Gerard Rosich - The Contested History of Autonomy

The Contested History of Autonomy

Europes Legacy in the Modern World

Series Editors: Martti Koskenniemi and Bo Strth (University of Helsinki, Finland)

The 19th century is often described as Europes century. This series aims to explore the truth of this claim. It views Europe as a global actor and offers insights into its role in ordering the world, creating community and providing welfare in the 19th century and beyond. Volumes in the series investigate tensions between the national and the global, welfare and warfare, property and poverty. They look at how notions like democracy, populism and totalitarianism came to be intertwined and how this legacy persists in the present day world.

The series emphasizes the entanglements between the legal, the political and the economic and employs techniques and methodologies from the history of legal, political and economic thought, the history of events and structural history. The result is a collection of works that shed new light on the role that Europes intellectual history has played in the development of the modern world.

Published:

European Modernity: A Global Approach, Bo Strth and Peter Wagner

Europes Utopias of Peace, Bo Strth

Historical Teleologies in the Modern World, Henning Trper, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires, Adrian Brisku

Forthcoming:

Caesarism in the Post-Revolutionary Age: Crisis, Populace and Leadership, Markus J. Prutsch

Social Difference in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: An Intellectual History, Francisco A. Ortega

Contents

I have incurred numerous theoretical debts while writing this book and, in this sense, I expect it is rich in ideas and unveils new questions and approaches. Wherever possible, I have recognized the many debts throughout the book by quoting or referring to the names of these people and their works.

Personally, I should particularly thank Peter Wagner for his support. This book would not have been possible without him, and not only because his approach to the concept of modernity has been key to my inquiry. Taking into account the current workings of academic institutions, it is a miracle that I had the opportunity to work with him. It can only be explained by his generosity and independence.

I would also like to thank Fina Biruls for her substantial reading of the chapters of the book as I was writing them. Her comments and always incisive suggestions have helped to solve impasses or doubts that were emerging. Daniel Gamper, scar Jan, Andreas Kalyvas and Bo Strth also read the entire manuscript and made valuable contributions from their fields of knowledge, most of which have been incorporated into the text. I am deeply grateful to them. I must also thank two anonymous reviewers for comments that helped to improve the manuscript.

This work is part of a larger collective endeavour. Parts of the book were discussed in the seminars of the Trajectories of Modernity (Tramod) research group at the University of Barcelona (http://www.ub.edu/tramod/members/). I thank all its members for their comments and contributions.

This book was originally written in English by a non-native speaker. In this sense, I am particularly grateful to Samuel Sadian, a sociologist colleague of mine in the Tramod research group. He has revised and copy-edited the whole manuscript. Thanks to the fact that he has done much more than was expected of him, I have also been able to benefit from his theoretical help by him pointing out paragraphs of the book that could be improved and arguments that seemed contradictory.

I cannot sufficiently thank the series editors, Bo Strth and Martti Koskenniemi, for their support and guidance throughout the process. Their understanding and encouragement have helped me to face the challenge of writing a book for a global audience.

Special mention must go to . Lorena Fuster Peir. The debt I have incurred with her can hardly be paid back. Numerous thoughts or ideas of this book have emerged from a daily dialogue over the last thirteen years. In particular, without her critical conceptualization of theories of recognition I would have had difficulty perceiving all the perverse dynamics that are generated in the dialectic between domination and emancipation. In addition, her work on the concept of imagination has allowed me to understand that it is the fundamental capacity that human beings possess that guides their actions and thoughts in the world they have themselves created. This has helped me get rid of all theoretical approaches that do not take into account prima facie what human beings do and say. I must also thank her for her comments on what could be improved, was incorrect or obscure.

To all these people, the merit of the work, if any, is due. For any limitations, mistakes and imprecisions it may contain, I am, of course, entirely responsible. Being stubborn and expeditious are suitable behaviours to bring a project to fruition. I hope they have also been so for writing a book.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/20072013)/ERC grant agreement n 249438 TRAMOD.

This book will try to challenge two of the most persistent assumptions about the birth of political modernity. First, that notions of autonomy appeared at the end of the eighteenth century during the so-called Age of Revolutions and the Enlightenment; and second, that the breakthrough to modernity in Europe was a consequence of social features unique to the region. Accordingly, so the argument goes, political modernity spread in time and space across the rest of the globe thanks to the normative and functional superiority of its principles. Progress thus meant the increase in intensity and reach of the commitment to autonomy. This is the core argument of modernization theories. Following this narrative, globalization would be the stage in the history of modernity where this commitment is generally shared across the globe.