| Summary: | Lustrates 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) 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 il.
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