Making use of the Thomist concept of mystical body and the ecumenical view of the Church, Sardinha re-examined these materials in order to give substance to an organic corporative historical view against conflictualist views and democratic-liberal atomism. The traditionalist and holistic conception of “people”, “populace”, ends up being at the core of this teleological view of national history, removing it to a space of totality which finalised ideological discourse itself as the most important constitutive moment.

If not, he considers the plan to correct the history of Portugal and the method which had served it: it became imperative to invalidate the two historiographical conceptions that had undermined the traditionalist and Catholic view of history, “that which makes history dependent on the action of a restricted minority (kings, nobles, priests) and that which makes it the spontaneous product of an instinctive headless mass. Unless we practise eclecticism, for a comfortable intellectual solution, it must be said, at least in relation to Portuguese history, that kings, bishops, nobles and the very people themselves constitute a homogenous block from which history flows, driven by directives that reside in the common soul although it falls to the leaders to specify these and ensure they are carried out. Thus we end, irrevocably, both the democratic concept and the aristocratic concept of history. (…) Since the People hand us the key to the problem. Since there were not really two distinct races in Portugal – one the winner and the other the defeated – the unity of our history is as transparent as pure water. This unity results from the mould in which the collective soul adapted and stabilised itself. Without any doubt, it was a religious mould” (posthumous, ”Os Gamas”, NP, V, t. I, n.º 1, pp. 12-13).

“Collective subject”, the people, is therefore the entification of a national conscience. And from here the “demonstration”, so dear to the historiographical discourse of the dictatorship, of the collaboration of both interests and classes to carry out major national projects was seen and it was “clearly proved and well established that in the Afonso dynasty as well as in the Aviz dynasty, the people, the nobility and the king collaborated as a single whole in the historical running of Portugal. On the day when the formation and development of the family in Portugal, with all its meanderings and intimate dynamic, is acknowledged, the intellectual poisoning of those of sincere faith and clear perception and with which our Jacobinocracy perverts the understanding of our past will no longer be possible, thus breaking those links and those roots without respect for which there is no national conscience” (ibid., p. 17).

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