1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910427035303321

Autore

Sánchez León Pablo <1964->

Titolo

Popular political participation and the democratic imagination in spain : from crowd to people, 1766-1868 / / Pablo Sánchez León

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham, Switzerland : , : Springer, , [2020]

©2020

ISBN

3-030-52596-1

Edizione

[1st ed. 2020.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (XIV, 363 p.)

Disciplina

323.0420946

Soggetti

World politics

Social history

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

1. Introduction: Historizing the Language of Modern Citizenship -- 2. Order: From Plebeian Disorder to Popular Citizenship—Constitutional Imagination Between Contexts,1766–1814 -- 3. Subject: Education, Taxed Wealth, Capacity, Roots—Citizenship Criteria from the Enlightenment to Liberalism,1780s–1840s -- 4. Space: The Spectre of Plebeian Tyranny—Popular Participation, Radical Leadership, and the Revolutions of 1848 -- 5. Time: The Fatalist Loop—Historical Culture and Popular Empowerment in the Mid-Nineteenth Century -- 6. Identity: Enraged Citizens or Subaltern Crowd? Popular Mobilization, Representation, and Participation in the Spanish Revolution of 1854 -- 7. Recognition: Vulgar as a Political Concept—Discourse and Subjects of Corruption in the Public Sphere of Limited Suffrage -- 8. Epilogue: Decline and Fall of the Liberal Monarchy, 1865–1868 -- 9.Conclusions: Studying Modern Citizenship as Historical Condition.

Sommario/riassunto

This book addresses the changing relationships among political participation, political representation, and popular mobilization in Spain from the 1766 protest in Madrid against the early Bourbon reforms until the citizen revolution of 1868 that first introduced universal suffrage and led to the ousting of the monarchy. Popular Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain shows that a



notion of the “crowd” internally dividing the concept of “people” existed before the advent of Liberalism, allowing for the enduring subordination of popular participation to representation in politics. In its wider European and colonial American context, the study analyzes semantic changes in a range of cultural spheres, from parliamentary debate to historical narrative and aesthetics. It shows how Liberalism had trouble reproducing the legitimacy of limited suffrage and traces the evolution of an imagination on democracy that would allow for the reconfiguration of an all-encompassing image of the people eventually overcoming representative government. “Focused on the nation and identities, Spanish historiography had a pending debt with that other historical subject of modernity, the people. With this book, Pablo Sánchez León starts cancelling the debt with an innovative methodology combining conceptual history with social and political history. Brilliantly, this books also proposes a novel chronology for modern history and renewed categories of analysis. In many senses, this is an extraordinarily renovating senior work.” —José María Portillo Valdés, University of the Basque Country, Spain “This book by Pablo Sánchez León is an original and detailed study of one of the essential components of modernity, the relation between the concepts of plebe and pueblo. The author shows that plebe and people were shaped in a process of mutual differentiation and how the enduring tension between them deeply marked out the evolution of Spanish politics from the end of the Old Regime and throughout the 19th century. As the author brilliantly argues, such tension is tightly imbricated with the enduring dilemma between representation and participation underlying modern political systems. Through a historical analysis of the influence of people and plebe over Spanish, the book makes clear the degree to which the power of language contributes to shape political actors and institutional frames.” —Miguel Ángel Cabrera — Professor, University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain “This is a book for exploring (from current needs) the history of political participation in Spanish society in order to rethink the very notion of modern citizenship.” —María Sierra, University of Seville, Spain “Motivated by the current crisis in political representation in parliamentary democracies, this work by Pablo Sánchez León departs from the process of construction of modern citizenship. Representation, participation and mobilization are put into play as an interactive triad whose dynamics and changing conceptualization have the key to the social, political and cultural changes between the Old Regime and the early establishment of democracy in 1868. The “They do not represent us!” and other current claims for deliberative democracy provide the guiding thread for a demanding research on the tension between representation and participation shaping the period 1766-1868. The work reflects on the relevance of popular participation and, in presenting the modern history of Spain as singular and relevant on its own, provides an account of the building of modern citizenship. —Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain This exciting book is both topical and historiographically valuable. It offers a fresh perspective on current debates about the limits of representation and the pros and cons of participation; it makes Spanish political culture in the age of revolutions accessible to anglophone readers, and it engagingly illustrates one way of doing the ‘history of concepts’. Recommended on all three counts. Joanna Innes, Oxford University Pablo Sánchez León is a researcher at the Centro de Humanidades CHAM of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has published extensively about the history of social movements in Spain and works on the relations between language and identity. He is coeditor of Palabras que



atan [Words that bind] (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015).