American Politics & Government Summit (ISI) 2025

From November 7 to 9, 2024, the American Politics and Government Summit (APGS) was held in Wilmington (Delaware, United States), organized by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute with the collaboration of Escuela Hispánica. The meeting brought together academics, students, and intellectual leaders interested in the Western political tradition and contemporary debates on conservatism.

In this framework, the general secretary of Escuela Hispánica delivered a presentation dedicated to the Hispanic tradition of liberty and its role as a necessary complement to the Anglo-Saxon tradition to sustain the historical project of the West. The intervention underscored that Western intellectual history cannot be understood solely through the usual genealogy—Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia—because there is a "lost city" in that narrative: Salamanca.

Intervention during the American Politics and Government Summit in Delaware.

From there, he reconstructed a thread linking St. Thomas, the precursor Franciscans, and the Hispanic scholastics with the birth of modern economics. His emphasis on subjective value, on the relationship between fair price and the free market—"without monopoly, without fraud, without coercion"—anticipates central notions that Austrian economists would later formalize. Chafuen also highlighted the role of Juan de Mariana, who linked moral reflection to institutional critique: the manipulation of currency, the Jesuit warned, was not just a technical error, but an act of social injustice. In his work De Rege et Regis Institutione, Mariana proposed a republican monarchy founded on virtue and respect for the natural order, aware that political power, without morality, inevitably degrades into tyranny.

The Genealogy of the Roots of the West

Next, Juan Ángel Soto placed that legacy within the broader architecture of Western civilization. He proposed including the City of Salamanca in the genealogy of the roots of the West, alongside Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. Not as a nationalist claim, but as a historical rectification. The Hispanic tradition, he explained, acted as a bridge between medieval Christendom and the Enlightenment, preserving the notion of natural law and perfecting it with a reflection on liberty that does not conceive it as mere absence of coercion, but as a moral exercise oriented toward the good.

"Freedom from is insufficient without freedom for," he noted. "Freedom, without an idea of the good to order it, dissolves into arbitrariness."

Representatives of Escuela Hispánica at the "American Politics & Government Summit (ISI) 2025" summit

Soto also warned of a contemporary misunderstanding: the political use of Hispanicity as a tool for geopolitical counterposition against the United States. Faced with these readings of antagonism, he proposed understanding the Hispanic tradition as a constitutive contribution to the Western project, not its negation. "The West of today," he stated, "cannot be sustained by a single column—the Anglo-Saxon one; it needs to rely on the others, especially the Hispanic one, which introduces a more complete anthropology and a more moral conception of the political order."

Personalism in the Face of the Modern Crisis

Enrique Pallarés took the discussion to the philosophical and existential realm, introducing Miguel de Unamuno as an heir to the scholastic tradition and a prophet of the modern crisis. Unamuno—he recalled—warned before anyone else of the risk of depersonalization: the replacement of the concrete individual by the abstract being, of the man of flesh and blood by the faceless "humanity." Faced with the dominance of instrumental reason and mass politics, the Bilbao thinker proposed recovering the centrality of the person. For him, being a person did not mean isolating oneself, but living in tension between the visible and the eternal, between history and the soul.

"There is no other politics," Unamuno wrote, "than saving the person in history."

Pallarés emphasized the theological depth of that statement: politics then ceases to be an engineering of power and becomes a moral task, oriented toward the salvation of the concrete man. In that personalist vision—heir to Christian anthropology and, ultimately, to Scholasticism—is found, he said, the key to responding to the contemporary crisis of liberal civilization. If the 20th century was the century of ideologies and the 21st runs the risk of being the century of indifference, the answer lies in restoring the dignity of the person to the center, against the abstractions of the market, the State, or the masses.

Toward a Political Reconstruction

The conversation between the three speakers revealed a common idea: that freedom without form or purpose leads to chaos, and order without freedom leads to oppression. The Hispanic tradition, from Francisco de Vitoria to Unamuno, would have sought a balance between the two: an order founded on natural law, which recognizes limits to authority and, at the same time, orients freedom toward the good. That "ordered liberty" is, according to Soto, the key to any political reconstruction possible in the face of the temptations of both technocratism and populism.

During the dialogue with the audience, participants addressed questions such as the tension between natural law and sovereign will, the actual influence of the scholastics on Locke and Smith, and the legacy of the Council of Trent in the development of modern political thought. Soto insisted that the goal is not to decide who "was right"—whether the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation—but to rediscover the points of convergence that cemented the Western world: the primacy of law over power, the dignity of the person, and the central role of virtue in public life.

Chafuen added a significant observation: Protestant and Catholic cultures, he said, have cultivated complementary dimensions of modern civilization—respect for the law, in one case; moral and philosophical depth, in the other—and the future of the West will depend on their reconciliation. In parallel to this table, another member of Escuela Hispánica, Felipe Mosquera, participated in another panel where he highlighted the influence of Jovellanos in this tradition.

Intervention by Felipe Mosquera in his panel within the American Politics & Government Summit (ISI)

Conclusion: An Essential Task

More than a historical lesson, the ISI session was an exercise in civilizational re-reading. The speakers from Escuela Hispánica proposed a narrative where the Iberian and American universities of the Golden Age become a missing link between Christendom and liberal modernity; where freedom, far from opposing morality, is founded on it; and where the person—not the masses, nor the State, nor the market—recovers its place as the measure of all political order. As Soto summarized in his final intervention:

"It is not about overcoming modernity, but about remembering that, before it, there already existed a tradition of freedom that was deeper, more human, and more moral. And that recovering it is perhaps the essential task of our time."