Thoughts on Gianandrea de Antonellis’ Juan Vázquez de Mella: Testi di dottrina politica, (Juan Vázquez de Mella: Texts of Political Doctrine), posted on altaterradilavoro.com, October 15th, 2025
What is the true meaning of Tradition? For Gianandrea de Antonellis, introducing Juan Vázquez de Mella: Texts of Political Doctrine (Solfanelli, 2023), the answer lies not in nostalgia but in renewal. Tradition, he explains, does not mean preserving the past in amber, but perfecting it—continuing its creative work. True progress, in this view, differs both from progressivism, which pursues novelty for its own sake, and from conservatism, which clings to inherited forms without vitality.
Vázquez de Mella (Cangas de Onís, 1861 – Madrid, 1928), the great Carlist thinker and orator known as the “Word of Tradition,” offered perhaps the clearest formulation of this principle:
“Tradition is the effect of progress; but since it communicates it—that is, it preserves and propagates it—it is itself social progress. Individual progress does not become social unless it is received by tradition. Tradition is hereditary progress; and progress, if it is not hereditary, is not social progress.”
For Mella, a generation worthy of its ancestors must not simply inherit but augment what it has received—enriching the patrimony before handing it on. To squander or repudiate that inheritance, he warns, is to leave only misery and ruin to one’s successors.
De Antonellis highlights this as the essence of tradition properly understood: progress without rupture, renewal without amnesia. It is a doctrine that transcends eras precisely because it rests on eternal truths—a vision that made Vázquez de Mella not merely a polemicist but, in the words of philosopher Rafael Gambra, “the logos who rendered explicit and coherent an entire system of ideas that before him had been more lived and felt than understood.”
A master of Thomistic and scholastic thought, Mella systematized Carlist political philosophy with formidable eloquence. Though most of his manuscripts were lost amid the revolutionary barbarism of the Spanish Civil War, his public writings—speeches, essays, and parliamentary addresses—were collected into twenty-eight volumes of Complete Works.
Among his most original contributions, De Antonellis notes, is his concept of societism (sociedalismo), a doctrine emphasizing the spontaneous growth of intermediate societies—families, guilds, municipalities, provinces, and regions—that both constitute and limit the State. “The collective person exists by its own right,” Mella wrote, “and the State has the power to recognize it, but not the right to create it.”
In this sense, his political theory aligns perfectly with the spirit of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum—not innovating, but articulating and grounding the Church’s traditional social vision.
Solfanelli’s Juan Vázquez de Mella: Texts of Political Doctrine offers a carefully curated anthology that distills the essence of this vision—a manual of political thought still strikingly relevant today. For those seeking a vision of social order rooted in continuity, duty, and the organic life of communities, Vázquez de Mella remains a thinker of enduring urgency.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, October 23rd, the Feasts of San Vero di Salerno and the Blessed Martyrs of Valenciennes
Juan Vázquez de Mella, Texts of Political Doctrine, Solfanelli, Chieti 2023, 190 pp., €14
