Gustavo Bueno y la teoría falangista del imperio

This article examines the Falangist roots of Gustavo Bueno’s political theory of Spain as an empire. Using archival and press sources, it reconstructs his intellectual formation in the Falange’s philosophical seminar in Zaragoza during the 1940s and his later militancy in Salamanca in the 1950s, first as political commissar and then as provincial councilor. It highlights the influence of Eugenio Frutos, Santiago Montero Díaz, and Antonio Tovar, for whom Nazi Germany represented the model of a really existing empire. After the fall of the Third Reich, these thinkers developed alternative conceptual frameworks that Bueno would later incorporate into his mature political philosophy. With Frutos, he reformulated the notion of the collective person as the basis of imperial theory; with Montero, he defended the Soviet Union as a generative empire; and with Tovar, he argued that a unified Spain grounded in a Falangist social program could function as a self-sufficient imperial project. The article concludes that Bueno avoided openly acknowledging these Falangist sources to prevent the discredit associated with previously failed proposals, recasting them instead within his own philosophical system.