Table Of ContentPopular Political Participation
and the Democratic
Imagination in Spain
From Crowd to People, 1766–1868
Pablo Sánchez León
Popular Political Participation and the Democratic
Imagination in Spain
Pablo Sánchez León
Popular Political
Participation and the
Democratic
Imagination in Spain
From Crowd to People, 1766–1868
Pablo Sánchez León
Centro de Humanidades (CHAM)
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Lisbon, Portugal
Translated from
Spanish by Igor Knezevic
ISBN 978-3-030-52595-8 ISBN 978-3-030-52596-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5
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To “los López” and the people of the AEF from the students strike of ’87
and thereafter, where all this started
For León, in transit from adolescent plebe to young people
P
reface
The writing of this book was not the outcome of a long-premeditated plan
but rather the result of a fortunate discovery. In the summer of 2016 I
happened to re-read several conference papers I had written over the pre-
vious seven years for international meetings on a variety of themes. Reading
them again it occurred to me that a common thread run through them
despite focusing on different topics and beyond the fact that they all dealt
with the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.
Once this became clear to me, I was able to sketch the outline of a book
that was originally projected as a series of independent albeit chronologi-
cally overlapping chapters. I presumed that by filling several lacunae they
could provide a general picture of the conceptions of political exclusion
and popular participation over a century of Spanish history. I was wrong,
as it became much harder to construct an overall hypothesis, and eventu-
ally I acknowledged the need of further reflection and research if the goal
was to offer a single interpretive scheme. This has left its imprint on the
structure of the book. Most of the chapters are either profoundly trans-
formed versions of earlier papers or combinations of two different papers
with significant alterations and additions. Only Chap. 5 is entirely new,
designed to give cohesion to the overall argument, though it also bene-
fited from an introductory study for another publication. The introduc-
tion and conclusion were written for this book.
The process of partial rewriting, revision, and re-assembling of the
chapters obviously extended beyond my original previsions. But the
project also ran into an unexpected roadblock. When I had sketched a
provisional table of contents and could submit an outline of the
vii
viii PREFACE
introduction and a more or less final version of one of the chapters, I sent
the project to a Spanish publisher. This took place in a context of great
political expectations that I was also partaking of, and which seemingly
imbued a part of the publishing sector with an ideological bias. The fact is
that, after a long wait, the project was rejected with scarcely any justifica-
tion or an opportunity to send an alternative proposal. It is only much
later that I understood the severity of the blow, as I used to have an inti-
mate bond of solidarity with the publisher. Despite half of the book being
ready, this setback led me to postpone the project indefinitely: there were
other issues consuming my attention, and my invariably precarious job
situation made it difficult to leave time for finishing a work that seemed
not to be fulfilling its destiny.
The landscape changed dramatically when in early 2019 I started work
at the Centro de Humanidades (CHAM) of Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
For the first time in my career I enjoyed a degree of job stability and envi-
able working conditions, and was able to benefit from a policy of support
for international publications—something I had not profited from before.
Moreover, as an émigré I could shed the label of being a “Spanish histo-
rian” (one that I have never been much fond of) and take on the role of a
“hispanist”—which my colleague and friend Sebastiaan Faber used to
tease me about—that is to say, someone who offers to the global commu-
nity the results of his research on the history of Spain. Consequently, I
decided to re-configure the project in English and to send it to a few
international publishers along with the same sample chapter. In contrast to
my experience with the Spanish publisher, the proposal was received with
interest by Palgrave, and the editor Molly Beck quickly solicited two eval-
uations from colleagues, to whom I am indebted to for their insightful
comments on improving the proposal, resulting in a more coherent and
comprehensive publication. Also thanks to Pedro Cardim from CHAM. I
contacted Igor Knezevic, who has dedicatedly translated my baroque
Spanish into English. Maeve Sinnot and Lakshmi Radhakrishnan have
since continued with the work of aligning the book with the publisher’s
standards.
Lisbon, Portugal Pablo Sánchez León
a
cknowledgements
The author of a book that is the product of research and writing extending
over several years incurs too many debts to be recalled or properly
acknowledged.
Some however are impossible to forget or omit. I would like to express
my deepest appreciation to the small but industrious research group that I
was a member of between 2010 and 2018 at the University of the Basque
Country. Directed by Javier Fernández Sebastián, its core was initially
composed of Luis Fernández Torres and Cecilia Suárez Cabal, and later
reinforced with the addition of Nere Basabe, Kirill Postoutenko, Marcos
Reguera, and David Beorlegui, all of whom have contributed to accom-
plishing the various projects of the group that in turn resulted in the ear-
lier versions of the chapters of this book. Other members of the Grupo de
Historia Intelectual de la Política Moderna—Javier Tajadura, Gonzalo
Capellán de Miguel, Iñaki Iriarte, Pedro Chacón, and Carmelo Moreno—
also participated in its seminars together with colleagues from the Leioa
campus such as Noé Cornago. A second set of acknowledgements is for
the active members of the History of Concepts Group, an international
network organizing annual conferences, where I have presented most of
the original texts of the chapters. I wish to mention Jan Ifversen, Helge
Jordheim, Margrit Pernau, Michael Freeden, Jani Marjanen, Willibald
Steinmetz, Martin Burke, Gabriel Entin, and Sinai Rusinek among other
European, American, and Asian colleagues. I would like to extend my
gratitude to the members of Iberconceptos, an interrelated network I have
been involved in since 2013, as a member and coordinator of a team of
researchers on the “mixed constitution.” I enjoyed especially fruitful
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
collaborations and exchanges with Fabio Wasserman, Gabriel Entin,
Clement Thibaud, Noemí Goldman, José Javier Blanco Rivero, Francisco
Ortega, Georges Lomné, and Elias Palti.
Still at the level of institutional acknowledgements, a special mention
must be made of the rather chaotic but deeply rigorous group Hicoes
(Historia constitucional de España) that I was invited to participate in
from 2016—a challenging proposal that proved to be extremely enrich-
ing, especially thanks to exchanges with Marta Lorente, Txema Portillo,
and Carlos Garriga. I am extremely grateful to François Godicheau, my
colleague and long-standing friend, who now from his base in Toulouse
remains an indefatigable intellectual companion, and to Rubén Pérez
Trujillano for inviting me to give a talk on issues related to several chapters
of the book.
There are several others with whom I have been sharing and debating
my ideas on representation and participation in theory and history. Germán
Labrador from Princeton University stands out as a frequent and invaluable
interlocutor on the relations between cultural and political identities—and
we also jointly contributed to the publishing of a chronicler analysed in
Chap. 5. Miguel Ángel Cabrera from Universidad de La Laguna invited me
to a seminar when the book was in its final stages, subsequently reviving a
conversation begun some time ago on the relations between discourse and
action in accounting for modern citizenship. I had another opportunity to
present the manuscript in Buenos Aires, in a seminar hosted by Noemí
Goldman at the Instituto Ravignani, and another one organized by the
group Política, Institucions i Corrupció a l’època contemporània (PICEC)
at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Finally, several colleagues have
read the manuscript in its entirety, providing me with insightful comments:
Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, Joanna Innes, Guy Thomson, María Sierra,
and Txema Portillo.
This book project was shaped in a political context that I cannot fail to
acknowledge, as a co-founder of the small group of professors of Political
Science and Sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid that
was a precursor of the Unidas Podemos party—“La Promotora” was its
original name, to which was later added the rather pedantic tag “de pensa-
miento crítico” (“the promoter … of critical thought”). Despite the par-
ty’s later achievements, I wish that this emerging generation of leaders had
committed themselves to thinking historically about the conditions of
their own irruption into the political scene, marked as it was by their reli-
ance on a corrupted academic space that they have endorsed rather than
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi
critically transformed. In compensation, I have closely witnessed the way
representation and participation relate to each other in a most original
social movement born out of Spanish democracy—the so-called memori-
alist movement, committed to the identification and exhumation of mass
graves of those killed following the 1936 fascist coup d’état. My status as
a participating observer in this movement owes much to regular commu-
nication with Emilio Silva, Manuela Bergerot, Marina Montoto, and other
activists. Another connection I wish to acknowledge is with Iñaki Bárcena
and Izaro Gorostidi from the project Parte Hartuz (Participate) at the
University of the Basque Country, who led me to captivating and always
instructive conversations on current political events. Bridging these two
groups is Ariel Jerez, who for over twenty-five years now has been sharing
his ceaseless ponderings on the question of how to integrate participation
in the political cultures from the Left in dialogue with the issue of repre-
sentation in parties, organizations, and institutions.
Leopoldo Moscoso always offers invaluable criticism of my reflections
and writings, and we have been debating on politics and knowledge for
years now. Never-ending conversations with Dardo Scavino, Celicia
González, and Gloria Vergès during my visits to Aránzazu Sarría Buil in
Bordeaux were another singular contribution to my learning process. I am
also much indebted to Manuel Pérez Ledesma, thanks to whom I became
interested in the historical approach to citizenship as a means of overcom-
ing the shortcomings of classic social history and to whose innovative and
dissident stances I still owe a lot. My sincere thanks also to my first mentor
Reyna Pastor: after all, I think with this book I have merely expanded
upon her original Resistencias y luchas campesinas, but on a different his-
torical context.
A long time ago, Julio Pardos, probably the best interpreter of Spanish
historiography I have ever met, pointed out to me that historians never
abandon the topic that initially captured our imagination. In this case, my
first essay for the master’s programme supervised in 1988 by Pablo
Fernández Albaladejo, and elaborated together with Leopoldo Moscoso,
was on representative institutions in England and the Crown of Aragón
between the Middle Ages and the early modern period; and the first paper
I presented at a conference in the same year dealt with “political integra-
tion in the program of Enlightened reforms, and its limits,” where the
term “integration” tried to rather unconsciously and inaccurately embrace
the spheres of representation and participation. Finally, for several years at
the end of the 1990s, I coordinated together with Leopoldo and Jesús
