Founders of the Future: The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization

By Óscar Iván Useche

In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial production—particularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work—to produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nation’s productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spain’s process of modernization.


 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Mar 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684483877

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Cover: Founders of the Future, The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization by Óscar Iván Useche

Founders of the Future

Campos Ibéricos

Bucknell Studies in Iberian Literatures and Cultures

Series Editors

Isabel Cuñado, Bucknell University

Jason McCloskey, Bucknell University

Campos Ibéricos is a series of monographs and edited volumes that focuses on the literary and cultural traditions of Spain in all of its rich historical, social, and linguistic diversity. The series provides a space for interdisciplinary and theoretical scholarship exploring the intersections between literature, culture, the arts, and media from medieval to contemporary Iberia. Studies on all authors, texts, and cultural phenomena are welcome and works on understudied writers and genres are specially sought.

Titles in the Series

Óscar Iván Useche, Founders of the Future: The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization

Carrie L. Ruiz and Elena Rodríguez-Guridi, eds., Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World

Joan L. Brown, Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite

Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech, eds., Indiscreet Fantasies: Iberian Queer Cinema

Katie J. Vater, Between Market and Myth: The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-Transition, 1992–2014

Founders of the Future

The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization

ÓSCAR IVÁN USECHE

LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Useche, Óscar Iván, author.

Title: Founders of the future : the science and industry of Spanish modernization / Óscar Iván Useche.

Description: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press, [2022] | Series: Campos ibéricos: Bucknell studies in Iberian literatures and cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021436 | ISBN 9781684483853 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684483860 (hardback) | ISBN 9781684483877 (epub) | ISBN 9781684483884 (mobi) | ISBN 9781684483891 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Industrialization—Spain—History—19th century. | Industrialization— Spain—History—20th century. | Organizational change—Spain—History—19th century. | Organizational change—Spain—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HC385 .U77 2022 | DDC 330.946—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021436

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2022 by Óscar Iván Useche

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.bucknelluniversitypress.org

Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

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For Violetta and Raphaella

Contents

Note on Translations

Introduction: Reaching out into the Future

1 The Social Foundry

2 Economy and Other Matters of State

3 The Educational Engine

4 Social Engineering

5 Technologies of Mass Diffusion

6 Industrial Footprint

Conclusion: The Unreachable Future

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Note on Translations

All translations in Founders of the Future, unless otherwise noted, are mine.

Founders of the Future

Introduction

REACHING OUT INTO THE FUTURE

SYMBOLIC IMPACT

Industrial modernization transformed Europe’s social, political, and cultural organization. It not only altered the social fabric, reshaping class structures, mechanisms of capital accumulation and distribution of wealth, and systems of human interaction, but also created new cognitive paradigms, turning into a powerful allegorical engine that provided novel and effective tools for evaluating society and negotiating identity. This process was particularly contentious in Spain, where attempts at consolidating scientific and technological traditions to support industrial growth resulted in irreconcilable tensions that delayed or even diverted progress. Industrialization was not always an answer for reaching out into the future. As a matter of fact, by the end of the nineteenth century a series of conflictive positions marked the cultural agenda with regard to national modernization. On the one hand, industrial progress nurtured in the collective imagination the possibility of overcoming the country’s long history of economic and social difficulties. This prospect persuaded progressivist sectors to celebrate science and technology as possible answers to the national backwardness. On the other hand, and despite the clear necessity of social transformation to facilitate innovation and growth, Spaniards placed tradition before their own material aspirations, a factor that conservative circles harnessed to glorify the past and censure modernization as a negative force. Industrial development was thus broadly seen as both an opportunity and a dangerous contingency—it provided the occasion to join European modernity but threatened to debilitate the principles over which national identity had consolidated.

This study proposes a new way of reading fin-de-siglo discursive production by uncovering some of the ideas and subjectivities that emerged at the intersection of industrial and national projects. While it assumes that industrialization interacted with the principles of discursive production in a diverse set of social, cultural, and political contexts, the analyses it advances are not concerned with the way in which texts respond to or describe industry and its impact on society. Rather, each chapter explores the productive incorporation of industrial language and imagery into a wide variety of textual formats to offer attentive diagnoses of the country’s most urgent problems and challenges. Ranging from the popularization of science to fiction, and including journalism, travel accounts, and political essays, this book shows how the complexities of national modernization were negotiated predominantly through the act of writing.

Cultural engagement with the materiality of industry produced a constellation of reflections about the nature of the social itself. To be sure, one cannot talk about a homogeneous or single way in which industrial transformation altered the perception of reality. On the contrary, subjected to particular beliefs and following specific political agendas, artists, educators, scientists, politicians, journalists, and cultural critics generated a vast array of complementary perspectives on the national situation. Questions such as economic recovery, the consolidation of peripheral nationalisms, the growing unrest of the working classes, or the environmental and human cost of technological progress, to mention just some of the issues studied in the following pages, were addressed from a plurality of critical approaches, often defying the ideological divisions that polarized the country’s political life. In fact, the appropriation of industrial referents into the cultural imagination was a versatile and multifaceted process that not only involved certain convictions but also encompassed different forms of knowing.

Philosophy, which profusely permeated discursivity at the turn of the twentieth century, was the backdrop and base for authors’ attempts at harmonizing antagonistic views of the country. Thinkers tackled tensions between spirit and matter and faith and reason that had historically complicated the adoption of progressive ideas, scientific discoveries, and technological advances on the peninsula. By formulating sophisticated yet untenable philosophical loopholes, they showed that in order for modernization to be attained, confrontations between tradition and progress needed to be overcome. In general terms, industrial growth was perceived as a negative, profane force whose capacity to alter reality affected the pillars of identity, producing a similar effect to that which Walter Benjamin conceptualizes as a loss of aura. In the same way that mechanical reproduction disrupted our understanding of cultural production, industrial development modified how society was perceived. If Benjamin defines aura as a mystical state, a reverential attitude connected to the unrepeatable quality of the artistic artifact,¹ one can extrapolate this articulation to approach the physical and ideological transfiguration of Spain during this period as a loss of aura. A new sense of class stability, disruptions to ideas of center and periphery, and the destruction of nature were indeed some of the aspects that complicated the negotiations of national identity as a bastion of historical continuity with the past.

Rather than focusing on the transformation of society per se, this study centers on the symbolic spaces—narrative strategies, rhetorical devices, metaphorical systems—that emerged in the discursive negotiations of such changes. Even though scholarship on Spanish industrialization has been extensive, few studies have delved into its semiological impact on the form through which national problems were evaluated.² Yet it is precisely at the metaphorical and allegorical levels that industrial modernization affected the cultural and social realms, changing how reality was abstracted into a new language that permeated all forms of discourse. Images, concepts, and ideas related to industry became ubiquitous referents in discussions about national consolidation. Mechanization and automation, for instance, stand out as symbols of the country’s profound transformation—the particular dynamism, structural organization, and operative conception of modern industries evinced the richness of the past, the mutability of the present, and the possibilities of the future. At the semiotic level, industrial metaphors and allegories offered new platforms (methodological, thematic, and discursive) for interpreting reality. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain, Metaphor is not merely a matter of language. It is a matter of conceptual structure. And conceptual structure is not merely a matter of the intellect—it involves all the natural dimensions of our experience.³ Contact with industrial reality, consequently, produced a rich repertoire of conceptual and analytical tools that facilitated the production of coherent discourses about society, education, politics, and the economy.

Founders of the Future’s main goal is therefore to identify the dialectical exchange between industrialization and society and to examine the rhetorical devices and narrative strategies that emerged at this interface. In order to show how industry’s operational, scientific, and technical principles transformed the cultural premises of textual production, the analyses included here assume that the dialogue between industry and culture takes place over a dynamic network of relationships. Material culture’s central proposition is useful in that regard to understand how the world of ideas interacted with the concrete realities of industrial transformation. According to this theoretical approach, objects have an impact on the social world by altering abstract articulations of reality—metaphors and allegorical constructions of industry thereby represented a novel and pertinent form of understanding social change.

Notwithstanding the fact that mechanization in Spain was already propagating at the end of the eighteenth century, this study focuses on its flourishing as a discursive and allegorical referent during the last third of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries. This period, which coincides with the Bourbon restoration, was characterized by a political consensus regarding the need for economic and institutional reforms that favored the consolidation of a strong industrial base in the country. The development of large-scale industries in Spain encompassed diverse sectors, including mining, manufacturing, and transportation. However, the steel industry stood out as the epitome of the possibilities of modernization and the image of progress’s dynamism and transformative power. In fact, the symbolic association of the production of metals with a society in flux is rather apposite to this book’s proposal. The functioning of the steel industry presented a new means of circulating ideas about time, energy, productivity, and collectivity that reshaped the projects of national modernization. The foundry became a point of reference in operational models of society that authors used to tackle the tensions and contradictions of the period. This convergence between industrial materiality and social diagnosis gave rise to a new interpretative lens, a novel insight into the country’s transformation that I have termed social foundry, and whose conceptual grounds are expounded in chapter 1.

The social foundry’s use of industrial signifiers, practices, and concepts emphasizes three distinctive and essential elements of modernization: human agency, materiality, and causality. In contrast to other scientifically or technically based abstractions of reality, such as social Darwinism or social thermodynamics, the social foundry’s consideration of human intervention—in the form of intellectual or physical labor—provided a concrete and relevant referential system for the formulation of plans for social reform. Additionally, in its materiality this frame of reference privileged the heuristic over the conceptual, encompassing practical and empirical elements related to the circulation of industrial objects in society. Finally, the social foundry’s logic transcended causality and determinism by considering the multiple directions that society could take according to the administration of its human and natural resources. Attention to the constitution of social foundries, then, offers new perspectives on how economic development, education, social transformation, scientific development, and environmental impact were evaluated in fin-de-siglo Spain as key elements in the forging of the modern nation.

THE FUTURE WAS HERE

The devastating effects of the 2008–2014 financial crisis in Spain has obscured the country’s recent achievements in terms of scientific research, technological advancement, and industrial development. In sectors such as renewable energy, medicine, and transportation, Spain’s innovations were on a par with those of other European nations.⁴ Even as late as 2010 (in the midst of the crisis), the high-speed rail network, an indicator of development, was still in expansion. That year, King Juan Carlos I inaugurated a new line that connected the cities of Madrid and Valencia. In his speech on the occasion, the monarch stressed the importance of continuing to work toward complete connectivity on the peninsula, an effort that would not only strengthen the economic and cultural links among different regions but would also consolidate the idea of a unified national identity: Esta extraordinaria conexión, concebida para dar el mejor y más rápido servicio a los ciudadanos, va a favorecer sin duda nuestra economía, y nuestra cohesión social y territorial (This exceptional connection, conceived as a mechanism for providing citizens with a better and faster service, will undoubtedly favor our economy and our social and territorial cohesion).⁵ Perhaps not surprisingly, it was these same goals that had mobilized investors to promote the construction of the first railroad line back in 1848. However, what in the past represented a small but significant step in the country’s modernization, in the twenty-first century positioned Spain as one of the most advanced nations in terms of railroad infrastructure.⁶ Moreover, with this huge leap, Spain demonstrated its total integration into the dynamics of European modernization, something unimaginable 150 years earlier. Looking at the past to explore the elements that enabled this integration thus reveals the complex assimilation of progress into the collective imagination and the extent to which this symbolic transaction shaped cultural, social, and political ideas about the country.

The pinnacle of nineteenth-century industrialization in Spain coincided with a period of relative political stability. The restoration of the monarchy in 1875 and the establishment of the long-lasting conservative political system that ruled the country for more than three decades show indeed how difficult it was to transition from traditional forms of government to progressive models of state administration that were advantageous to the projects of national modernization.⁷ The peaceful shifting in power between liberals and conservatives, which was enforced as a corrective measure to the historical confrontation of these irreconcilable ideologies, provided a sense of economic and social improvement whose inefficacy would be later exposed by the moral and military defeat in the 1898 war with the United States. While achieving an ideological integration of the peninsula had proven to be challenging, this loss confirmed the problematic underdevelopment of the country. Yet, at the same time, advances in infrastructure and the expansion of the industrial base showed prospects of economic recovery that were contingent on the collective efforts of various sectors in society. This was one of the aspects that King Juan Carlos remarked on in his 2010 speech during the inauguration of the high-speed line between Madrid and Valencia: [Este logro] simboliza … el resultado feliz de años de trabajo, de férrea voluntad y de generosa unidad ([This achievement] symbolizes the happy results of years of work, iron will, and generous unity).⁸ Science and technology were key in giving shape to a new vision of the country, one that only materialized in the late twentieth century thanks to the relentless labor and generosity of scientists and educators. Their success, however, had not been simply won.

As a matter of fact, promotion and development of science and technology during the nineteenth century were constantly compromised by the idea that progress could impinge on traditional values. Cultural and political agents, in this context, aligned with diverse and occasionally incompatible perspectives when negotiating social changes. Progressivists, for instance, proposed a thorough re-evaluation of the country’s political and economic structures in order to respond more effectively to the new dynamics of industry. Conservatives, meanwhile, rejected any form of power redistribution or social mobility, thus questioning the very notion of modernization and limiting its potential. Traditionalist thinkers who aligned with these ideas resisted the reorganization of society, arguing that its structure was essential to keeping national cultural values intact. Yet conservatives and traditionalists did not disdain the material possibilities of progress; on the contrary, most of them participated actively in entrepreneurial initiatives to promote industrial development, making sure that social and political control remained in the hands of the governing elites. Liberals, though, contested this position by exposing and denouncing the social crisis that co-opting the benefits of modernization could generate. In its different chapters, Founders of the Future explores this ideological complexity, tracing its protean nature and the repercussions it had for the conceptualization of Spain as a modern nation.

An example may be pertinent to illustrate this point. Consider Ramón Torres Muñoz de Luna’s laudatory poem written in 1861 to celebrate the inauguration of the railroad line joining Madrid and León. Exalting modernization, in it the poet draws an interesting comparison between the achievements of queens Isabel I and Isabel II in terms of political and territorial cohesion. Titled Las dos Isabeles (The two Isabels), the panegyric looks at the past to celebrate the monarchy’s and the Church’s crucial role in forging the national identity. The piece’s theme is in this regard paradigmatic of the problematic assimilation of industrial, scientific, and technological progress in Spain. When referring to Isabel I, for example, the poet underlines, Un mundo mereciste a Dios clemente/Que a Colón señaló tu diestra mano,/Cual precioso diamante refulgente /Perdido entre las olas del océano (One world you deserved from merciful God/the one your skillful hand showed to Columbus,/like a brilliant diamond/lost between the ocean waves).⁹ Similarly, the second Isabel knew how to appreciate the possibilities of the unknown, in this case represented by industrial machinery and locomotion: A otro mundo de fuerzas productoras/Con fe se lanza nuestra reina amada,/Sus carabelas son locomotoras,/Su América, la España inanimada (Our beloved queen is leaping into a different world of productive forces/her caravels are locomotives,/her America is the inanimate Spain). While one Isabel relied on Columbus’s vessels to ensure the future, the other has locomotives; whereas one discovered America, the other rediscovers an inanimate Spain that needs the dynamism of modernization. Both the discovery of America and the railroad expansion are presented as landmarks in the history of the country, achievements that would have been impossible without a divine auspice or the monarch’s will.

Torres Muñoz de Luna’s poem embodies a gesture of appreciation to the queen for her role as facilitator and promoter of modernization. His panegyric, in that regard, differs greatly from King Juan Carlos’s speech, in which it is the monarch who extends his appreciation to the people for their hard and essential work in making industrial progress possible. This symbolic inversion of the relationship between the monarchy and the people suggests a profound transformation of society and, consequently, of national identity—palpable evidence of a long but effectual process of ideological negotiations and technological development that began materializing during the nineteenth century.

In addressing the problems of nation and national identity on the peninsula, recent historiography treats the early nineteenth century as a turning point in the consolidation of Spain as a sociopolitical and cultural unity. While religious, geographical, and ethnic elements had become part of a protonationalism as early as the late fifteenth century, these studies consider that the sentiment of belonging to a nation (understanding the word in its modern meaning) did not consolidate until the Napoleonic invasion in 1808.¹⁰ It was at the outset of the French occupation that Spaniards became aware of shared aspirations, common traditions, and collective beliefs that opposed those of the occupiers. Underwriting the country’s institutional transition toward a constitutional monarchy, the proclamation of the 1812 Cadiz Constitution strengthened national sovereignty amid the international conflict with France. One of the main achievements of this document was the re-evaluation of the core political conceptions on which the model of national integration had been built. At the same time, the Constitution upheld certain social structures and cultural practices identified as part of the national essence, which further complicated the articulation of scientific, technological, and industrial modernization. Tensions between traditionalist and progressivist views of the country in this context divided society and questioned the extent to which the national character needed to be defined in relation to allegiance to the monarchy and the profession of Catholicism. This conflict contributed to the political antagonism, social instability, and economic frailty that would later characterize Fernando VII’s and Isabel II’s reigns during the first portion of the century.

The 1868 liberal revolution changed the balance of these ideological conflicts, yielding the adoption of a slightly more progressivist agenda. Yet the revolutionaries were unable to revamp the country’s administrative apparatus—the constitutional and parliamentary system they proposed encountered strong opposition from conservative sectors who saw in these attempts at renovating the country a dangerous threat to their own socioeconomic standing. As a result, as historian José Álvarez Junco explains, liberals found themselves with the dilemma of having to redefine the Spain that was best suited to their political project. At the very least, they had to be sure this notion was not delineated exclusively by inherited religion, loyalty to the king, or the traditional values of the aristocracy; without questioning its unity and power, they needed this idea of the country to function as the basis for constructing a modern state and a participative government.¹¹ Only six years after the revolution, the system that liberals had put in place collapsed, giving way to the restoration of monarchy and the instauration of an accorded alternation in power of conservatives and liberals. Subject to a political model in which opposing ideologies could in principle coexist, from 1875 onward Spain lived through a period of institutional stagnation that progressively eroded the opportunities for national modernization.

As the ideologist of the Restoration’s political structure, historian and politician Antonio Cánovas del Castillo embodied the ideals of a rather conservative liberalism that was reluctant to favor the country’s social and economic reorganization. An objector to principles such as free trade and universal suffrage, in his plans Cánovas undervalued the potential of industry’s social changes to impact the national economy. In fact, his political agenda operated at the margins of increasingly problematic phenomena, such as social mobility, urban expansion, and population displacement. From Cánovas’s perspective, as historian Juan Pablo Fusi explains, there was no doubt that Spain constituted an integrated entity on the basis of its history, geography, and language.¹² Connections between identity, religion, and traditional forms of social stratification were therefore common to his vision of the nation. Yet Cánovas’s projects of modernization included attempts to reconcile conservative and liberal convictions. By 1897, however, when he was assassinated, presumably by his political enemies, his system of concerted alternation of parties as heads of the government had already exhausted all its possibilities for harmonizing conflicting ideologies.

After Cánovas’s death, less conciliatory political visions emerged that in any case had to focus on alleviating growing social tensions. The new administrations worked on eliminating the government’s excessive centralization and on combating the institutional vices that the mechanism of political alternation generated. With these goals in mind, in 1899 Francisco Silvela, representative of the most conservative faction of Canovism, assumed the presidency of the country; and a few years later, in 1902, Alfonso XIII was crowned king. Two visible representatives of conservative ideals were thus in command of a country that needed an injection of modernity if it were to leave its backwardness behind and recover from the moral, economic, and social debacles of defeat in the 1898 war with the United States. This loss, along with the growing unrest of the working class, radicalized the country’s ideological division even more, thus preventing a much needed national consensus to promote, among others, the educational and institutional reforms that were required to bolster national modernization.

This pessimistic atmosphere contrasted with the hopefulness that the county’s new leadership and the beginning of a new century aroused in certain sectors of society. In a special issue of the journal La Energía Eléctrica (Electric energy) published in 1902 and entitled La ciencia y la industria eléctrica en España al subir al trono S.M. el Rey Don Alfonso XIII (The science and industry of electricity in Spain at the advent of H.M. the King Alfonso XIII), for example, military engineer, science popularizer, and educator Francisco del Río Joan celebrated the advent of the new monarch as a symbol of regeneration and change:

Parece como si al cerrar la diez y nueve centuria, se abriese para España una era de consoladora rehabilitación. Parece como si al tocar en un mínimo de la curva social, reuniéramos nuestras fuerzas para ir ascendiendo á un máximo de velocidad. Parece que al advenir un Rey, le acompaña la aurora, y el horizonte se arrebola y se dilata. Parece que la Infinita Misericordia se apiada de nosotros, y que una voz apocalíptica nos grita como á otro Lázaro: —¡Levántate y anda!¹³

(It seems as though the closing of the nineteenth century ushered in a new era of reconciling rehabilitation for Spain. It seems as if at the moment we reach a minimum on the social curve, we gather our energies to start ascending at maximum speed. It seems that the advent of the King was followed by dawn, and the horizon becomes redder and wider. It seems that the Infinite Compassion takes pity on us, and that an apocalyptic voice commands us, as if we were a new Lazarus: —Come out!)

A closer examination of this passage offers clues about the contradictory nature of this period. The optimistic tone used by del Río Joan can be explained in part by his own affiliation with regenerationism—an intellectual and political movement that sought to rescue Spain from its social, economic, and moral decline. Indeed, the idea that the country needed to hit rock bottom in order to start ascending again was one of the arguments put forward by this group of thinkers.¹⁴ Del Río Joan’s faith in the young monarch’s ability to bring stability and progress to Spain, for example, is represented by the metaphor of dawn. By highlighting that Alfonso XIII’s arrival was a breakpoint in the decay of the country, the author thus projects both a realistic assessment of the present and an optimistic view of the future. Through divine intervention (the Infinite Compassion suggested in the passage), Spain could be resurrected, a gesture that would confirm the prominent role of religion and the monarchy (symbols of the past) as engines of the future. Such contradiction, as this book shows, is symptomatic of the multiple ideological hurdles that marked national modernization.

LOOKING AT THE PAST

Before I lay out the various parts that this study comprises, a brief example may be useful to illustrate how the multiple tensions upon which national identity was negotiated during this period—materialism and spirituality, past and present, and tradition and progress—complicated the assimilation of the industrial phenomenon into the country’s imagination. Spain’s eclectic intellectual environment at the turn of the twentieth century saw the convergence of multiple, and sometimes irreconcilable, philosophical currents—positivism, Krausism, Darwinism, and socialism, among others ideological frameworks, supported attempts at understanding the complexities of progress.¹⁵ Subsumed under the possibilities offered by this broad theoretical spectrum, in a talk delivered at the opening of classes at the Ateneo de Madrid (Madrid Athenaeum) in 1882, Cánovas criticized the effort and energy society devoted to censure the materialist facets of scientific inquiry. For him, this philosophical dispute, along with recriminations of science for placing reason over religious dogmas, had diverted thinkers’ attention from more urgent and pressing problems. Cánovas’s unease was directed at the unanticipated enthusiasm that Auguste Comte’s positivism or Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism had generated in Spain. Both platforms had destabilized scientific and philosophical endeavors, secularizing their approach to fundamental questions such as the constitution of matter, the nature of movement, the origin of language and reasoning, or the essence of free will. Cánovas concluded that, as long as analytical efforts concentrated on separating the spiritual and material aspects of reality, neither philosophers nor scientists would ever be able to find an answer to these problems. In his discussion, for instance, he referenced neo-Kantian philosopher Charles Renouvier to emphasize that, even when physical laws were accepted as valid, the universe could not be reduced to a simple mechanism. In synthesis, science could only be useful insofar as its philosophical substrate encompassed both materialism and spirituality, an analogous conclusion to that postulated years later by Miguel de Unamuno regarding the rational grounds of faith.¹⁶

Beyond proposing a basis for the public debate on the role of science in society, the tension between materialism and spirituality also led to fruitless attempts at rendering compatible the most recent scientific discoveries with the Catholic doctrine. As a matter of fact, the cult of nature that spread across Europe, and the conceptualization of science as the mechanism to unveil its secret laws,¹⁷ encountered strong opposition in Spain precisely because of the ideological conflict between the foundations of scientific inquiry and the principles of Catholicism. As historian of science Agusti Nieto-Galán has noted, scientific views of society popular amid the progressive convictions that fueled the 1868 liberal revolution were later rejected and even proscribed, once the conservative guidelines behind the Restoration called into question the validity of recent scientific postulations.¹⁸ French positivism and German Naturphilosophie illustrate two different approaches to this tension and serve as antecedents in understanding the complexities of the Spanish case. In Naturphilosophie, physical laws had to be derived from nature, with science being understood as a systematic procedure for exploring the creations of God. In positivism, physical laws prevailed upon nature, and science was seen as the set of procedures for discovering and making sense of those principles, their properties, and their relations. Both approaches oscillate between subjectivity and objectivity, between metaphysics and materiality. The emphasis of German science on the organic greatly differed from the stress the French system gave to the causal and mechanical character of nature. Analogously, cultural appropriations of technology and industry in Spain fluctuated between these two contrasting forms of scientific interpretation.

Significantly, the debate around scientific materialism also had repercussions on the organization of higher education. In Spain the Catholic Church had authority to decide on the content, teaching methodologies, and lines of study available in universities. It is not a coincidence that during the last decades of the century, educators’ and scientists’ inaugural talks as members of the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales (Royal Academy of Natural, Physical, and Exact Sciences) insistently focused on the state of science and the way freedom of thought was affecting education. The popularization of scientific knowledge also raised awareness of the adverse repercussions that a close relationship between the Church and state could have on education. Part of the problem was the adherence of Spanish identity to Catholicism, which had prevented a questioning of tradition indispensable to consolidating the country’s projects of modernization.

Not surprisingly, in this context many ideas proposed by materialist scientists and thinkers, including Ludwig Büchner, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, became serious threats to the system of values that supported the national ethos. Thus, while positivism, evolution, and anthropocentrism were linked to negative effects of modernization, Naturphilosophie got to be more appealing, as it facilitated the reception and adoption of less dogmatic philosophical edifices, such as the one advanced by German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. Imported to Spain by Julián Sanz del Río around 1850 and widely disseminated among a group of liberal intellectuals during the revolutionary period, this doctrine became pivotal in their political efforts to execute social and institutional reforms. As Juan López-Morillas explains, in Spain Krause’s ideas transcended the theoretical and philosophical debate to become part of a political and even religious discussion: Francamente confesamos que, más que el análisis de un sistema filosófico, nos atrae la caracterización de una modalidad cultural. Lo que en el Krausismo quiso ver cierto tipo de español se nos antoja mucho más significativo que lo que Krause puso en su doctrina o que lo que Sanz del Río se propuso al importarla (In all honesty, I have to say that more than an analysis of a philosophical system, my study is a characterization of a cultural mode. What certain Spanish thinkers wanted to see in Krausism is much more significant than what Krause proposes in his doctrine, or what Sanz del Río expected when he imported it).¹⁹ As an intellectual platform, Krausism offered the perfect model for shunning three different views of Spanish identity. First, the idea that Spaniards were unable to produce or understand abstract notions and, as a consequence, were incapable of generating scientific or philosophical knowledge—the national genius was then inclined to an imaginative exuberance that highlighted their extreme individualism and passionate spirit. Second, the notion that this particular character was a response to the religious radicalization of society that had taken place after the Counterreformation. And, finally, the perception that in the aftermath of this schism the Spanish personality was consecrated to Catholicism, entrusting the Church with the mission to restore the country’s social and moral orders. One consequence of these perspectives was the consolidation of a Manichean approach to religion: any ideological tendency that threatened the Church’s sovereignty or seemed heterodox was considered anti-Spanish.²⁰ Krausist adherents, for their part, developed an original vision of the country built on the objective revision of reality—one possible path toward modernization consisted precisely in the rationalization of culture. In this light, Spain seemed to be suffering from a disease for which the lack of scientific, technological, and industrial development was one of its most severe symptoms.

The emergence of a rhetoric of illness was indeed part of a larger project of rationalization of the national problems. The function of the discourse of degeneration, as Michael Aronna explains, was to determine which groups and practices constituted biological and cultural obstacles to modernity, to diagnose the illness afflicting these groups and to develop treatments or solutions.²¹ In assimilating technological and industrial change, concepts such as decay, degeneration, and disorder also functioned as markers for assessing social practices, traditions, and identity traits that could represent serious obstacles to the projects of national modernization. As objective and effective tools with which it was possible to diagnose the nation, analysis and rational interpretation thus reaffirmed the importance of education for social advancement.

Within Krausism, education was considered indispensable for putting national problems into perspective. As a matter of fact, Sanz del Río had a rather specific idea of the role universities played in the country’s process of modernization:

No se debe pensar—escribía [Sanz del Río] desde Heidelberg en 1844—que universidad es y significa en Alemania lo que en España. Nuestras universidades son instituciones donde se enseña la ciencia, antiguamente bajo la influencia y aun dirección eficaz, directa, íntima de la Iglesia, y ahora del Estado; en Alemania la universidad es en su interior, en la enseñanza misma, una institución totalmente independiente de la Iglesia y del Estado; con tal que sea verdaderamente ciencia lo que en ella se enseña.²²

(We should not assume—he wrote from Heidelberg in 1844—that university is, or even means the same in Germany as in Spain. Our universities are institutions where, in the past, science was taught under the Church’s intimate, direct, and effective supervision, and in the present, under the state’s vigilance. In Germany, regarding education and instruction, the university is a completely independent institution; at least with respect to science.)

Leading Krausists, such as Francisco Giner de los Ríos, Nicolás Salmerón, or Gumersindo de Azcárate, considered that it was time for universities in Spain to seek support in the society they were supposed to serve, and not in the state that had kept them in a condition of serfdom. Azcárate, in particular, thought that university independence and