Biographies

Bartolomé de las Casas was born in Seville in 1484, the son of a merchant who had participated in Columbus's second voyage. He came to America as a young man and received encomiendas, but his direct experience with the colonial system led him to a profound moral conversion. He entered the Dominican order and dedicated his life to the legal defense of indigenous people.

His activity was both intellectual and political: he participated in imperial debates, influenced legislation, and was a protagonist in the famous Valladolid controversy (1550–1551). He was not simply a humanitarian; He developed a complete legal theory.

In the Apologetics summary history and other writings he maintains that indigenous peoples possess full political reason. They have cities, laws and legitimate authority. Therefore, no war of conquest is just without real prior aggression.

Las Casas goes beyond Vitoria: he affirms that evangelization does not grant political dominance. Conversion must be free and civil power remains in the hands of the people.

His doctrine introduces universal legal equality as an operating principle. This is not just about spiritual dignity: it involves institutional consequences, including local self-government and limits on imperial authority.

He died in Madrid in 1566. His thoughts influenced Indian legislation and later European debates on human rights and colonization.

Domingo de Soto was born in Segovia in 1494 and died in Salamanca on November 15, 1560. He entered the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and trained at the University of Alcalá before moving to Salamanca, where he was a direct disciple of Francisco de Vitoria and became one of the central figures of the so-called Second Scholasticism. His intellectual prestige was such that Charles V appointed him imperial theologian at the Council of Trent, where he participated in the decisive doctrinal debates of 16th century Europe. However, its historical importance is not limited to theology: Soto is one of the great architects of modern legal and economic thought.

His most influential work, De Iustitia et Iure (1553–1554), constitutes one of the most complete expositions of natural law philosophy of the Renaissance. In it he systematically addresses issues of property, commerce, contracts, poverty, work, taxes and political power. It is not an economic treatise in the technical sense, but rather a moral theory of the social order, where the economy appears integrated within justice.

His most innovative contribution is the formulation of the theory of fair price. Faced with the medieval conception that identified the fair price with an objective value determined by authority or by a supposed moral essence of the good, Soto maintains that the economic value depends on the common estimation of the community. That is, the fair price is the price that arises in the market when exchanges are carried out freely.

The market is, therefore, neither a morally suspect environment nor a chaotic space, but a social mechanism of rational coordination. Prices are not set from outside, but emerge from the interaction of needs, scarcity and human preferences. Soto thus introduces an idea that centuries later will be central to modern economics: the economic order can emerge spontaneously without political planning.

This conclusion has decisive political implications. If the price arises from social interaction, the public power cannot determine it arbitrarily without generating injustice. Forced price fixing breaks the equity of exchanges because it replaces social reality with the will of the ruler. The State does not create economic value; it can only protect the legal framework in which it arises.

In this way, Soto links economy and civil liberty: justice in exchanges depends on freedom of contract. The economy ceases to be an area subordinate to power and becomes a dimension of the human natural order. Political authority is structurally limited, since it cannot alter the spontaneous coordination of society without consequences.

His thinking anticipates fundamental elements of classical economics—especially the notion of market price as an indicator of social information—and prepares the later idea of ​​spontaneous order. But, unlike modern economists, Soto reaches these conclusions from moral philosophy: economic freedom is required by justice, not just efficiency.

Thus, Domingo de Soto contributes to a profound intellectual transformation: the recognition that society has internal organizational mechanisms prior to the State. Political authority must not direct economic life, but respect an order that precedes it. This limitation of power in economic matters would become centuries later one of the pillars of liberal constitutionalism.

Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva was born in Toledo in 1512 and died in Segovia in 1577. He was one of the great jurists of the Spanish Renaissance, member of the Council of Castile and later bishop of Segovia. Unlike many purely academic scholastics, his thinking developed simultaneously in the university classroom and in the State administration, which gave his work a particularly institutional orientation.

Trained in Salamanca under the influence of Francisco de Vitoria, Covarrubias applied natural law to specific problems of property, commerce, and legislation. His most important work, Variarum Resolutionum ex Iure Pontificio, Regio et Caesareo Libri IV (1552), analyzes real legal cases and resolves them based on general rational principles.

His most notable philosophical contribution is the early formulation of a subjective theory of value. Covarrubias affirms that the fair price of a good depends on the common estimation of men (communis aestimatio), not on the intrinsic nature of the object or the cost of production. This statement breaks with the classical tradition that linked value and essence. Economic value becomes dependent on human perception within a social context.

The political consequence is profound: if value depends on social valuation, power cannot legitimately set it. The market appears as a collective cognitive process in which individuals coordinate dispersed information. The economy is no longer an area regulated from above to become an emerging dimension of social life.

Covarrubias also defended the relative autonomy of the civil sphere against absolute power. The right is not pure will of the sovereign; It must reflect natural reason. The unjust law loses legitimacy. Thus he contributed to transforming law from an instrument of power to a limit of power.

His thinking anticipates central elements of modern economics and constitutionalism: political authority must respect preexisting social structures—ownership, exchange and valuation—because it does not create them. In this sense, Covarrubias represents one of the transition points between the medieval legal world and the modern conception of social order.

Tomás de Mercado was born in Seville around 1525, within a city that at that time was the great economic node of the Atlantic world after the opening of the American routes. He entered the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and trained between Andalusia and New Spain, later moving to Mexico, where he died in 1575. His intellectual life took place, therefore, between two continents: Europe and America. That experience is decisive for understanding his work, because it does not reflect on a local medieval economy, but on the first truly global economy.

His main work, Sum of Deals and Contracts (1569, expanded in 1571), is one of the most sophisticated economic treatises of the 16th century. Written as a manual for confessors and merchants, it systematically analyzes specific commercial operations: maritime loans, bills of exchange, banking, insurance, monetary exchanges, international credit, speculation and intercontinental trade. This is not an abstract morality, but a practical study of the workings of early capitalism.

Mercado starts from a central question: how to integrate commercial expansion—increasingly complex—within the Christian moral order without condemning economic activity. Faced with medieval suspicion towards commerce, he maintains that commercial activity is legitimate if it respects the freedom of the parties and real knowledge of the contract. Economic justice does not depend on political control or a price set by authority, but on transparency and informed consent.

This principle has profound consequences: the free contract becomes the criterion of economic legitimacy. The moral value of a transaction does not depend on the benefit obtained, but on whether there is deception, coercion or serious asymmetry of information. Mercado thus introduces an early notion of contractual equity that anticipates the modern theory of contract and trust as the basis of the market.

Particularly innovative was his analysis of banking and credit. He observed the activity of Sevillian bankers linked to American commerce and studied how monetary circulation, bills of exchange and distance loans transformed the economy. He understood that money was not simply a metal, but a social instrument based on trust and future expectation. For this reason, he condemned practices that distorted that trust - exchange fraud, monetary manipulation or misleading information - more than commercial benefit itself.

In this way he transferred moral freedom to the economic sphere: to trade is to cooperate rationally. The market ceases to be morally suspect and begins to be understood as a form of natural human interaction within society. The economy appears integrated into natural law: voluntary exchanges coordinate interests and generate social order without the need for constant political direction.

This conception anticipates central elements of later economic thought: the importance of information, institutional trust, decentralized coordination and the legitimacy of benefit within a framework of general rules. Centuries later, liberal economics will consider the market as a system of spontaneous cooperation; Mercado had already established his moral foundations.

His contribution also represents the Atlantic dimension of Scholasticism: European philosophical reflection adapts to an expanding world economy. In its pages a coherent moral theory of early capitalism appears for the first time: international trade is not an ethical anomaly, but a manifestation of human sociability ordered by norms of justice.

Thus, Tomás de Mercado contributes to a decisive turn in intellectual history: philosophically legitimizing the market economy without separating it from ethics. Economic freedom is neither amoral nor autonomous, but a concrete application of human freedom within a legal and moral framework. With this, he prepares the conceptual ground on which centuries later modern political economy will be based.

José de Anchieta was born in La Laguna (Tenerife) in 1534 and entered the Society of Jesus when he was very young. He was sent to Brazil, where he spent most of his life among indigenous people.

He learned local languages, wrote grammars and catechisms, and organized autonomous communities called reductions. These communities were not simple missions: they were hybrid political structures where indigenous authority and Christian organization coexisted.

Anchieta understood politics as a gradual social order. Legitimate authority had to emerge from existing cultural forms and not be imposed violently. This idea reflects the scholastic notion of natural law applied anthropologically.

His epistolary work shows a practical conception of power: governing consists of harmonizing community, morality and custom. Anticipates the modern principle of subsidiarity.

He died in 1597 in Brazil. He is considered the intellectual founder of colonial Brazilian society.

Pedro da Fonseca was born in Cortiçada (Portugal) in 1528 and entered the Society of Jesus at a very young age, training at the University of Coimbra, one of the great intellectual centers of the Hispanic monarchy. There he developed his entire academic career and became the central figure of Iberian Aristotelianism of the 16th century. His contemporaries called him “the Portuguese Aristotle” not because of simple philological erudition, but because he managed to systematically reconstruct Aristotelian metaphysics and logic as an operational foundation for theology and practical philosophy.

His most influential work, Institutionum Dialecticarum Libri Octo (1564), was for decades a university manual in much of Europe—including Protestant universities. The importance of this work exceeds formal logic: Fonseca intended to offer a theory of knowledge capable of substantiating the objective intelligibility of reality. Against late medieval nominalism, he defended that universal concepts are not mere mental conventions, but rather rational captures of a real common nature.

This metaphysical statement had profound political consequences. If there is a shared objective human nature, there is also a knowable objective morality: natural law. And if natural law is rationally knowable, political power cannot be founded on the mere will of the sovereign. Thus, even before Vitoria, Suárez or Mariana, Fonseca established the philosophical condition that makes all subsequent scholastic political theory possible: politics belongs to the rational order of nature, not to the voluntarist order of power.

He died in Lisbon in 1599, leaving the metaphysical basis on which the entire legal and political architecture of the Second Scholasticism would be built.

Juan de Mariana was born in Talavera de la Reina (Crown of Castile) on April 2, 1536 and died in Toledo on February 17, 1624. He entered the Company of Jesus at a very young age and was trained in Alcalá de Henares and Rome. During his youth he taught theology at the Roman College and at the Sorbonne in Paris, a decisive experience because it put him in direct contact with the French religious wars, the problem of tyrannicide, and European debates on political legitimacy. Upon his definitive return to Spain he settled in Toledo, where he wrote most of his historical, economic and political work.

Although he was an extremely prolific author—his Historiae de rebus Hispaniae (1592) was for centuries the official history of Spain—his philosophical relevance is concentrated in three fields: theory of political power, right of resistance, and monetary criticism.

His most influential work, *De Rege et Regis Institutione* (1599), constitutes one of the most radical texts of European political philosophy before the Enlightenment. In it Mariana develops a complete theory of political legitimacy based on natural law. It states that power belongs neither to the king by nature nor by direct divine right, but originally to the political community, which delegates it to the ruler for the common good. The monarch is therefore a fiduciary magistrate, not an owner of the State.

From this premise he derives his most famous thesis: if the ruler violates natural law—oppresses freedom, confiscates property, or rules arbitrarily—he becomes a tyrant and can be deposed. In certain extreme circumstances, it even justifies tyrannicide. This is not a defense of indiscriminate political violence, but rather a logical consequence: if authority derives from the people, it loses legitimacy when it destroys the moral order it was supposed to protect.

Mariana also formulates a surprisingly modern tax theory: taxes require consent. Taxation without social approval is morally equivalent to expropriation. This idea directly anticipates the later constitutional principle of political representation.

Even more novel was his financial contribution. In De Monetae Mutatione (1609) he criticized the Crown's manipulation of currency—the reduction of the metallic content of coins—as a form of covert theft. He argued that the inflation generated by the authority is an illegitimate tax because it reduces purchasing power without the consent of citizens. Here appears for the first time a moral formulation of the modern monetary problem: political power cannot indirectly appropriate private property through devaluation.

These theses cost him a legal process for lese majeste in 1609–1610. He was arrested, interrogated by the Inquisition and his work was banned and burned in Paris in 1610 following the assassination of Henry IV, which some attributed to the spread of his ideas about tyranny. Although he was not ultimately convicted, the episode reveals the extent to which his theories were perceived as politically explosive in absolutist Europe.

The historical importance of Mariana lies in the fact that it connects three planes that until then had remained partially separated: moral theology, public law and economics. For him, political freedom does not depend only on the form of government, but also on respect for property, a healthy currency and fiscal consent. The State is thus subordinated to a prior moral order.

His ideas circulated widely in England during the 17th century, amidst the polemics against absolutism, and many of his arguments later reappeared in Locke: popular sovereignty, the right of resistance, the protective function of government, and the centrality of property. Indirectly, these principles passed into American constitutionalism. It is no coincidence that John Adams owned a copy of De Rege and that Jefferson knew his work.

Mariana thus represents one of the culminating points of the Second Scholasticism: a thought that, starting from Thomism, manages to formulate a fully modern theory of limited power. In his philosophy, the State ceases to be an almost natural reality and becomes a morally conditioned institution. His conclusion can be summarized in a simple but revolutionary idea for its time: political power exists to protect human freedom and loses legitimacy when it stops doing so.

Francisco Suárez was born in Granada on January 5, 1548 and died in Lisbon on September 25, 1617. A Jesuit, professor in Salamanca, Rome, Alcalá, Coimbra and Évora, he was one of the greatest systematic philosophers of the Modern Age and probably the last great scholastic metaphysician with direct influence on European politics. His work encompasses metaphysics, moral theology, and legal philosophy, but his political impact was especially concentrated in Defensio Fidei Catholicae adversus Anglicanae sectae errors (1613).

The Defensio Fidei was written in a very specific context: the English political-religious crisis after the Anglican Reformation. King James I of England had imposed the Oath of Allegiance (1606), which required the denial of any supratemporal authority over the monarch and consolidated a doctrine of absolute divine right of the king. Suárez's work sought to refute that position, but his response ended up having much broader consequences than mere confessional controversy.

Suárez precisely formulated a revolutionary thesis: political power comes from God as the ultimate foundation of the moral order, but it is not delivered directly to the king, but first to the political community, which delegates it to the ruler through consent. The king is not the owner of power; He is your administrator. Therefore, civil authority is essentially fiduciary.

This doctrine implied three decisive consequences:

The origin of power is social, not personal.

The ruler is limited by the common good and natural law.

A community can resist the tyrant if he destroys the legal order.

James I immediately understood the political significance of the work. In 1614 he ordered the public burning of the Defensio Fideien London and Oxford. The text was considered not only theologically dangerous but also constitutionally subversive: it denied the intellectual basis of English absolutism at a time of growing tensions between Crown and Parliament.

Paradoxically, the English condemnation favored its dissemination. European universities—including those in the Protestant sphere—debated the Suarezian thesis, and its arguments indirectly passed into the British political vocabulary. In the following decades, during the controversies of the 17th century (English Civil War, Commonwealth, and Glorious Revolution), the central question would no longer be whether power comes from God—that was accepted—but rather who it immediately belongs to: the king or the people.

In that sense, Suárez did not influence England as a massively read author, but as an inevitable political problem. The defenders of absolutism had to refute him; The constitutionalists ended up assuming its conceptual structure: mediate popular sovereignty, limited government and delegated power. The Anglo-Saxon political philosophy of consent—which will culminate in Locke—develops within that previously defined polemical framework.

Thus, Suárez's contribution was not simply theological. By transferring sovereignty from the person of the monarch to the political community, he provided the conceptual architecture on which modern theories of constitutionalism would be built: power as a revocable trust and subordinate to a higher legal order.

Roberto Francisco Rómulo Belarmino was born in Montepulciano (Grand Duchy of Tuscany) on October 4, 1542 and died in Rome on September 17, 1621. He entered the Society of Jesus at a very young age and was trained in Rome, Padua and Leuven, soon becoming one of the great theologians of the Counter-Reformation. He was a professor at the Roman College, cardinal since 1599 and doctrinal advisor to the papacy in an era marked by the European religious wars, the crisis of authority after the Protestant Reformation and the rise of absolute monarchies.

Although his historical fame is often linked to the controversy with Protestantism—his monumental Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei (1586–1593) was the most influential theological treatise of modern Catholicism—his philosophical-political importance is equally profound. In works such as De Laicis (1610), De potestate summi pontificis in rebus temporalibus (1610), and in several previous political texts integrated into the Controversies, Bellarmine formulated a theory of civil power that transformed the European debate on sovereignty.

Its central thesis is based on a key distinction: political power comes from God in terms of its moral origin—because human sociability is part of nature—but is not granted directly to any specific ruler. It resides first in the political community, which decides the form of government and delegates authority. The king, therefore, does not rule by personal divine right, but through the mediation of the people.

This position frontally attacked the doctrine of the divine right of kings defended by English and French absolutist theorists. Against the idea that the monarch is the immediate vicar of God, Bellarmine maintains that the ruler is a derived authority: the political community is the immediate subject of power and the prince its administrator.

From this premise it introduces a decisive consequence: if authority comes from the consent of the community, it can be modified when it no longer fulfills its purpose—the common good. He does not develop the direct defense of tyrannicide as Mariana will do, but he establishes the legal basis of later constitutionalism: political authority is conditional.

His thinking had an enormous impact precisely among his adversaries. The Anglican Robert Filmer wrote Patriarcha (published in 1680) to refute him, and in doing so spread his ideas in England. The historical paradox is that, by attacking Bellarmine, he introduced his theory of popular sovereignty into the English political debate that would lead to the Glorious Revolution and Locke.

Belarmino also contributed a structural reflection on the forms of government. He considered that no pure system—monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy—was perfect, and defended a mixed constitution capable of balancing stability and freedom. This idea anticipates the model of combined government that will characterize modern constitutionalism and that will later appear in British and American political thought.

His influence was particularly important in the Iberian scholastic tradition: Suárez systematized his theory, and Mariana radicalized its consequences. In this way, Bellarmine occupies a decisive intermediate position: he translates medieval Thomism into modern political language and provides the conceptual basis that will allow us to think of power as representation and not as property.

Ultimately, his philosophical contribution consists of having definitively separated political legitimacy and absolutism. For Bellarmine, authority is not a sacred force inherent to the ruler, but rather a moral function delegated by the community to preserve justice. With this he contributed to the intellectual transition that would lead from medieval political theology to contemporary constitutionalism: power is legitimate only as long as it remains ordered to the common good and sustained by the consent of those who obey it.

Juan de Salas was born in 1553 in Castile and died in 1612. Jesuit and professor in Salamanca, he belongs to the generation after Suárez and participated in the maturation of scholastic legal-economic thought.

His major work, Commentarii in Secundam Secundae Divi Thomae, discusses contracts, property, restitution, and distributive justice in detail. Salas studies economic exchange as an interpersonal relationship based on rational trust.

It develops a key idea: contractual justice depends on actual knowledge of the conditions. Deception invalidates the contract because it breaks the moral equality between the parties. Economics thus becomes an extension of the ethics of human communication.

This implies that the market is neither morally neutral nor arbitrary: it works correctly when the rules are general and consent is free. Political power must protect these conditions, not replace them.

Salas thus contributes to the institutional conception of the market: an order of general rules rather than specific decisions. His thinking anticipates the modern notion of legal security as the foundation of economic prosperity.

Juan de Lugo was born in Madrid in 1583 and died in Rome in 1660. Jesuit, professor in Salamanca and later cardinal in the Roman Curia, he belongs to the late phase of the Second Scholasticism, when Salamanca thought had already spread throughout Europe and America. His work represents a final synthesis of the system before the enlightened turn.

His main treatise, De Iustitia et Iure (1642), is one of the most refined analyzes of economic value in the scholastic tradition. Lugo deepens the notion of fair price developed by Soto and Molina and formulates a theory surprisingly close to modern economics: the value does not reside in the thing or in the labor incorporated, but in the utility estimated by people.

It states that the price depends on subjective appreciation within a specific social context. Two individuals can value a good differently without either of them being wrong. The market does not discover an objective essence of value, but rather coordinates human expectations.

This idea directly anticipates the subjective theory of value developed centuries later by marginalist economics. But in Lugo the conclusion is philosophical: the economy is a process of social knowledge. Political power cannot set prices because it does not have the dispersed information of the community.

Thus, the market appears as a collective cognitive order, a social institution that transforms individual preferences into coordinated results. Economic justice consists of allowing this process under general rules.

With Lugo, scholasticism reaches an almost modern understanding of the economy as a spontaneous information system, anticipating central elements of contemporary economic thought.

Juan Caramuel was born in Madrid in 1606 and died in Vigevano (Italy) in 1682. Cistercian, mathematician, logician and theologian, he was one of the most original minds of the European Baroque. It represents the transition between scholasticism and scientific modernity.

His monumental work, Theologia moralis fundamentalis (1652) and later treatises on logic and probability, attempt to mathematize moral reasoning. Caramuel develops an advanced probabilism in which human decisions are made under rational uncertainty.

This has political consequences: the law cannot provide for all specific cases. Social order requires general rules and room for prudential decision-making. The government does not completely control society because human action is inherently contingent.

Caramuel thus anticipates a modern vision of the social order as a complex system. Politics must manage probabilities, not impose determinism.

His thought marks the passage from classical scholasticism to modern awareness of social complexity: order is not mechanical but adaptive.

Born in Santa Eulalia de Sorriba (Asturias) in 1723, Campomanes was a lawyer, economist and prosecutor for the Council of Castile. A brilliant self-taught person, he trained in legal history and natural law at a time when the Bourbon monarchy was trying to modernize its economic structures.

In Discourse on the Promotion of Popular Industry (1774) and Discourse on the Popular Education of Artisans (1775), he argues that prosperity does not depend on monopolies or guild privileges, but on the productive freedom of society. His criticism of mercantilism is notable: the State does not create wealth; it can only remove obstacles for society to generate it.

Although his language is enlightened, his philosophy is the heir of scholastic economic thought. Considers that the economic order arises spontaneously from human activity and that legislation must adapt to it, not impose artificial forms on it. Excessive intervention generates poverty because it contradicts the social nature of exchange.

Campomanes represents the economic reformism that prepares the ground for later liberalism, but without revolutionary rupture: he reforms the monarchy from its own legal tradition.

Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was born in Gijón on January 5, 1744, into an Asturian noble family. He was trained in Oviedo, Ávila and Alcalá de Henares within an environment still deeply marked by classical natural law, which in Spain continued to be taught in continuity with the scholastic tradition. His career began as a magistrate and prosecutor of the Council of Orders, which allowed him to learn first-hand about the institutional structure of the Spanish monarchy.

Although he is usually classified as enlightened, Jovellanos did not share French constructivist rationalism. His thinking was based on a different conviction: political institutions are not designed from abstraction, but rather slowly emerge from social life. This idea appears clearly in his most influential work, Report on the Agrarian Law (1795). There he maintains that wealth does not come from privilege or state planning, but from the free interaction of men within a stable legal framework. The Spanish economic problem was neither moral nor technical, but institutional: the legislation prevented the natural development of society.

His defense of private property and economic freedom is not utilitarian, but moral. For Jovellanos, property fulfills a civilizing function: it creates responsibility, foresight and personal autonomy. The government should protect it, not direct it. This vision connects directly with the Salamanca tradition, where the social order was understood as a result of the social nature of man.

During the crisis of 1808 he supported the convening of the Cortes, not as a revolutionary innovation, but as a historical recovery of traditional political representation. He died in 1811 after years of political persecution. His work constitutes the intellectual bridge between late scholasticism and moderate liberal constitutionalism.

Born in Oviedo in 1754, a priest and historian, he dedicated his life to studying medieval Spanish institutions. In Teoría de las Cortes (1813) he argues that political representation existed in the Hispanic monarchy centuries before modern liberalism.

For Marina, the national sovereignty proclaimed in Cádiz was not a revolutionary principle, but the modern formulation of a historical pact. Real power had always been limited by the political community.

His work was decisive in legitimizing the Constitution of 1812 as historical continuity and not as a rupture.

Sebastián Francisco de Miranda was born in Caracas on March 28, 1750, in a colonial society still organized according to legal hierarchies inherited from the Hispanic world. His education at the University of Caracas was marked by the late scholastic curriculum: Aristotelian logic, natural law and moral theology. That training is decisive, because Miranda will never start from abstract rationalism or pure enlightened contractualism; Its initial horizon is that of legal pactism of the Iberian tradition, where authority exists as a delegation and not as property of power.

After joining the Spanish army, his life became a continuous journey across the revolutionary Atlantic. He toured Europe and America, fought in the United States War of Independence, lived with figures such as Washington and Hamilton and later participated in the French Revolution, where he reached the rank of general. Few biographies condense in such a direct way the political experience of the 18th century: imperial monarchy, American revolution and European revolution literally crossed the same life.

However, Miranda did not simply adopt the political model he found in each place. Its originality consists precisely in trying to reconcile them. He observed in England a constitutional balance, in the United States an organized sovereignty, and in France a revolutionary energy; but he believed that none could be transferred intact to the Hispanic world. America should not imitate: it should continue its own political tradition.

When the Spanish monarchy collapsed in 1808, it interpreted the crisis with categories very close to Suárez's doctrine: if the legitimate king disappears, sovereignty returns to the peoples who had made an agreement with the crown. Independence did not mean breaking the legal order, but rather preserving it in the absence of the holder of power.

Here appears the actual Miranda contribution. Unlike other revolutionaries, he does not limit himself to justifying emancipation; attempts to design its institutional form. He studies British parliamentarism, North American federalism and the classical republican tradition to project Colombia, an American continental constitutional monarchy. It was not a utopian gesture, but an attempt to found a new political order without destroying its historical legitimacy.

His thought is thus a singular synthesis: the scholastic heritage of delegated power, English constitutionalism, American federalism and classic republican citizenship converge in the same political architecture. His revolution was not intended to erase the past, but to make it viable in a modern world.

He died as a prisoner in Cádiz in 1816, but his project survived in the Spanish-American constitutional imagination and in the work of his disciples, especially Bolívar. Philosophically, Miranda represents the moment in which the scholastic theory of popular sovereignty stops being a legal argument and becomes a concrete institutional design: the transition from legitimacy to the State.

José Servando Teresa de Mier y Noriega was born in Monterrey on October 18, 1765. He entered the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and stood out from a young age for his intellectual brilliance. He was a professor of theology and a renowned preacher, but his life took a decisive turn in 1794 when he delivered a famous sermon in which he questioned the traditional narrative about the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

That sermon earned him persecution, imprisonment and long years of exile in Spain, France, England and Italy. During this journey he came into contact with Enlightenment political thought and European constitutional debates, without abandoning his scholastic training.

The event that definitively transformed his political thinking was the crisis of 1808: the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and the forced abdication of Ferdinand VII. Here the Suarezian doctrine of sovereignty directly applies.

Following the thesis formulated by Francisco Suárez in Defensio Fidei (1613), Mier maintains that political power comes from God but resides immediately in the political community, which delegates it to the ruler. If the legitimate king disappears or loses the capacity to govern, sovereignty returns to the people.

For Mier, this means that the American territories are not obliged to obey illegitimate peninsular authorities. Independence is not rebellion, but restoration of the natural legal order.

In works such as History of the Revolution of New Spain (1813), he develops this argument with legal clarity: America does not separate arbitrarily, but rather exercises a pre-existing political right.

What is original about Mier is the fusion between scholasticism and modern constitutionalism. It does not abandon classical natural law, but articulates it with concepts such as representation, written constitution and division of powers.

He actively participated in Mexican political life after independence, was a deputy in the Constituent Congress and defended moderate republican models against centralist or monarchical tendencies.

He died in Mexico City on December 3, 1827. His philosophical legacy lies in having converted the scholastic tradition of popular sovereignty into a revolutionary legal argument. In it, American emancipation appears not as an ideological break with Europe, but as a coherent consequence of the Iberian legal tradition itself.

Andrés Bello was born in Caracas in 1781 and later lived in London and Chile. A universal humanist, he received an education deeply marked by classical natural law before coming into contact with British thought. His mature work seeks to politically stabilize the new republics through institutions consistent with their legal tradition.

Its Chilean Civil Code of 1855 does not imitate the French revolutionary model, but rather integrates Roman law, Hispanic tradition and modern rationality. Bello understands that political freedom requires legal security and institutional continuity. Positive law must express moral principles prior to the State.

Thus, the process initiated by the scholastics culminates: popular sovereignty ceases to be an argument for resistance and becomes a permanent civil order. He died in Santiago in 1865, leaving behind the most enduring legal architecture in Latin America.

Born in Campeche in 1800, Gutiérrez de Estrada was a diplomat, jurist, and one of Mexico's most misunderstood political thinkers. His Essay on the Future of Mexico (1840) caused scandal by proposing a constitutional monarchy for the country. However, his argument was neither dynastic nor nostalgic: it was philosophical.

He argued that absolute popular sovereignty produces instability because it turns politics into unlimited will. The political community is not an instantaneous contractual creation but a historical reality that requires institutional continuity. At this point he returns to Hispanic pactism: legitimate authority does not arise from a specific election, but from the articulation between social tradition and representation.

His criticism anticipates the problem of modern plebiscitary democracy: when power derives only from the majority, it is no longer limited by the objective common good. Thus, his monarchical proposal was a means to ensure the institutional neutrality of power, not a return to absolutism.

Juan Francisco María de la Salud Donoso Cortés was born in Don Benito (Badajoz) on May 6, 1809 and died in Paris on May 3, 1853. Initially trained in doctrinal liberalism, he was a professor, journalist, deputy and finally a diplomat—ambassador of Spain in Berlin and Paris. He lived from within the European revolutionary crisis of 1848, which decisively marked his intellectual evolution.

His culminating work, Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism (1851), is one of the most influential political texts of the European 19th century. Donoso formulates a radical thesis there: all politics rests on a prior theology. When a society abandons the doctrine of original sin, it ends up absolutizing man—first in parliamentary liberalism, then in revolutionary socialism. The inevitable result is the total State.

Its relationship with the scholastic tradition is profound. Donoso does not constantly cite Suárez or Mariana, but his conceptual structure is the same: power is not sovereign in itself, but is limited by a prior objective moral order. Without natural law, freedom becomes pure will and ends up being destroyed. Hence his famous thesis that societies that lose their moral foundation oscillate between anarchy and dictatorship.

Donoso would decisively influence later thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, but also European conservatism by reinterpreting the classical tradition in the context of mass politics.

Jaime Luciano Balmes was born in Vic on August 28, 1810 and died prematurely in 1848. Priest, philosopher and publicist, he was the great systematizer of Spanish Catholic thought in the 19th century.

His main work, Protestantism compared with Catholicism in its relations with European civilization (1842–1844), attempts to demonstrate that European freedoms were not born against the Church, but within its conception of the person. Faced with the illustrated story, Balmes maintains that the limitation of political power comes from Christian anthropology: if man has moral dignity, no power can be absolute.

Balmes represents the intellectual continuity of the Second Scholasticism adapted to modern constitutionalism. It defends parliaments, representation and freedoms, but within an objective moral order. Freedom is not radical autonomy, but social harmony founded on human nature.

It could be said that Balmes anticipates the European social constitutionalism of the 20th century and offers a middle way between absolutism and revolution.

Born in Cangas de Onís on June 8, 1861, he was the main theorist of Spanish political traditionalism. Extraordinary speaker and systematic thinker, he converted old Hispanic pactism into modern political theory.

For Vázquez de Mella, society is not born from the contract or the State, but from previous historical communities: family, municipality, guild and region. The abstract sovereignty of the State is a modern fiction. Authority comes from the community and is delegated to power—an almost direct formulation of Suarezian doctrine.

His thinking moves scholasticism from theology to sociopolitical analysis: political freedom requires institutional plurality. Anticipates contemporary theories about intermediate bodies and subsidiarity.

Apolinario Mabini, born in Tanauan in 1864, was the main political theorist of the first Philippine republic and advisor to President Emilio Aguinaldo. Paralyzed since he was young, he developed intense intellectual work during the independence process.

In texts such as The True Decalogue (1898) and The Philippine Revolution (1899), he developed a theory of the State based on the moral sovereignty of the community. Government exists to serve the common good and is morally limited by justice. The unjust law does not bind conscience.

Although influenced by European liberalism, its conceptual structure clearly comes from the Spanish legal tradition: power does not create law, it administers it. Philippine independence is thus conceived as the restoration of political legitimacy and not as the arbitrary creation of a new order.

Mabini represents the final step from scholasticism to the republican constitution in Asia.

Ramiro de Maeztu was born in Vitoria in 1874 and began his career within regenerationism and European liberal thought. He lived for many years in London, where he studied British parliamentarism and modern industrial society. However, his experience of World War I radically transformed his political thinking.

In The Crisis of Humanism (1919) and, above all, in Defensa de la Hispanidad (1934), Maeztu argues that the modern world has confused freedom with absolute autonomy. Western freedom, he claims, was not born of individualism but of a moral tradition that limited political power by principles superior to it.

Maeztu interprets the history of Spain as a legal civilization rather than an ethnic one. Hispanidad would be a community articulated by the idea of ​​person, dignity and natural law. It is not imperial nostalgia, but political theory: authority is only legitimate if it recognizes rights prior to the State.

The scholastic heritage clearly appears in his reflection. Power does not create justice; recognizes her. Society is not born from an arbitrary agreement; rests on a shared moral nature. Faced with contemporary relativism, it proposes a freedom linked to objective responsibility.

He died in Madrid in 1936, assassinated at the beginning of the Civil War. His work represents the most explicit modern formulation of the Hispanic political tradition as an intellectual alternative within the West.

José Ortega y Gasset was born in Madrid in 1883 into a family linked to the journalistic and intellectual world. Trained in Madrid and Germany, he introduced contemporary European philosophy to Spain, especially neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. However, his historical reflection on Spain led him to reconsider the Hispanic intellectual tradition from a new perspective.

Ortega was neither a scholastic nor a traditionalist, but he understood that Spanish modernity could not be explained using the same scheme as northern European modernity. In works such as Invertebrate Spain (1921) and La Rebellion of the Masses (1930), he maintained that Western political life depends on the existence of governing minorities capable of articulating a common project. This conception, centered on the historical community as a political subject, indirectly approaches the classic idea of ​​community prior to power.

His reflection on the nation and political coexistence reinterprets the Hispanic tradition of social order not as an artificial contract, but as a shared historical reality. For Ortega, the State does not create society: it organizes it. This priority of social life over the political structure connects with the old intuition of scholastic thought, although expressed in modern philosophical language.

Thus, Ortega contributes to integrating the Spanish tradition into European intellectual history not as an anomaly, but as an alternative path to modernity, based on historical continuity rather than revolutionary rupture. He died in Madrid in 1955, leaving behind a philosophy that, without explicitly claiming scholasticism, recovers its fundamental intuition: politics is based on a social reality prior to power.

António Sardinha was born in Monforte in 1887 and was the main thinker of Lusitanian integralism. His work appears in the context of the crisis of the First Portuguese Republic, perceived by him as a consequence of the importation of the French Jacobin model.

In A Aliança Peninsular (1924) he argued that Spain and Portugal form the same political civilization characterized by municipalism, social corporatism and historical limitation of power. For Sardinha, the Iberian tradition did not know absolute sovereignty: neither the king nor the nation were omnipotent; both were subordinated to a previous moral and social order.

His thinking radically distinguishes authority and power: authority emerges from the living community, while modern power seeks to create itself. In this he explicitly takes up scholastic political anthropology: society is not born of contract or will, but of the social nature of man.

He died prematurely in 1925, but his work anticipates much of the contemporary criticism of the ideological State.

Argentine Thomist priest and philosopher. He interpreted modernity as a progressive emancipation of power from moral truth. His criticism is not sociological but metaphysical: when politics stops recognizing a natural order, it transforms into a pure technique of domination.

For Meinvielle, freedom does not consist of absolute autonomy but rather of the rational order of human action. The political community exists to facilitate virtuous living, not to produce collective wills. This conception directly extends the political anthropology of the Second Scholasticism.

Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson was born in London in 1909 and trained as an economist at the London School of Economics under the influence of Friedrich Hayek. His interest in Spain arose during his residence in Malaga after the Civil War, where he came into contact with archives and libraries that preserved economic treatises from the 16th century practically forgotten by European historiography.

In 1952 he published The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory 1544–1605, a work that transformed the history of economic thought. Until then, it was considered that modern economics was born in the 18th century with Adam Smith; Grice-Hutchinson demonstrated that fundamental concepts—subjective value, quantitative theory of money, legitimacy of interest—had been formulated two centuries earlier by Spanish theologians and jurists.

His contribution did not consist only of editing texts, but also of changing the intellectual narrative of the West. He revealed that modern political economy does not emerge exclusively from the Protestant world or British empiricism, but also from scholastic moral reflection on justice, property, and freedom of exchange. Thanks to his work, the Salamanca tradition was once again integrated into the genealogy of liberalism.

In this way, Grice-Hutchinson made it possible to understand that many ideas present in modern constitutionalism—limitation of fiscal power, criticism of inflation, primacy of property—were not enlightened innovations, but developments of a previous legal and moral tradition. He died in Malaga in 2003, after having restored Hispanic scholasticism to its place in European intellectual history.

One of the greatest historians of the State in Latin America. In a Historical Essay on the Notion of the State in Chile, he maintains that the Chilean State does not create the nation; arises from a previous historically organized society.

His thesis coincides with classical political philosophy: community precedes power. The State is not sovereign in an absolute sense, but rather an institutional expression of a previous social reality. When you try to redefine it ideologically, it produces a crisis.

Góngora represents a historical realism compatible with scholasticism: politics must recognize the historical nature of society, not reconstruct it theoretically.

Álvaro d’Ors (1915–2004)

Álvaro d’Ors Pérez-Peix was born in Barcelona on April 14, 1915 and died in Pamplona on February 1, 2004. Son of the essayist Eugenio d’Ors, he developed an exceptional intellectual career as a jurist, legal historian and political philosopher. Professor in Santiago de Compostela and later at the University of Navarra, he is considered one of the greatest Romanists of the 20th century.

His fundamental contribution was to reinterpret the European legal tradition from its Roman roots to modernity. Against the modern idea of ​​sovereignty—a supreme power capable of producing law—d'Ors defended that law had historically been prior to political power. In Rome, in medieval Christianity and in the Hispanic tradition, the function of the ruler was to guard a received legal order, not to create it arbitrarily.

His distinction between authority and power summarizes his entire political philosophy. Authority convinces because it is recognized; Power rules because it can impose itself. When power attempts to replace authority, the absolute modern State appears.

This thesis connects directly with Suárez and Vitoria: power is a delegated function within a prior legal community. The ruler is not the source of the law but rather its first obligation. For d'Ors, political modernity begins when sovereignty replaces law as the organizing principle of the community.

In works such as Law and Common Sense (1956), Essays on Political Theory (1979) and numerous studies of Roman law, he argued that Europe was for centuries a jurisdictional civilization - ordered by courts, jurisdictions and intermediate bodies - and not sovereign. The contemporary State broke this continuity by identifying power with right.

D'Ors thus constitutes one of the clearest bridges between classical scholasticism and contemporary political theory: he does not recover his conclusions out of historical nostalgia, but rather by showing that the current problem of political legitimacy comes precisely from having abandoned that previous legal model.

Carlos Alberto Stoetzer (1916–1997), Argentine jurist and historian trained between Buenos Aires, Europe and the United States, was one of the first researchers to systematically propose that American independence—both Anglo-American and Spanish-American—should be interpreted within the same intellectual genealogy. Faced with the dominant narrative that presented modern constitutionalism as the almost exclusive fruit of the Protestant Enlightenment, Stoetzer reconstructed the Atlantic circulation of legal ideas coming from the Second Scholasticism.

In The Scholastic Roots of the American Constitution (1986) he analyzed the library, correspondence, and intellectual environment of the British colonists and the Founding Fathers, showing that concepts such as popular sovereignty, fiduciary power, fiscal consent, and the right of resistance did not suddenly appear in Locke or the English Whig tradition. These principles had already been formulated with precision by Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suárez and Juan de Mariana between the 16th and 17th centuries. Stoetzer argues that such ideas penetrated the Anglo-Saxon world through European theological-political controversies—especially English anti-absolutist disputes—and that, once secularized, they became constitutional language. The result was that the American Revolution did not create a new political paradigm, but rather institutionalized a previous legal doctrine.

The author expanded this thesis in Political thought in Spanish America during the period of emancipation (1789–1825), where he studied how Spanish-American revolutionaries did not initially resort to French revolutionary contractualism, but to legal categories inherited from Hispanic public law. There he showed that the idea of ​​“retroversion of sovereignty” – according to which, once the legitimate king has disappeared, power returns to the political community – comes directly from the Suarezian theory of delegated power. Independence was not conceived as a revolutionary rupture, but as the restoration of a previous legitimate order.

In Scholastic Roots of the Emancipation of Spanish America he delved even further into this doctrinal continuity, demonstrating that both in North America and Latin America the same fundamental notions were used: the political community is prior to the ruler, power is fiduciary and conditioned to the common good, and there is legitimacy to depose the tyrant. The difference between both processes would not be philosophical but institutional: while in the British colonies these ideas crystallized in a stable constitutionalism, in the Hispanic world they translated into more complex political processes.

Stoetzer's general conclusion is especially relevant: modern constitutionalism is not born from a break with the medieval-Catholic legal tradition, but from its historical evolution. The American revolution and the Spanish-American independence thus appear as parallel manifestations of the same intellectual matrix—that of the Second Scholasticism—later reinterpreted by the Enlightenment, but not originated by it. Consequently, Atlantic political history ceases to be the expansion of a single Anglo-Saxon model and becomes the plural development of a shared Western legal tradition.

Francisco Canals Vidal was born in Barcelona on December 21, 1922 and died in the same city on February 7, 2009. A Thomist philosopher and professor for decades at the University of Barcelona, ​​he was a central figure of Spanish Christian personalism of the 20th century. His thought developed in dialogue with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition and with modern philosophy, especially in the face of contemporary subjectivism.

Canals argued that the modern political crisis is actually an anthropological crisis: by losing the notion of human nature, politics stops being oriented towards the common good and becomes a pure technique for organizing power. Faced with this, he recovered the classic notion of political community as a moral reality rather than a contractual one.

In works such as On the Essence of Knowledge, Spanish Politics: Past and Future or his studies on social philosophy, he maintained that society is not born from an agreement between isolated individuals but from the natural sociability of the person. Political power then appears as a function at the service of that community, not as an absolute constituent instance.

This thesis reproduces in a contemporary key the intellectual structure of the Second Scholasticism: natural law → common good → political legitimacy. Freedom does not consist in the absence of limits, but in rational participation in a just order. Therefore, for Canals, European historical liberalism is not opposed to Thomism, but is one of its historical consequences when translated institutionally.

His philosophy represents one of the most coherent reworkings of classical political thought in the 20th century: authority is not legitimized by the will but by the truth about man. In that sense, Canals directly extends the Hispanic tradition that understood politics as an ethical dimension of social life and not as an autonomous creation of power.

Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora was born in Barcelona on April 30, 1924 and died in Madrid on February 10, 2002. Doctor of Law, career diplomat and later Minister of Public Works (1970–1974), he was above all a political thinker of far-reaching intellectual scope. His work is situated in a very specific moment in European history: the exhaustion of the ideological language of the 19th century and the transformation of politics into administrative management of complex societies.

His most influential book, The Twilight of Ideologies (1965), is based on a provocative thesis: the great modern political worldviews—doctrinal liberalism, doctrinal socialism, romantic nationalism—had lost their explanatory capacity in technified societies. Real politics was no longer moved by absolute principles but by rational solutions to concrete problems. However, Fernández de la Mora did not defend a technocracy without principles, but rather the opposite: politics can only be rational if it recognizes that the truth is not born from political will.

Here its deep connection with the classical tradition appears. For him, the State does not produce legitimacy; manages it. Legitimacy comes from the adaptation of decisions to the objective common good, not from the emotional intensity of the majority or from ideological mobilization. This position refers directly to the Thomistic structure of natural law: political power does not create the moral order, but must respect it and apply it prudently.

In later works such as Partitocracy (1977) or Los Errors del Cambio (1986), he developed a systematic criticism of parliamentarism understood as a struggle of sovereign wills. The problem of political modernity, according to him, was not the lack of participation, but the replacement of prudential government by permanent ideological competition. Politics degenerated when it tried to be a creator of values ​​instead of an administrator of realities.

Thus, Fernández de la Mora reformulated in contemporary language a central intuition of scholasticism: power is limited because reality is prior to the decision. His thinking anticipates many current criticisms of populism, political moralism and democratic decisionism, defending a conception of government as institutional prudence rather than as an expression of absolute sovereignty.

Intellectual and political of Mexican Christian humanism of the 20th century. Trained in Thomist philosophy, he developed a deeply classical conception of democracy: not as sovereignty of the will but as a moral method of social cooperation.

He defended that the State does not create rights, but rather recognizes them. Politics must organize the common good respecting the primacy of the person. His thought recovers the scholastic tradition in a modern context: political legitimacy does not depend only on procedures but on their adaptation to human nature.

Carlos Sacheri was born in Buenos Aires in 1933 and trained in philosophy at the Argentine Catholic University and later in Europe, where he came into contact with the Thomist renewal of the 20th century (Maritain, De Koninck, Fabro). He was a university professor, lecturer and one of the most systematic Argentine political thinkers of his generation. He was murdered in 1974, in a context of political violence that tragically symbolizes the type of civilizational crisis that he himself had analyzed: politics converted into a pure struggle of wills.

His most influential work, The Clandestine Church (1970), and his philosophical-political essays develop a profound criticism of the modern State understood as an instance that produces public morality. Sacheri maintains that political modernity has replaced the classical idea of ​​law—rational order oriented to the common good—with the sovereign decision of authority. When power aims to create values, it stops being authority and becomes social engineering.

Here you can see its direct connection with the Suarez tradition. For Sacheri, sovereignty is neither absolute nor originating in the State: it is fiduciary. The political community has a prior moral structure—human nature, social purposes, order of justice—that power must recognize and safeguard. The government does not legitimize the truth; The truth legitimizes the government.

This has constitutional consequences: democracy is not a sufficient criterion of legitimacy. A law passed by a majority can be unjust if it contradicts human nature. Legality, therefore, does not exhaust legitimacy. This thesis reproduces in a contemporary key the scholastic distinction between lex and ius: the positive norm is only fair when it expresses the objective moral order.

Sacheri can thus be read as a bridge between Salamanca and the political crisis of the 20th century. Where scholasticism fought monarchical absolutism, it combats the ideological absolutism of the modern State. In both cases the problem is the same: the claim of unlimited sovereignty.

Constantino Ocha’a Mve Bengobesama (1936–2001)

An Equatoguinean jurist and intellectual trained in Spain, Ocha'a belongs to the generation that experienced the transition from the colonial territory to an independent State (1968). His political reflection focused on the fundamental problem of postcolonial Africa: how to create a legitimate state without destroying the traditional community.

Faced with revolutionary or ideological models, he defended a legal State based on rational norms and the recognition of the social community prior to political power. Power had to be institutional, not personal or tribal. Authority comes from society and must remain limited by it.

His approach reproduces, in the African context, the classic idea of ​​fiduciary power typical of scholastic thought: the ruler administers an authority that does not belong to him. Legitimacy does not come from force or the single party, but from service to the common good.

Pedro Schwartz was born in Madrid in 1935 and is an economist, historian of economic thought and academic at the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. Trained in London, his work is situated in classical European liberalism, but with a strong concern for Spanish intellectual history.

Schwartz has insisted that liberalism should not be understood as a late foreign import in Spain. In his works on economic and constitutional history he maintains that the Spanish tradition already contained elements of limitation of power, protection of property and representative government before the Enlightenment.

Unlike Huerta de Soto—more focused on doctrinal continuity—Schwartz emphasizes institutional continuity: jurisdictions, courts, pactism and legal tradition. His contribution consists of showing that Spanish liberalism was neither anomaly nor imitation, but rather the evolution of a tradition interrupted in the 19th century.

Rafael Alvira Domínguez was born in Zaragoza in 1942 and has been one of the most influential Spanish philosophers in the contemporary recovery of the classical and Christian tradition in the field of practical philosophy. Professor of Philosophy at the University of Navarra and intellectual disciple of Leonardo Polo, his work is situated at the intersection between metaphysics, social ethics and political philosophy.

Alvira has developed a theory of society focused on the idea of ​​community as a reality prior to political power. Faced with modern contractualist individualism, he maintains that the human person is constituted in relationships of coexistence—family, friendship, university, business—that have their own rationality that is irreducible to the State. This conception takes up the classic principle of man's natural sociability formulated by Aristotle and reworked by Thomas Aquinas, the anthropological core of the Second Scholasticism.

In works such as The Reason for Being a Man, Civil Society and Political Society or Philosophy of Everyday Life, Alvira explains that legitimate authority arises from social life and not from abstract sovereign will. Political power is a subordinate entity to the common good, not its creator. In this way he recovers the scholastic notion of power as a fiduciary delegation: the community precedes the State and limits it morally.

His philosophical contribution consists of having reformulated that tradition for the contemporary world: the crisis of political modernity is not due to an excess of freedom, but to the replacement of social authority with administrative power. At this point, Alvira directly links with the intellectual line that goes from Vitoria and Suárez to current debates on civil society and constitutionalism, showing that the Hispanic tradition is not a historical vestige but rather a conceptual framework that is still operational to understand the relationship between person, community and State.

António José de Brito was born in Porto in 1947 and was one of the main contemporary Portuguese political philosophers. A specialist in Aristotle and the classical tradition of natural law, he dedicated his work to analyzing the moral crisis of the modern State.

He argued that political modernity had replaced legitimacy with legality: power is no longer justified by its adaptation to the common good, but by its normative capacity. Faced with this, he defended the recovery of the classical tradition in which politics is an ethical activity oriented toward objective human ends.

Brito does not propose a historical return, but rather a philosophical one: Western civilization can only sustain free institutions if it recognizes moral limits to power. In this sense, his work connects directly with Suárez, Vitoria and the Iberian scholastic tradition, reinterpreting it for contemporary political theory.

He died in 2023, being one of the last representatives of the living continuity of classical natural law in the Iberian world.

José Manuel Moreira was born in Lisbon in 1949. He has a degree in Economics and Philosophy, a master's degree in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy from the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Braga) and a doctorate in Philosophy from the Universidad Pontificia Comillas (Madrid). He has developed his academic career as a professor of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Aveiro and was director of the Master's Degree in Public Administration and Management at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Porto).

Intellectually, Moreira has played a central role in the recovery and updating in Portugal of four main lines of thought: economic and business ethics, the Austrian economic tradition, the economic analysis of politics and the theory of governance. His approach combines moral philosophy, institutional theory and political economy, always placing the problem of power within a prior normative framework, in clear continuity with the tradition of natural law.

One of his most relevant contributions to the Hispanic tradition is the book The Salamanca School, written together with André Azevedo Alves and published within the collection Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers Series. In this work, Moreira and Azevedo systematically reconstruct the contribution of the Salamanca School to modern economic and political theory, showing how authors such as Vitoria, Soto, Azpilcueta and Mariana formulated fundamental concepts about subjective value, market, money, popular sovereignty and limitation of political power long before the British Enlightenment. The book explicitly places the Second Scholasticism within the genealogy of Western liberalism, breaking the narrative that reduces its origins to the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

In his work on business ethics and political economy, Moreira insists that the market is not a simple technical allocation mechanism, but a moral institution based on contractual freedom, personal responsibility, and the limitation of state power. This perspective is directly linked to the Iberian scholastic tradition, where economic activity is part of the natural moral order and where political authority lacks legitimacy to intervene arbitrarily in free exchanges.

He has collaborated with the Institute of Political Studies of the Portuguese Catholic University, the National Institute of Administration, the Escola de Administração do Porto, the Escola de Administração de Empresas and the Ordem dos Engenheiros. He is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, of the Board of Trustees of the +Liberdade Institute and of the Research Council of the “Center for Ethics, Business and Economy” of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. In the past, he was part of the governing bodies of the Portuguese Association of Political Science.

Author and co-author of more than forty books and more than one hundred academic articles in national and international journals, Moreira has contributed decisively to consolidating in the Lusophone space a reading of liberalism compatible with the classical and scholastic tradition. In his thinking, economic freedom is not a break with tradition, but rather its coherent development: political power is instrumental and derived, while human dignity and moral order are prior to the State.

Within the Hispanic tradition of political thought, José Manuel Moreira thus represents a contemporary continuity that connects Salamanca with the current debate on constitutionalism, market economy and limits of public power.

Juan Belda Plans is a Spanish priest and historian of theology born in 1950, specialized in scholastic thought and, in particular, in the so-called Second Iberian Scholasticism of the 16th and 17th centuries. Professor for decades at the University of Navarra, he belongs to the generation of researchers who, after the pioneering work of Menéndez Pelayo and later authors such as Carlos Stoetzer or Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, undertook the systematic reconstruction of the School of Salamanca not only as a theological phenomenon but as a complete intellectual school: philosophical, legal, economic and political.

His most influential work is The School of Salamanca and the renewal of theology in the 16th century, where he demonstrates that the Salamanca authors were not isolated commentators on Thomas Aquinas, but participants in a coherent intellectual program aimed at responding to the great problems of the first globalization: the discovery of America, the Atlantic commercial expansion, the formation of modern States and the crisis of European Christianity. In this sense, Belda shows that Vitoria, Soto, Cano, Molina, Suárez or Mariana do not elaborate mere academic disputes, but rather a general theory of social order based on three pillars: rational natural law, dignity of the person and fiduciary nature of political power.

One of Belda's most important contributions consists of dismantling the dominant historiographic interpretation according to which political modernity was born in a break with medieval scholasticism. Based on the philological and doctrinal analysis of the relections, legal treatises and theological comments, he maintains that modern constitutionalism inherits categories already fully developed by the scholastics: original sovereignty of the community, fiscal consent, moral limitation of power, legitimacy of resistance to the tyrant and relative autonomy of the economic order. The Enlightenment—especially the Anglo-Saxon one—would not have created these ideas ex nihilo, but would have secularized and reformulated them.

Belda also highlights the university dimension of this process. The academic network formed by Salamanca, Alcalá, Coimbra, Valladolid, Évora and the American centers was not only an educational system, but a space for transatlantic intellectual circulation. Through manuals, public disputes, libraries and religious orders, these doctrines passed to the European world and later to the Anglo-American world. From this perspective, the Atlantic constitutionalism of the 18th century appears as a later phase of an intellectual development that began two centuries earlier.

Philosophically, his work has an important consequence: it restores the historical continuity between classical natural law and modern freedoms. Political freedom does not arise against theological tradition, but from within it when it affirms that the person has a dignity prior to any power. For this reason, the School of Salamanca ceases to be a scholarly episode and becomes a founding moment of the Western theory of limited government.

In short, Juan Belda Plans is not so much an original political thinker as the great contemporary reconstructor of a tradition. His work allows us to understand that the Second Scholasticism constitutes a true bridge between classical philosophy and modern constitutionalism, providing the conceptual architecture that would later make possible the liberal theory of the limited State.

Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho was born in Campinas (Brazil) on April 29, 1947, and died in Richmond (Virginia, USA) on January 24, 2022. A journalist, essayist, and self-taught philosopher, he developed most of his work outside the university but exercised considerable cultural influence in Brazil and in sectors of the contemporary Ibero-American political debate.

His central work, The Garden of Afflictions (1995), already contains the intuition that runs through all his production: political modernity has separated intellectual life from moral experience and turned politics into a technique of power. In later texts such as The Collective Imbecile (1996) and The Minimum You Need to Know Not to Be an Idiot (2013), he argued that Western culture can only sustain freedom if it maintains an objective notion of truth.

Although Olavo did not present himself as a scholastic, his thought is situated within the same intellectual structure. His critique of positivism reproduces the classical distinction between legality and legitimacy developed by the Iberian natural law tradition. Politics, for him, does not create the moral order; it must recognize it. His insistence that personal conscience and objective truth precede any political order recalls the doctrine according to which power is fiduciary.

In Political Theology (1922) and The Nomos of the Earth (1950), Schmitt criticizes the modern fiction of the State's unlimited sovereignty. He recognizes that the pre-modern European political order did not function on absolute sovereignty but on jurisdictions, charters, and limited authority—a model that coincides with the scholastic theory of delegated power.

In The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), Hayek develops the theory of spontaneous order. His conception of law as discovery and not as creation by the legislator coincides with the scholastic legal tradition: just law derives from a prior moral order and not from the sovereign will of the ruler.

In History of Economic Analysis (1954), Schumpeter identifies the Spanish scholastics as the first scientific economists. He recognized that they formulated, before classical economics, theories on subjective value, market price, and the nature of money, changing the intellectual genealogy of economic liberalism.

French legal philosopher Michel Villey studied the Second Scholasticism in La formation de la pensée juridique moderne. He maintains that the modern notion of subjective right was born in late scholasticism, introducing Salamanca to the contemporary philosophical debate on human rights.