El rostro de la comunidad: la identidad del campesino en la Castilla del Antiguo Regimen

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2005 by Aurelio Espinosa

El rostro de la comunidad: la identidad del campesino en la Castilla del Antiguo Regimen. By Jesus Izquierdo Martin (Madrid: Consejo Economico y Social--Comunidad de Madrid, 2001. 795 pp.).

Izquierdo Martin 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 neoclassical arguments about the role of the individual as a historical agent and especially about the farmer in traditional agrarian Castilian society.

Izquierdo Martin 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 Martin 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.

Izquierdo Martin'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.

Drawing from municipal archives, especially the town of El Escorial, the cities of Segovia and Madrid, and the national archive, Simancas, Izquierdo Martin divides his analysis into seven parts. The first section is his critique, his methodology and approach to the problem of the Castilian farmer and his relationship to the collectivity. He covers a range of theories, from neo-liberalism and its commitment to free markets and individual liberties to utilitarian arguments that emphasize social consequences of cooperation and collective activity. Arguing against utilitarian theories, Izquierdo Martin places social conflict more along the lines of morality and justice and not on self-interest. In his analysis of economic, anthropological, and sociological traditions, he rejects theoretical essentialism and instead posits the formulation of identity based on historical developments, namely the early modern transformation of feudal hierarchies into decentralized urban lordships. He shows how the fragmentation and intensification of territorial communities continued to cement horizontal values of communal identity. The Spanish absolutist monarchy formalized this process of communal identification, benefiting from the sale of liberty proceeds and providing an appellate court system for the territorially aggressive communities of Castile.

Using local archival evidence of the town of El Escorial, Izquierdo Martin presents preliminary information: from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, El Escorial suffered from an acute demographic crisis, as its population after the 1591 epidemic did not recover in numbers until the year 1848. During this time, almost all of the land was communal (about 71.6%). Citizens with tax exemptions declined too, from 5.8% of the population in the 17th to 3.2% in the 18th. In the light of environmental difficulties, the community configured the field of activity on the basis of altruism and vested interests; citizens participated in the civic sphere of recognition, with its social market of values that were interchanged. The currencies were reciprocity, prestige, confidence, and solidarity. The collectivity thus created the distinct agencies in which members of the town expressed their pertinence to the collectivity. Identity was accomplished solely through the currencies that the community recognized, providing them with the face of individuality. The community was therefore the hegemonic provider of identity, the "guardian of a symbolic grammar" of interpretive outlets and alternatives, by which members of the collectivity recognized others and communicated on the basis of a shared communal discourse. The subject was not the judge of his own interests, but rather identified himself with the communal platform and the monopoly of collective certitude. Conflicts arose when members of farming communities struggled for recognition, which is the social ordering principle guiding members as political actors and that sometimes effected social change.