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
Sanchez Leon 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." -Jose
Maria Portillo Valdes, University of the Basque Country, Spain
"This book by Pablo Sanchez Leon 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 Angel Cabrera - Professor,
University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain "Most accounts of Spain's
transition to modern democracy begin with the popular uprising
against the French invasion in 1808, the creation of a national
parliament and the promulgation of an advanced Liberal constitution
in 1812. Pablo Sanchez Leon begins the story half a century earlier
in the mass street protests in Madrid and other cities in 1766
sparked by Charles III's sweeping reform programme. Sanchez Leon
focuses unrepentantly on plebeian groups and crowd action - how
they are described and conceived by contemporaries - as a key to
understanding Spain's precocious and troubled passage from
absolutism to the promulgation of universal male suffrage in
September 1868. This audacious and highly original interpretation
will surely strike a chord with students of modern Spain." -Guy
Thomson, University of Warwick, UK "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." -Maria Sierra, University of Seville, Spain
"Motivated by the current crisis in political representation in
parliamentary democracies, this work by Pablo Sanchez Leon 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 Fernandez 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
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