One part of this realism concerns the problem of inequality. Unlike many modern writers, including even some conservatives, Cervantes has no illusions about abolishing inequality: “Dos linajes solos hay en el mundo, como decía una abuela mía, que son el tener y el no tener.” (“There are only two families in the world, as a grandmother of mine used to say: the Haves and the Have-nots.”) This must be the first literary use of the phrase “Haves and Have-nots”, more than two centuries before another great conservative, Benjamin Disraeli, wrote in his novel Sybil of “two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy . . . the Rich and the Poor”. Because conservatives do not yearn for an egalitarian Utopia, they prefer to address the problem by ameliorating the effects of poverty, rather than demonising the rich. It is as important today as it ever was to avoid class warfare, which is stoked up by the demagogy of the far-Left; but the Right will only be taken seriously if it is seen to take radical measures to open up society and the economy to enable the Have-nots to compete on equal terms with the Haves. The Left will always try to exploit the guilt complexes of the Haves and the resentments of the Have-Nots; and these two emotions, guilt and resentment, are very powerful political factors, today as much as ever. If the centre-Right cannot counter guilt with generosity and resentment with justice, then its place will be taken by the far-Right, which exploits similarly negative emotions to the Left. The far-Right is in the ascendant across Europe today precisely because the conservative cause has allowed itself to abandon liberalism, and with it the positive politics that alone provide a vision of the future that may inspire the young and old alike.

In its long period of decline from the 17th to the 20th centuries, Spain produced several conservative thinkers of a deeply pessimistic cast of mind, from the great Jesuit Baltasar Gracián, whose Criticón and Oráculo so impressed Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to the noble diplomat Donoso Cortés, whose Ultramontane polemics against progress exercised a profound influence on Carl Schmitt. We can certainly learn much from these Catholic Cassandras, but in my view the Spanish thinker who should inspire conservatives today is José Ortega y Gasset. In his early tribute to Cervantes, Meditations on Quixote, he declared: “Hatred is the feeling which leads to the extinction of values.” That was published in the fateful year 1914. Then came the Great War, from which Spain was fortunate to escape unscathed. In his best-known work, La Rebelión de las Masas (The Revolt of the Masses), published in 1930 as monarchy was replaced by republic in Spain, while Europe was being crushed between the pincers of Fascism and Communism, Ortega developed this thought. “Civilisation,” he wrote, “is nothing else than the attempt to reduce the use of force to being the ultima ratio, the last resort.” What he called “the revolt of the mass man”, the tyranny of the majority and the use of force to resolve political disputes, was “the Magna Carta of barbarism”. He went on: “Civilisation is above all the will to live together. A man is uncivilised, a barbarian in so far as he does not take others into account.” This is what we see today, in its most extreme form, in the jihad against the West by Isis and other Islamist terrorists. What Ortega held up as his ideal “form of life” he called convivencia, a wonderful Spanish expression which combines the English words “coexistence” and “conviviality”, as well as the Latin concordia. Such is the life that is only made possible by civilisation, and such is the true raison d’être of conservative thought and politics.