@article{958867,
      recid = {958867},
      author = {Sánchez León, Pablo,},
      title = {Popular political participation and the democratic  imagination in Spain : from crowd to oeople, 1766-1868 /},
      pages = {1 online resource (xiv, 363 pages)},
      abstract = {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. 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 Pablo Sanchez Leon 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 Economica, 2015).},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/958867},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5},
}