ABSTRACT
Professor Othmar Spann, the passionate and productive, much admired and much attacked Viennese thinker has long passed as an eminently 'Catholic' social theorist, one whose special mission it is to act as a link with 'nationalist' thinking. Spann has many points of contact with 'catholicising' Romanticism; but his concept of totality was also an attempt to borrow from Aristotelian and Thomist Scholasticism, and he has made much use of the expression 'Corpus Christi mysticum'. The idea of totality forms the corner-stone of Spann's theory: the claim that the whole 'precedes' the parts, and that between the supreme totality and the lowliest part there is a mediating hierarchy of 'partial totalities', somewhat like the relation between the whole organism, organs and cells in a living being. In addition, the totality is not a genuine existent, a spiritual agent behind the visibly working parts, but is itself 'articulated' in the parts, without simply being reducible to them.
