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

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.

In section two, the author describes the fragmentation of a large city state, Segovia, into a landscape of independent and autonomous entities. His evidence is legal documents about municipalities subject to the lordship of the city of Segovia, one of the eighteen cities of Castile with privileges of self-taxation and representation in parliament, the Cortes. Seeking to purchase the commodity of autonomy, villages subject to Segovia achieved inter-communal recognition. As villages become towns with privileges of self-rule, they gained the legal status of communal liberty. The monarchy facilitated this process of communal identity, and especially in its intervention in the legal disputes between the territorial incursions initiated by autonomous towns against towns and villages that disputed such claims.

In section three, Izquierdo Martin documents communal development and counters utilitarian notions and classical economic theory that township status was an agenda of individuals with motives to acquire personal property. He argues that economic behavior was not dictated by a self-interested calculus, but rather that the collectivity was the proprietor of the legal initiative. He presents evidence to show how small communities attained legal privileges in order to provide their members with benefits that the community controlled and distributed, a process that facilitated internal communal integrity. The end result for the crown was the augmentation of royal revenues and the juridical empowerment of the absolutist state. Drawing on evidence about the legal battles and conflicts between territorial municipalities, he shows how villages "dis-identified" themselves from their principal town. Segovia, for example, lost 65.3% of its jurisdictions in the 17th century. In the 16th and 17th centuries a vast majority of villages became autonomous and distinct from their previous jurisdictions (95% of the growth of towns occurred during the 17th century).

Section four is about how the collectivity established subjective identity for its members. The absolutist platform of the sale of liberty, as more and more towns bought their autonomy, accelerated communal identity for its citizens on the basis of economic activity. As public land increased (the percentage for El Escorial was 403%), the collectivity divided the commons into smaller portions in order to generate additional revenues. The author counters arguments about the inefficiency of communal agrarian hegemony, by pointing out dynamic economic life in autonomous municipalities by which municipal councils transformed the commons into corporate assets. Municipal councils individualized assets for the benefit of entrepreneurial citizens, and they established just and equitable policies for their procedures of selling municipal assets to individuals. These mechanisms resulted in the intensification of local identity. Towns acquired a better sense of collective memory, which was used by the council to evaluate more precisely properties, value and use, and their history of exploitation. Citizens too acquired a more profound sense of their person, as they were not subjects with passive rights, but subjects with personal obligations to the collectivity, and this inter-relationship on the basis of communal duties authorized individuality. These obligations and opportunities constituted citizenship.

In section five, the author constructs the paradigm of the collectivity as a social market that prescribed individual choice. Individuals were rational agents, but the principle of reciprocity constrained them as citizens. All of the civic institutions yielded a sphere of recognition that was formed by the collectivity. Shared values were contained in a collective language of inter-communal understanding. Civic and social structures, from families, open town council sessions to business transactions, facilitated symmetrical identification; citizens understood reciprocal responsibilities and opportunities. For evidence, the author looked at real estate transactions, real estate prices, and the market of loans and debts, and compared demographic figures with the distribution of real estate. His findings are that in the 18th century 37.9% of the population of El Escorial possessed 70.8% of wealth, in particular revenue producing wealth, and 31% of the citizens generated only 1% of its revenue (El Escorial had 203 citizens). Real estate wealth was another matter as 73.9% of the population had none, and 41.6% of the real estate was in the hands of 6.9% of the citizenry. He notes, however, that 14% of the community's revenue came from religious institutions, but he adds that 60% of the farmers of El Escorial owned land. Investigating 693 law suits documented in El Escorial, between 1581 and 1800, the author discovers that 83.4% of the cases are related in some way to debts, many of them dealing with the use of private property. During the decades between 1570 to 1590, 60% of the citizenry of El Escorial was indebted, and out the total population, which also included people with debts, 40% were lenders. By analyzing transactions, rents and leases, which were drawn from municipal archives, Izquierdo Martin offers a typology of loans: loans without interest, loans with annuities, and loans in kind and on a percentage of the produce of the land being rented out. All of these regularized interaction.

Izquierdo Martin considers the individual statistically at the level of the territorial collectivity, and in this case the percentages point to a high degree of transactions, especially loans. He focuses on certain years to show a high level of indebtedness and negotiations. The diffusion of this system of loans and mortgages, down payments, and securities, maintained traditional society as a web of economic relationships, intensifying communal identity and cementing economic ties and social connections. The community presented individuals with certain types of choices in the matter of loans and debts and therefore made its constituents accountable to the collectivity.

In section six, the author probes the paradox of the inherent inequality of Castilian communal society. He argues that, although a minority of citizens acquired much more than the majority, the principles of reciprocity and mutuality sustained a strong homogeneous communal identity. In effect, the oligarchy symbolized the collectivity; local hierarchies, rural municipal councils for instance, intervened in daily life with their distributive institutions. Local governments intervened with price controls which minimized costs for the benefit of the farmers. Price controls then supported the community, especially individuals and their families, who had a vested interest in their government because it sustained them during famines and price fluctuations and by means of a communal reserve of grain for bread production.

On an individual level, magistrates assumed responsibilities and administrative tasks. Service to the community established an individual's reputation. More than advancing individual benefits, the cooperative communal system stabilized itself by promoting competition for recognition. His evidence consists of audits of the appellate judges (twenty-six residencias between 1597 to 1776) and civil law suits (the author looked at 693, most of them concerned with debts) that magistrates expedited for the benefit of the community. The local legal system worked sufficiently well and was accountable to procedures and regulations that highlighted reputable competency and performance.

In section seven, Izquierdo Martin addresses oligarchic power and the cooperative role of public officers. He argues that individuals with political power sought recognition or reputation, and they represented themselves within the matrix of communal advancement, not self-interest. The author uses an example of the crown's involvement in hunting rights in order to show the principle of communal cooperation. The monarchy purchased hunting grounds from private hands, and the king would in turn sell autonomy to subject villages which would pay for their autonomy in the form of fire prevention and protection of the hunting grounds. Although illegal hunting was widespread and tolerated by local magistrates and royal officials, hunting was a collective semantic that underscored the values of the community. Collective action such as hunting was a semantic bridge in which an individual, whether aristocrat or farmer, understood and interpreted his personal experience.

In this last section, the author also investigates the phenomena of democratic town council meetings, sessions open to all citizens of the municipality. Such sessions addressed matters pertinent to all citizens (e.g., the appointment of public physicians, the control and supervision of the town market, hunting grounds, grain reserves, fairs, schools and teachers, and tax privileges). In such towns, citizens became more than just members of the collectivity, for many participated in public office. Offices, for example, were distributed to 416 citizens during a period of 230 years, and each of these citizens averaged 3.1 offices. The author characterized the majority of these people as above the rest of the community in terms of incomes, as they made more than 72% of El Escorial's citizenry. This embodies an effective oligarchy, but the oligarchy did not represent a class interest per se, but rather reproduced the notion of the body politic. The oligarchy was not about the stratification of groups, but that oligarchy created a fiction of a collective community.

Izquierdo Martin concludes that the collectivity was sovereign, an ontological logos. Hovering over the community was the role of the individual, the "rostro" of the community, or the farmer's identity within the collectivity. Strategies of communal integration consisted of the principle of individual reciprocity, and the individual came accessorized with communal categories. Farmers had a range of privileges and rights from the community which set limits on what an individual could and could not do. This municipal control of political and economic life ensured that competition among diverse economic concerns generated further communal coordination. Differences too congealed into a social contract in which privileges and economic inequalities were communal goods.

This study of a handful of municipalities in Old Castile is encyclopedic, an extensive analysis of sociological, anthropological, and economic theories, a detailed description of communal prerogatives with respect to its citizenry, and a masterful use of archival evidence. The argument that self-identity was a function of one's relations with others is well supported. The author provides many charts and statistics to show how local participation was the crux of Castilian agrarian society. In such societies philanthropy was not unilateral. Modern social change in Spain was an impossibility for the longest time because the territorial community empowered only itself and maintained its orthodoxy until the second half of the twentieth century. Izquierdo Martin finishes his lengthy analysis by suggesting that Spain, in particular Castile, is just waking up from its very long siesta of communal existence.

Aurelio Espinosa

Arizona State University