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REVIEWS
| El rostro de la comunidad: la identidad del campesino en la Castilla del Antiguo Régimen. By Jesús Izquierdo Martín (Madrid: Consejo Económico y Social—Comunidad de Madrid, 2001. 795 pp.).
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| Izquierdo Martín investigates a range of political theories dealing with the individual, equality, and rational choice, and covers political and sociological traditions beginning in the late middle ages to the liberalism of the nineteenth century. He examines the development of the social sciences, such as the work of Durkheim, anthropological approaches, and economic models that inscribe individual self-interest to the subject. His theoretical goal is to historicize neo-classical arguments about the role of the individual as a historical agent and especially about the farmer in traditional agrarian Castilian society. |
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Izquierdo Martín is also concerned about Spanish economic history, Castilian backwardness and its unresponsiveness to modern developments, such as economic liberalism and free market values. His thesis is that individualism and competitiveness were not ingrained social values and that traditional Castilian agrarian society did not begin to catch up with the modern world until the mid 1970s (after the death of Franco). In his extensive analysis of theory, secondary literature, and empirical data, the author shows how pre-modern Castilian communities individuated persons and that identity was based on clear social roles and communal responsibilities which barred autonomous self-realization and concomitant philosophies of individualized pursuits. Addressing modern theories about individual agency, Izquierdo Martín describes the ways in which pre-modern society, especially the territorial community, circumscribed what the individual believed and valued. The individual was not autonomous and did not establish a voluntary association with the community that the individual can then revoke. |
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Izquierdo Martín's point of departure is a succinct exploration of key conceptual elements of pre-modern life, which were community, corporation and the members (as opposed to modern existence, which are constituted by society, association and the individual). In pre-modern Castile, the community dictated the criteria of inclusion and exclusion, and subjectivity arose in the person as an equal among the citizenry. By means of such a model he analyzes the historical and dialectical process by which individuals, in particular citizens of small farming towns, become actors and acquired agency by means of accepted social mechanisms. He argues that collective participation and cooperation facilitated subjectivity. Self-realization or identity were possible because of a complex and multi-faceted social market that provided individuals with a range of rights, benefits, and privileges. Subjects of the community contributed to their system of social goods that, in turn, reproduced for contributing members economic and political gains. Reciprocity was the key factor in these pre-modern agrarian societies that required participation and cooperation for their survival. The community invented or instituted the necessary measures and procedures by which its members expressed their pertinence to a collective identity, establishing the condition of individual agency or action by offering a range of norms and motivations. The community was a collective semantic everyone understood. |
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