The Qualification of Collective Absolutes and the Individuality of Persons and Events in Mid-nineteenth-century Spain

The purpose of this article is to consider several Spanish thinkers and cultural figures of the 1850s who favoured in political thought an emphasis on the individuality of persons, and sometimes of events. 1 It will look at the relationship between such individuality and discussions of alienation, history, and modernity. Finally, the article will link the consideration of political thinkers to two cultural figures (Eugenio Lucas and Manuel Fernández y González). (Nothing said here is meant to deny the presence of anti-individualist intellectuals. See Lacasta Zabalza 1984:8.) The period concerned saw the rise of the Democratic Party, founded in 1849 to challenge the two dominant Liberal Parties, the right-leaning moderados, and the left-leaning progresistas, both of whom had ruled through systems of restricted suffrage. The latter arrangement has been termed oligarchic Liberalism. It has sometimes been suggested that the emphasis on individuality shared across the three political groups indicates the bourgeois origins common to them all. A well-established historical view (not just amongst Marxists, but also many of their opponents) has it that the nineteenth-century revolutions saw the rise and hegemony of a newly dominant class, the bourgeoisie, committed to individual property as the basis of the economic and political order. It is implicit in numerous (not all) existing accounts of Democratic Party thinkers, especially Pi i Margall, that their ideology (which includes a commitment to individualism and to property and rationalism) represents an inability in their dispute with the established Liberal Parties and attack on the bourgeoisie to transcend the limitations of a bourgeois outlook common to all.