ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Ramiro De Maeztu’s early life, with special regards to his family origins, education and first cultural influences in late 19th-century Spain. The Spanish capital resulted to be the cultural scenario of De Maeztu’s first intellectual education. De Maeztu’s volume of 1916 could be seen as the theoretical summa of his changing of perspective on socio-economic and political problems, directly influenced by the whole British cultural environment in which he was absorbed since 1912. De Maeztu blended all the theories in a sharply authoritarian fashion by binding together the idea of Catholic and monarchic state supremacy with the acknowledgment of the institutional legitimacy of the organized productive and economic forces. The logic consequence of the juridical approach was to refuse the theory of natural rights, as it was theorized by the Enlightenment and then concretized in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789, and to elaborate a different viewpoint on rights.
