Since the explosion of the indignados movement beginning in 2011, there has been a renewed interest in the concept of the “public sphere” in a Spanish context: how it relates to society and to political power, and how it has evolved over the centuries. The Configuration of the Spanish Public Sphere brings together contributions from leading scholars in Hispanic studies, across a wide range of disciplines, to investigate various aspects of these processes, offering a long-term, panoramic view that touches on one of the most urgent issues for contemporary European societies.
Today it is assumed that we understand contemporary nationalism and nation-building. Researchers rarely consider the very different traditions from which such state-building emerged. Instead, there is almost too much discussion of the "global village," with its supposed uniformity and inevitable trajectories. We need to view modernity as something other than a single condition with a preordained future. New visions of a modern civilization are emerging throughout the world, calliing for a far-reaching appraisal of the older visions of modernization. Following Eisenstadt's and Schluchter's introduction, Bjorn Wittrock explores the varieties and transitions of early modern societies, noting that only by looking at societies' collective identities and their modes of mediating in the public sphere can the distinguishing factors between modernity be appreciated. Sheldon Pollock discusses the use of vernacular language in India through its literary culture and polity, 1000-1500. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, sums up major developments in the recent historiography of South Asia from 1400 to 1750. David L. Howell focuses on the boundaries of the early modern Japanese state, including its political boundaries and the boundaries of collective identity and social status. Mary Elizabeth Berry examines public life in authoritarian Japan. Frederic Wakeman, Jr. probes the boundaries of the political game and how they were affected by the increased political centralization that developed after the disorder of the Ming-Qing transition during the seventeenth century. Alexander Woodside discusses territorial order and collective-identity tensions in Confucian Asia. Bernhard Giesen argues that the French Enlightenment can be described as an extension of absolutist court culture. Finally essay, Victor Perez-Diaz examines the state and public sphere in Spain during the Ancient Regime contrasting two ideal types of states--a "nomocratic" model and a "teleocratic" model. This volume addresses cultural and political practices not only from outside the European and American spheres but also over long periods of time in which the internal dynamics of other civilizations become visible. Its broad-ranging use of empirical materials enables us to think comparatively and historically about the ways in which different modernities took shape.
An original theory and meticulous analysis of how advocates of political secularization emerged historically and why they succeeded in some contexts but not others. Why do some countries adopt secular institutions while others do not? In The Origins of Secular Institutions, Zeynep Bulutgil develops a theory that combines ideational and organizational mechanisms to explain how institutional secularization occurs. She first focuses on why political groups with a secularizing agenda emerge. Her argument is that the circulation of Enlightenment literature among the elite and associations through which the elite could exchange ideas were the main factors that influenced the early emergence of secularizing political movements. She then turns to the conditions under which these movements succeed. Secularizing political groups are at a comparative disadvantage when it comes to recruiting grassroots support because, unlike religious actors, they cannot rely on a pre-existing institutional structure. They become likely to overcome this obstacle if they have time to build a robust organization before religious political movements emerge. Bulutgil supports these arguments by combining statistical analysis of original historical data with comparative analysis of countries in Europe (France, Spain, The United Kingdom) and the Middle East/North Africa (Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia). An authoritative explanation of why political secularization occurred in some countries but not others, this book will reshape our understanding of an issue of unsurpassed importance for over two centuries: the effects of modernity on politics.
This volume takes up current debates in comparative and historical sociology that deal with multiple modernities and civilizations. It does so through an examination of patterns of state formation, civilization and the development of capitalism in the interaction of European and American worlds over three centuries. The early part of the argument explores cutting-edge theoretical debates around the nature of early modern formations.
This major work retraces the emergence and development of the Bourgeois public sphere - that is, a sphere which was distinct from the state and in which citizens could discuss issues of general interest. In analysing the historical transformations of this sphere, Habermas recovers a concept which is of crucial significance for current debates in social and political theory. Habermas focuses on the liberal notion of the bourgeois public sphere as it emerged in Europe in the early modern period. He examines both the writings of political theorists, including Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville, and the specific institutions and social forms in which the public sphere was realized. This brilliant and influential work has been widely recognized for many years as a classic of contemporary social and political thought, of interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.
(Dis)connected Empires takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue, to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answer, Biedermann explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. (Dis)connected Empires argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire-building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, cartography, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It examines a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest.
This is a book about the links between politics and literacy, and about how radical ideas spread in a world without printing presses. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Spanish colonial governments tried to keep revolution out of their provinces. But, as Cristina Soriano shows, hand-copied samizdat materials from the Caribbean flooded the cities and ports of Venezuela, hundreds of foreigners shared news of the French and Haitian revolutions with locals, and Venezuelans of diverse social backgrounds met to read hard-to-come-by texts and to discuss the ideas they expounded. These networks efficiently spread antimonarchical propaganda and abolitionist and egalitarian ideas, allowing Venezuelans to participate in an incipient yet vibrant public sphere and to contemplate new political scenarios. This book offers an in-depth analysis of one of the crucial processes that allowed Venezuela to become one of the first regions in Spanish America to declare independence from Iberia and turn into an influential force for South American independence.
Eighteenth-century Spain drew on the Enlightenment to reconfigure its role in the European balance of power. As its force and its weight declined, Spanish thinkers discouraged war and zealotry and pursued peace and cooperation to reconfigure the international Spanish Empire.
This book explores the trials of Spanish democracy, focusing on the generation that came of age in the 1960s, assumed political power, and formed the first Socialist government in 1982. Starting in 1993, however, this popular government came under siege when scandals shook the country's confidence in its legal and political institutions.
This book is about the sociologists' analyses of the newness of our time. It discusses five conceptual perspectives: (1) Multiple modernities; (2) Globalization; (3) Multiculturalism; (4) The declining accountability of the State; (5) Postmodernity. The divergent propositions which surface give this discourse its basic coherence.
