Ramiro de Maeztu


Ramiro de Maeztu y Whitney was a prolific Spanish essayist, journalist and publicist. His early literary work adscribes him to the Generation of '98. Adept to nietzschean and social darwinist ideas in his youth, he became close to Fabian Socialism and, later, to Distributism and Social corporatism during his spell as correspondent in London, from where he chronicled the Great War. During the years of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship he served as Ambassador to Argentina. A staunch militarist, he became at the end of his ideological path one of the most prominent Far-right theorists against the Second Republic, leading the reactionary voices calling for a military coup. Member of the cultural group Acción Española, he spread the concept of "Hispanidad". Imprisoned by Republican authorities after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was killed by leftist militiamen during a :es:Sacas de presos|saca in the midst of the conflict.

Career overview

Ramiro de Maeztu y Whitney was born on May 4, 1875 in Vitoria, the capital of Alava province. He was the son of Manuel de Maeztu Rodriguez, a Cuban engineer and landowner born in Cienfuegos with ancestry from Navarre. While in Paris he had met her mother, Juana Whitney, born in Nice and daughter of a British diplomat, when she was sixteen years old.
He was among the young Spanish intellectuals deeply affected by their country's humiliating defeat in the Spanish–American War of 1898, along with José Martínez Ruiz, Pío Baroja and others forming the literary Generation of '98. His first collection of essays was published in 1898 under the name Hacia otra España.
An early advocate of Socialism, he became disillusioned by the Great War while serving as the London correspondent for several Spanish newspapers, traveling in France and Germany.
After returning to Spain, Maeztu rejected many of his friends and argued that human reason alone was not enough to solve social problems, and argued for the importance of strong authority and tradition rooted in the Roman Catholic Church. These ideas were embodied in his 1916 book, Authority, Liberty, and Function in the Light of the War, first published in English, and later in Spanish as La Crisis del Humanismo.
Maeztu became one of the most prominent defenders of the regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera, and called for Spain to "recover its 16th-century sense of Roman Catholic mission." In 1926 his literary essays were published in Don Quijote, Don Juan y La Celestina, and in 1928 he served as Spanish ambassador to Argentina.
In 1930 he joined the National Monarchist Union, the successor party to Primo de Rivera's Patriotic Union, along other defenders of the dictatorship such as the son of the dictator José Antonio or former ministers José Calvo Sotelo and Eduardo Callejo de la Cuesta.
Along with Pedro Sainz Rodríguez and others, Maeztu founded the right-wing, monarchist Acción Española political movement in 1931. In 1934, his final published book was written, Defensa de la hispanidad, advocating "a return to pure Spanishness" and strongly condemning Liberalism and the French Revolution's slogan "Liberté, égalité, fraternité", which he countered by his own motto: Duty, hierarchy, and humanity. He thought of Spanishness as a spiritual world that united Spain and its former colonies by the Spanish language and Catholicism, rationalism and democracy being supposedly alien to the Hispanic ethos.
On October 29, 1936, Maeztu was murdered by Republican soldiers in the early days of the Spanish Civil War while near Madrid. The following last words are attributed to him: "You do not know why you kill me, but I know why I'm dying: For your children to be better than you!" His political thoughts had a profound influence on Chilean historian Jaime Eyzaguirre.
His younger sister was the Spanish educator and feminist, María de Maeztu who founded the Residencia de Señoritas and the Lyceum Club in Madrid, and his younger brother was the painter Gustavo de Maeztu who has a museum named for him in the Palace of the Kings of Navarre in Estella, Spain.
Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset dedicated his book Meditations on Quixote to Maeztu — "A Ramiro de Maeztu, con un gesto fraternal."

Works

Works in English translation