Felipe Alaiz, Iberian Federalism and the Making of the Anarchist Intellectual

Abstract

This article traces how the work by Felipe Alaiz, Hacia una federación de autonomías libertarias (1945), posits an alternative to notions of contemporaneous nationhood, race and identity by placing his work within the context of nineteenth-century “Iberianism”, its social and political context and nationalist discourses on the nation. Rather than a trans-historical notion of nationhood, Alaiz demystifies essentialist concepts of race, suggesting that “Spanishness” is an amalgam of different cultural and “racial” characteristics. He suggests that the social organisation of the peninsula is best effected on the basis of the autonomous municipality, thus arguing that the nation and indeed the state are superfluous, nefarious and divisive concepts best jettisoned in favour of Iberian federalism. As a secondary concern, the article examines the extent to which Alaiz breaks with or revises concepts of the “intellectual” as a canon in the history of twentieth-century Spain. Rather than arguing that Alaiz was an intellectual, an analysis of his thought invites us to re-cast notions of intellectuality to include those who made ideas and fought on the side of the vanquished of the Civil War. In this way, a contribution to recuperating the thought of Alaiz and the broader libertarian project of acculturation of the masses is made.