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INTRODUCTION 
Stanley G. Paync: An Intellectual Biography 
MICHAEL SEIDMAN 
Stanley Payne is an extraordinary scholar who has produced a body of work
whose range 
and depth cannot fail to impress. His seventeen books focus mostly on the
political and dip- 
lomatic history of twentieth-century Spain (as do the contributions in the
present volume), 
but two-A History of Spain and Portugal and Spanish Catholicism-cover two
millennia 
of Iberian history. Moreover, Payne has not concentrated exclusively on the
history of the 
Iberian Peninsula. His work on fascism is a model of European and global
comparative his- 
tory and may be the most important conservative and anti-Marxist interpretation
of the 
fascist phenomena. In the course of writing both Spanish history and what
he calls-with 
some irony-"fascistology," Payne has demonstrated an intellectual
sophistication and lin- 
guistic cosmopolitanism that includes a command of nearly all the Romance
languages plus 
German and Russian. 
These striking accomplishments make it imperative to focus on Payne as an
individual, 
not as a member of any particular group of scholars-whether "cold warriors"
or modern- 
ization theorists. In other words, contrary to current trends in social and
especially cultural 
history which argue (or rather generally assume) that individuals are determined
by their 
membership in a group based on politics, race, class, gender, religion, or
age, I shall con- 
centrate on Payne as an exceptional intellectual. Of course, his modest origins,
Protestant 
upbringing in Texas and California, and development as a white male scholar
during the 
Cold War undoubtedly influenced his work, but certainly did not determine
it. Like other 
creative scholars, Payne combined these and other influences to form an original
oeuvre. 
Given his remarkable achievements, it might seem petty and presumptuous to
disagree 
with Payne's interpretation of his own work. In response to a question during
a March 2005 
interview with the British political scientist, Roger Griffin, Payne asserted
that The Spanish 
Revolution (1970) constituted a real rupture in his thinking:' 
For the [Spanish] Revolution book, [I] did primary research on the left for
the first 
time. The latter was much more of an eye-opener than any of the research
on the 
right, for I had been raised on the myth of the Republic and of the (at least
funda- 
mentally) virtuous left. Discovering that the left, rather than the right,
had initiated 
political violence, both small-scale and large-scale, and was responsible
for the initial 
breakdown of democracy was the most radically new finding of my entire career,
and changed my whole outlook. It also meant that my reputation among the
left 
would begin to go into decline.2 
Instead of seeing The Spanish Revolution as a break with his first two books-Falange:
A 
History of Spanish Fascism (1961) and Politics and the Military in Modern
Spain (1967)-I 
will emphasize their methodological and even ideological continuity. These
first volumes 
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