Footnote ⁹¹

Lissarrague began publishing studies on the classics of sociology in 1951 to counter the harsh critique that his doctoral thesis, El poder político y la sociedad (1944), published by the IEP, had received. Qualifying it as empty eclecticism, a prominent representative of social Catholicism, Antonio Perpiñá (1908–84),Footnote ⁹² rejected it immediately. Lamenting the “excessive number of different authors, opposing mentalities and antagonistic schools,” he even saw it as a “disjointed and fragmentary exposition of different issues,” leading him to conclude that the “author's own thought … doesn't really exist.”Footnote ⁹³ A year earlier, Perpiñá had reviewed Ortega's 1933 course on Christian religiosity's secular mutation, which was reedited in 1942. Starting by polemically describing Ortega's particular style as sometimes similar to “Keyserling's dilettantism,” he expressly welcomed the “fine interpretation of the Renaissance phenomenon,” but stressed his disappointment regarding Ortegian sociological keys (social authenticity, in particular) precisely because of their proximity to historicist displacement of “human essence from nature to history (as Spengler already did).”Footnote ⁹⁴ Perpiñá qualified this “Spenglerian, disjointed succession of cultures” as a dehumanization of history, insisting on a divine teleology of humanity—i.e. contemplation of ideas “for their moral and social value, for their transcendence towards an outside, aiming at divinizing them”—meant to facilitate an “integral understanding of man and his mission” in terms of “reality and healthy realism.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Although he considered Ortega a “genius,” in 1961 Perpiñá qualified Ortegian sociology as a simplistic theory of cultural behavior whose focus on an “[o]ntology of interhuman reality” lacked a “clear notion … as science in positive and empirical terms,” therefore constituting “at most, a social philosophy, but never a sociology.”Footnote ⁹⁶ He believed this based on an implied phenomenological solipsism incapable of “explaining social life.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Since the first volume of his study Teoría de la realidad social (1949/58), Perpiñá qualified it as “sociological trans-individualism,” a purely theoretical and “completely misleading as well as inaccurate” approach. Instead, he defended so-called “supra-objective social units” conceived as “given through the will of living socially,” i.e. as sociologically detectable units “within real living” (vivencia efectiva). Here, he relied on Schelerian sociology, expressly described as the completion of Weberian ideas (Max Weber ha adivinado esto, aunque no lo desarrolló).Footnote ⁹⁸ Following this approach, in 1961, Perpiñá insisted (without even mentioning Weber) on sociology as an “applied or applicable science” according to a concept of a “norm that aspires to be fulfilled” (deber ser que es), which he presented as a “third concept that escapes classic … Kantian and neo-Kantian dualism.”Footnote ⁹⁹

This proposal stemmed from his 1951–2 critique of Hans Freyer (1887–1969), a leading sociologist of the Leipzig school whose anti-Maineckenian ontological historicism decisively impacted the history of structures and concepts after World War II.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In his critique, Perpiñá referred to Freyer's omnipresence in Spain as both an en vogue and a principal sociologist whose texts had become semiofficial books in many universities. This was certainly the case of Einleitung in die Soziologie (1931), which he meticulously commented on, in addition to Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft (1930).Footnote ¹⁰¹ Perpiñá presented Freyer's “revolution of social science,” first of all, as an attempt to rescue Diltheyan foundations, identifying an anti-Kantian “gnoseological super-realism” anchored in “phenomenological analysis.” From this perspective, Freyerian sociology consisted of a “simple social physiology” opposed to Weber's “logic of rational–teleological thought to construct his ideal types,” given that Freyer rejected “Rickertian distinction between idiographic and nomothetic science.”Footnote ¹⁰² Elaborated in more detail in 1958, Perpiñá simplified here Weberian Wertfreiheit by erroneously identifying it with Rickertian Wertbeziehung, as if Weber had been “following Rickert” on the “selection of the object operating through value references.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The core problem of Freyerian sociology, according to Perpiñá, refers to the meaning attributed to the “term reality (Wirklichkeit),” which is supposed to unite “excessive voluntarism” with “strong social determinism,” and causes an inversion of sociology, turning it into a “science of normative mandates.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Perpiñá rejected this dialectical conversion of “overarching and categorical structural laws of community and society” by qualifying it as an antisociological “confusion” between the “experience of the social (not simply the mental category of the social)” and the “experience of temporal succession” (Erlebnis des Sozialen [nicht bloß die Denkkategorie des Sozialen] ist etwas anderes als das Erlebnis der Zeitfolge).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Here, remarkably, he followed Leopold von Wiese (1876–1969), who had criticized Freyer for identifying the Beziehungslehre as a merely logical and ahistorical science opposed to sociology as Wirklichkeitswissenschaft.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Against this background, Perpiñá identified a “deep error that presides over the entire Freyerian thesis” in that it skips all the “elementary assumptions necessary to construct rational knowledge,” referring to abstract and timeless concepts, as well as to laws built on formal–relational analysis of “small, microscopic processes” (Simmel). Furthermore, Perpiñá's “strongest objection” to Freyer refers to his reduction of sociology to a naturalist “inverted philosophy of history” that Perpiñá considered a “typical nineteenth-century evolutionist approach.” Categorically rejecting Freyerian monism (un proceso/una comunidad/una sociedad), Perpiñá insisted on defending a pluralistic cultural sociology (diversos procesos completos de culturas históricas/diversas comunidades y diversas sociedades), relying explicitly on “Oswald Spengler's categories of culture and civilization.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Following the early Cologne school of sociology's perspective, and reaffirming it with reference to René König (1906–92), Spenglerian morphology of cultures allowed Perpiñá to turn around Freyerian Wirklichkeitswissenschaft. In order to diversify it “into many systems,” and syntonize it with cultural morphology's manifold historical senses, Perpiñá resemantisized Freyer's “valid volitional content of the present” (contenido volitivo ‘valido’ del presente).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Here, he referred explicitly to the “nations as validity areas for society's new forming principle” (Völker als die Geltungsräume des neuen gesellschaftsbildenden Prinzips) that Freyer had identified with the “valid historical will of change” of the present's “dialectical content” (geschichtlich gültigen Willen zu ihrer Veränderung/dialektischen Gehalt der Wirklichkeit), i.e. the “concept of true will ” (Begriff des “wahren Willens”).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Announced as the new “contiguity system” (sistemática de la contigüidad), Perpiñá underlined Freyerian “duality of degree-value and layer-value” (Zweiheit von Stufenwert und Schichtenwert) as a key characteristic of “all formations of social reality” (alle Gebilde der gesellschaftlichen Wirklichkeit) in terms of “delimitation and reciprocal action of degree-value and layer-value” (Verschränkung und Ineinanderarbeitung von Stufenwert und Schichtenwert).Footnote ¹¹⁰ Against the universalism of “cultural evolution ‘stages’” (“estadios” de la evolución cultural), referring to Freyerian Stufen (grados), Perpiñá resemantisized sociology as science of reality by particularly emphasizing the so-called “‘strata’ of any social structure” (‘estratos’ de cualquier estructura social), referring to Freyerian Schichten (capas). This historical dialectic corresponded to the “eminent and preferential microscopic forms of sociability” as the result of a “realist scientific analysis” of “social value systems” that Perpiñá identified as the “very simple answer” to the question of the “specifically significant content of society.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Perpiñá's resemantisizations of Freyerian sociology were shaped in the extensive second section of his Teoría de la realidad social. There, he elaborated a series of “errors” (following and expanding on Scheler), seeking to “overcome the value category” by reinstating human existence's vital hierarchy, proposing (with Ortega and Spranger) religion as the “crown” value in terms of the “perfect expression of moral life.”Footnote ¹¹² Symptomatically, Weber's explanations of the need to avoid value judgments (Werturteilsfreiheit) given at the Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1913 were used here as a key argument taken out of context. By distorting Weber's careful differentiation between freedom of teaching at the university and freedom of expression in public (mag [und: soll] er tun, was sein Gott oder Dämon ihn heißt),Footnote ¹¹³ as if pursuing a Thomistic argument against relativism, Perpiñá instrumentalized it to reject any “independent autonomy” or possible validity “of proper merits” not grounded in the “supreme value” of “religiosity” (Spranger).Footnote ¹¹⁴

In this way, Perpiñá reaffirmed the initial context of Freyer's reception in Spain through the circle of the Revista de Occidente, which he had explained some years before, demanding “a historical investigation … that is, a true sociology of sociology (Freyer).”Footnote ¹¹⁵ On that occasion, he not only qualified Weberian sociology as unfinished for its “blindness to values,” but also connected von Wiese's Beziehungslehre (given its “foundation in and explanation of the vitalist substratum of human sociability”) directly with Schmitt's “well-known definition of the political,” highlighting that “political science's highest goal” is contemplation of the “vitalist aspect of societies.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Finally, in 1949, he anchored Schmittian concepts of “friendship and enmity” explicitly in Scheler's “values of sympathy and antipathy,” criticizing Schmitt's “error of perspective” by exclusively understanding them as criteria of the political.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Indeed, in 1931, the Revista de Occidente had published Freyer's introductory contribution to the first volume, Das Erwachen der Menschheit (1931), of the Propyläen-Weltgeschichte (1929–33). Said volume was edited by the historian Walter Goetz (1867–1958) and translated by the Spengler translator Manuel García Morente (1886–1942) at Espasa-Calpe from 1932 to 1936. This Freyerian introduction instantly became a prolegomenon in Spain's interest in universal historiography, which Spengler's reception inspired and which was mainly cemented in the ten-volume series Historia del mundo (1926–33) and the five-volume collection Summa artis (1931–5) edited by the Catalan historian Josep Pijoán (1881–1963).Footnote ¹¹⁸ Freyer started his explanation of universal history's fundamental forms with a Nietzschean–Spenglerian diagnosis according to which all “healthy culture” had been replaced by the “chaos of modern education and the weariness of a decadent age.” This situation was only curable by shoring up “intimate connections” (innerer Zusammenhang) between history and its pending reactivation through estimative decisions on “meaning relations” (sinnhafte Beziehung).Footnote ¹¹⁹ Set against “accumulated facts,” Freyer defended a holistic approach as an “intelligible nexus” (Einheit, als Sinnzusammenhang) that demands “switching from history as the past into the present as vitally valid” (Umsprung aus gescheher Geschichte in gelebte Gegenwart). This qualitative change required a “specific ‘point of view’; that is, “awareness of certain value decisions” (bestimmter “Standpunkt”, das heißt das Bewusstsein bestimmter Wertentscheidungen) that bring about two effects by means of their “value content” (Wertgehalt): (a) radiating into the future in terms of requirement and “advancement of history to be intrinsically carried out” (notwendig zu vollziehende Fortbildung der Geschichte) and (b) constituting, with regard to the past, a “picture of the historical course including interpretation of phases and turns” (Bild des geschichtlichen Verlaufs und eine Deutung seiner Etappen und Wendungen).Footnote ¹²⁰ In the final part, Freyer identified, in this regard, the three main value decisions in the concepts of freedom, cycle, and dialectics. Here, he singled out Spengler as the “purest representative” of a value decision focused on the “plurality of particular cultures” (Vielheit der Einzelkulturen), conceived as “conclusive historical cycles” (Mehrzahl geschlossener Kulturabläufe) set against the “unity of universal history as an arc of superior radius” (Einheit der Weltgeschichte als ein höherer Bogen), and focused on the “people's spiritual essence that survives” (geistigen Ertrag, der das Volkstum überdauert) studied (by Lamprecht, Breysig, and others) in terms of “cultural rebirth, reception, and exchange” (Renaissancen, Rezeptionen und Kulturdurchdringungen).Footnote ¹²¹

Freyer celebrated the Spenglerian opus magnum as early as 1921 precisely for its proximity to his own neo-Hegelian approach, enthusiastically welcoming its vision of future socialism in terms of cultural activism (spätherbstliche Taten wollen ebenso getan werden wie frühlingshafte).Footnote ¹²² Like Spengler, during the 1920s he developed a philosophy of technique as an expression of Faustian culture, i.e. in Hegelian terms and conceived as the “manifestation of a historical will.”Footnote ¹²³ In 1933, Freyer strongly supported Spengler's candidacy as director of the Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte (replacing Goetz, who retired for political reasons), a position that he himself accepted after Spengler rejected it.Footnote ¹²⁴

Freyer's introduction to Spain in the early 1930s came about as part of an increasing neo-Hegelian dynamic among the members of the Revista de Occidente circle, which was initiated, in 1928, with the Spanish translation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's (1770–1831) Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (1837). This two-volume book was published in Spanish as an inaugural number of the newly established Biblioteca de Historiología;Footnote ¹²⁵ it included a prologue from Ortega, which was taken from an essay published in Spain and Germany almost simultaneously.Footnote ¹²⁶ In 1935, Felipe Eduardo González Vicén (1908–1991),Footnote ¹²⁷ who later, in 1945, served as a translator of Freyer's introduction to sociology, translated the first partial version of Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821); it was published in the Revista de Occidente collection entitled Textos Filosóficos. There, in his introductory comment, Vicén highlighted Hegel's anti-natural-law position.Footnote ¹²⁸ The pre-Civil War transfer of Hegel in Spain was determined by so-called liberal–critical Hegelian arguments (opposing Freyer and Schmitt), especially from Heinz Heimsoeth (1886–1975), as well as Hermann Heller (1891–1933).Footnote ¹²⁹ At the same time, this neo-Hegelian dynamic strongly diverged from Spanish Krausist traditions, which notably preserved a pre-Kantian natural-law perspective compatible with the Thomistic idea of society as a well-ordered community.Footnote ¹³⁰ Nineteenth-century Spanish Krausist social organicism argued for the state's merely tutelary function, an argument that builds on a concept of pre-political, self-regulating social harmony, that stemmed from French liberalism's eclectic trends, and aligned with anti-Hegelian arguments.Footnote ¹³¹ Adolfo González-Posada y Biesca (1860–1944), a key representative of interwar Spanish Krausist traditions, was influenced by Léon Duguit's (1859–1928) organicism.Footnote ¹³² Regarding Souveraineté et liberté (1922), which was translated into Spanish in 1924, the Revista de Occidente circle immediately identified the core of Duguit's basic norm of social solidarity (derived from Durkheimian sociology) as a concept of metaphysical superiority grounded in natural-law realism.Footnote ¹³³ In his 1934 Cátedra de Valdecilla lecture, Posada demanded revision of all the basic elements of the then current concept of the state according to this Krausist anti-Hegelian natural-law tradition that had been renewed through Duguit's organicism. Symptomatically here, Posada particularly referred to Scheler's 1933 posthumous essay on ontological hero typology.Footnote ¹³⁴