Unamuno, Cervantes and Mises: what it takes to convince, and what it takes to win

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was born in Bilbao on 29 September 1864 and died in Salamanca on the last day of 1936, under house arrest, eleven weeks after the scene for which the world remembers him. On 12 October 1936, in the great hall of the university of which he was rector, three months into the civil war and with Franco's wife among those present, he is supposed to have answered General Millán-Astray's cry of "¡Viva la muerte!" with the sentence that has been printed in every history of the war since: Venceréis, pero no convenceréis. You will win, but you will not convince.

The difficulty, established in 2018 by a librarian at the university's law faculty called Severiano Delgado, is that nobody present recorded those words, and that the account in which they first appear was written five years later, in English, in London, by a man who had not been in the room. Delgado's study, Arqueología de un mito, traces both famous sentences of the day, Millán-Astray's "¡Muera la inteligencia!" and Unamuno's reply, to "Unamuno's Last Lecture", an article by the exiled Salamanca professor Luis Portillo in Cyril Connolly's Horizon in December 1941. Portillo, Delgado says, wrote "a literary recreation with no intention of historical description", a piece of theatre in which good faced evil across a lecture hall; Hugh Thomas took it whole into The Spanish Civil War in 1961, Ricardo de la Cierva did the same in 1970, and the recreation became the record.

The date supplies two other men who had strong views on the difference between winning and convincing. Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547, probably on 29 September, the feast of the archangel whose name he was given; and Ludwig von Mises was born in Lemberg, now Lviv, on 29 September 1881, and spent his life insisting that an argument he had won in 1920 was still unanswered when everyone else had moved on. Émile Zola died in Paris on the day in 1902 and W. H. Auden in Vienna in 1973. The thread is Unamuno's, and it runs better through the sentence he probably did say than through the one he probably did not.

What Unamuno said, as far as anyone knows#

Delgado does not deny that something happened. There was, he told a Salamanca paper on the anniversary in 2018, "a very violent verbal confrontation between Unamuno and Millán Astray", and the rector left the hall under protection and was stripped of his office within the fortnight. What Delgado disputes is the script. His preferred witness is Emilio Salcedo, a Salamanca journalist who wrote the 1964 biography Vida de don Miguel from the testimony of people who had been there, and Salcedo's version of the key sentence is longer and, to my ear, better: vencer no es convencer, y hay que convencer, sobre todo, y no puede convencer el odio que no deja lugar para la compasión. To win is not to convince, and convincing is what matters above all, and hatred that leaves no room for compassion cannot convince. Delgado also thinks that Unamuno's remarks turned not on the general at all but on José Rizal, the Filipino poet and physician shot by a Spanish firing squad in 1896.

The Salcedo sentence has a structure that Portillo's slogan lacks, and it is the structure of Unamuno's whole philosophy. Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos (1913) opens with "the man of flesh and bone", el hombre de carne y hueso, the one who is born, suffers and dies, set against the abstract "man" of the philosophers, and it proceeds on the claim that reason and the hunger for immortality cannot be reconciled and that the honest course is to live inside the contradiction rather than to resolve it. Reason, for Unamuno, wins every argument with faith and convinces nobody of anything that matters. He had found the same thought in Kierkegaard, whom he met in 1901 and for whom, a scholarly survey of Kierkegaard's Spanish reception records, he "had the courage to learn Danish, moved above all by the wish to read the thinker of Denmark in the original"; in Del sentimiento trágico he calls him hermano, brother. Pascal is the other presence, and Spinoza, whose conatus, the striving of each thing to persist in its being, Unamuno reads as the philosophical form of the wish not to die.

The life was as contradictory as the doctrine and he would have said that was the point. He was appointed to the chair of Greek at Salamanca in 1891, made rector in 1900, and turned out by a government in 1914. Primo de Rivera exiled him to Fuerteventura in 1924; he escaped to Paris, settled at Hendaye on the French side of the Basque frontier and came home in 1930, when the dictatorship fell, to be made rector again. He welcomed the Republic and then attacked it, and in July 1936 he welcomed the military rising as a restoration of order. The Republic sacked him as rector on 22 August. The rebels reinstated him. Then came 12 October, and Franco removed him in turn. He had spent the autumn writing letters against the killings in the Nationalist zone, which is the part of the story that Portillo's theatre, for all its inventions, got right.

Cervantes, and a birthday reasoned from a name#

Cervantes's birthday is an inference. The one document is the baptismal register of the church of Santa María la Mayor in Alcalá de Henares, which records the ceremony on 9 October 1547; the birthplace museum in the town puts it exactly, that he was born "probably on September 29, on día de san Miguel", since Spanish families of the period commonly named a child for the saint of the day of birth and baptised within a week or two. Britannica prints the date with a question mark. It is the kind of evidence a historian accepts with a shrug.

The rest of the life is better documented and reads like the novel's own subplots: three wounds at Lepanto in October 1571, one of which left his left hand useless; capture by Barbary corsairs in 1575 and five years in Algiers, with four failed escapes; the tax-collector's job that ended in a Seville gaol in 1597 over the accounts. Part One of Don Quixote came out in 1605, when its author was fifty-seven; Part Two in 1615; he died in Madrid on 22 April 1616, and the 23rd, which the world keeps as his day, is the day of his burial. Unamuno's claim on him was total and slightly mad. Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905), written for the novel's tercentenary, reads the book as scripture and its hero as a Spanish Christ, the man who chooses the impossible in an age of reason, and it defends Quixote against Cervantes, who is accused of not understanding what he had made. This is not a reading most Cervantists accept, and Unamuno did not care.

There is a stronger philosophical case, and Foucault made it in the first part of Les Mots et les choses (1966), where Don Quixote marks the end of the age of resemblance: the knight reads the world through books of chivalry, finds that windmills are not giants, and thereby exposes the gap between signs and things on which modern knowledge is built. The second part, in which the characters meet readers of the first, closes the loop; representation has begun to represent itself. On this account Quixote is Descartes's contemporary, forty years early, asking whether the world is as it appears or as one has been taught to see it. He is also, and here Unamuno's reading and Foucault's meet, a man who cannot be convinced. Sancho, who begins as the realist, ends by believing in the island. The book is a two-volume study of how conviction moves between people, and of the fact that it is not moved by winning.

Mises: an argument that won and did not convince#

Ludwig von Mises took his doctorate in law at Vienna in 1906, sat in Böhm-Bawerk's seminar, served as an artillery officer in Galicia and the Carpathians, and in 1920, in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, published "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth". The argument is short. Rational allocation of resources requires comparing the value of alternative uses of capital goods; that comparison requires prices; prices arise from exchange; exchange requires owners; and a commonwealth that abolishes private ownership of the means of production has therefore, whatever its planners' good faith, no way of knowing whether it is building the right things. Socialism (1922) expanded the case and, on Hayek's own account, converted him. Mises left Vienna for Geneva in 1934, reached New York in 1940, and taught a seminar at New York University from 1945 to 1969 from which the American Austrian school descends. Human Action (1949), his treatise, set economics on what he called praxeology, the deduction of the whole science from the axiom that human beings act, using means to attain chosen ends, with no empirical premise required and none admitted. He died in New York on 10 October 1973.

The calculation debate is where the day's theme bites, because Mises won it twice and was told both times that he had lost. Oskar Lange's reply in The Review of Economic Studies in 1936 and 1937 proposed that a planning board could set prices by trial and error, raising them where shortages appeared, and most of the profession decided that Lange had answered Mises. Hayek's response was to shift the ground: not calculation given the data, but the fact that the data never exist in one place, since the knowledge that prices summarise is dispersed, local and often tacit. That is the argument of "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), which this series took up on 18 September, and it is the one the textbooks now credit. Mises regarded the shift as unnecessary; the argument from ownership, he thought, had never been met, and he said so with a stubbornness that cost him allies. The Soviet collapse persuaded many that he had been right. Persuasion of that kind is winning, not convincing, and a Misesian ought to be the first to notice the difference: nothing in 1991 was an argument.

His apriorism is the other reason he belongs in a philosophy calendar, and it is the weaker ground. To say that economics is deduced from an axiom and cannot be refuted by observation is to place it outside science on Popper's criterion, and the Austrians have spent seventy years arguing about whether that is a fault of the criterion or of the method. Popper's side of the quarrel is in the entry for 17 September. Mises would have said that the demand for falsifiability was itself an unargued convention of the profession, which is true, and that his axiom was self-evident, which is where the trouble starts. Unamuno, who thought reason won every argument and convinced no one, would have recognised the shape of the impasse.

Two deaths: Zola's chimney and Auden's disowned line#

Émile Zola died on the morning of 29 September 1902 in his house in the rue de Bruxelles, of carbon monoxide from a coal fire in a sealed bedroom; his wife Alexandrine, in the same bed, survived. The investigation found the chimney badly swept and little else. In 1953 the newspaper Libération printed a story that a stove-fitter working on the roof next door had confessed on his deathbed in 1927 to blocking the flue on the orders of anti-Dreyfusards and unblocking it the next morning. Frederick Brown, Zola's biographer, concluded that the story may be true and can no longer be checked, which is the right place to leave it. J'accuse, the open letter to the President in L'Aurore of 13 January 1898, is the origin of the modern intellectual, the writer who spends his authority on a matter outside his competence, and Zola paid for it with a conviction, a year in London and, perhaps, a chimney. His 1880 essay Le Roman expérimental had claimed for the novelist the method of Claude Bernard's experimental medicine, a bridge between the philosophy of science and the theory of fiction that did not bear weight. Dreyfus walked behind the coffin.

W. H. Auden died of heart failure at the Altenburgerhof hotel in Vienna in the night of 28 to 29 September 1973, a few hours after reading his poems to the Austrian Society for Literature. He belongs here for a single act of self-correction. "September 1, 1939" ends its penultimate stanza with a line that has been quoted at every crisis since: "We must love one another or die." Auden cut the stanza from the Collected Poetry of 1945, changed the line to "We must love one another and die" for an anthology in 1955, wrote to a critic in 1957 that "between you and me, I loathe that poem", and when he permitted a final reprint in 1964 attached a note describing it, with four others, as "trash which he is ashamed to have written". The line had won; it had persuaded millions. He judged that it did not convince, because it was not true, and he withdrew it. He was the editor of The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952), and the elegy for Freud, which this series discussed on 23 September, gave the twentieth century the phrase "a whole climate of opinion". His own most quoted line about his art, from the Yeats elegy, is that "poetry makes nothing happen". It is the most Unamunian sentence in English.

The day, and the series#

The five did not agree; Mises would have found Unamuno's contempt for reason intolerable, and Unamuno would have found praxeology a fine example of reason talking to itself. The pattern is that each of them held the two things apart, the winning and the convincing, and that in every case the historical record has since confused them: a slogan invented in London stands in for what a rector said, a birthday is reasoned from a saint, a debate is settled by an empire's collapse, and a poem's best-loved line was the one its author threw away. The previous entry in this series is 24 September.