Juan Donoso Cortés

Spanish political thinker, diplomat and orator (1809–1853), born in Valle de la Serena and died in Paris. He began as a moderate liberal and deputy, and in 1848 — with revolution in the streets of Europe — turned towards a counter-revolutionary Catholicism he never abandoned. The Discourse on Dictatorship, delivered to the Cortes that same year, argues that the choice is between the dictatorship of the sabre and that of the dagger, and that society must defend itself by suspending legality.

The Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism (1851) takes the argument to its conclusion: without theology no politics is possible. He is one of the sources of European counter-revolutionary thought, and Carl Schmitt returned to him a century later.