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2022/2023

History of Modern Political Thought and Political Cultures

Code: 100366 ECTS Credits: 6
Degree Type Year Semester
2500501 History OT 4 1

Contact

Name:
Lluis Ferran Toledano Gonzalez
Email:
lluisferran.toledano@uab.cat

Use of Languages

Principal working language:
catalan (cat)
Some groups entirely in English:
No
Some groups entirely in Catalan:
Yes
Some groups entirely in Spanish:
No

Prerequisites

For now, no prerequisite. However, for a better formative coherence, we recommend doing the subjects Culture and Mentalities in the Modern Era; Political cultures and social conflicts in contemporary Catalonia; and History of social movements in the contemporary era.

Objectives and Contextualisation

The main objective of the subject is to provide the instruments and analytical resources that allow to approach the world of the ideas, concepts and values manifested by contemporary political cultures. We will treat both the most renowned authors and all those who escape from the official canon and come from the popular sectors. In this exploration we will also attend the creation and transformation of the spaces of opinion production (the living room, the tavern, the coffee, the press, the parliament, the public square ...). The chronological framework contemplates from the fall of the old regime in the late eighteenth century to the global crisis of the late twentieth century. A universe, then, plural and diverse, permeable to European and American influences, but also to those of the Arab and Muslim world.

Competences

  • Applying the main methods, techniques and instruments of the historical analysis.
  • Developing critical thinking and reasoning and communicating them effectively both in your own and other languages.
  • Identifying the main historiographical tendencies and critically analysing their development.
  • Respecting the diversity and plurality of ideas, people and situations.
  • Students must be capable of collecting and interpreting relevant data (usually within their area of study) in order to make statements that reflect social, scientific or ethical relevant issues.
  • Students must be capable of communicating information, ideas, problems and solutions to both specialised and non-specialised audiences.
  • Students must develop the necessary learning skills in order to undertake further training with a high degree of autonomy.

Learning Outcomes

  1. Analysing the main social and political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.
  2. Communicating in your mother tongue or other language both in oral and written form by using specific terminology and techniques of Historiography.
  3. Engaging in debates about historical facts respecting the other participants' opinions.
  4. Identifying the main and secondary ideas and expressing them with linguistic correctness.
  5. Organising and planning the search of historical information.
  6. Properly using the specific vocabulary of History.
  7. Reading and interpreting the historical documents produced in the contemporary era.
  8. Recognising diversity and multiculturalism.
  9. Solving problems autonomously.
  10. Submitting works in accordance with both individual and small group demands and personal styles.
  11. Using the characteristic computing resources of the field of History.

Content

General objectives: Introduction to the study of the languages and arguments of the main currents of contemporary political and social thought. The problematic of the configuration of the great political cultures in the society of the XIX and XX centuries and of the present time. Special attention to the reception and circulation in Spain and Catalonia of the authors and the most decisive formulations of European and American thought. Critical contributions from Spanish authors and social movements. It also includes a gender perspective on issues such as the role of women in the romantic and revolutionary culture, and the new bourgeois values (Angel del Hogar), the first suffrage feminism and the contributions of women like Alexandra Kollontai and Simone de Beauvoir.
 
 
Temary:
 
Presentation: 1.1. The political thought in historiography. 1.2. Beyond texts and canonical authors: the production, communication and socialization of ideas, intellectuals, the printed. 1.3. The history of concepts, of languages and discourses. 1.4. Laboratory of concepts: political culture, communication and political identity, metaphors and political values. 1.5. The stages: the parish, the cafe and the tavern, the school and the army, the press, the athenaeum and the transformation of the public space, the meeting and the mass media.
2. The tree of freedom: political and economic liberalism. The illustrated legacies (Corsica, United States, Scotland, England and France). Doctrinarism and utilitarianism. Romanticism (liberal and reactionary). From Locke to Benhtam, through Smith and Constant. Henry D. Thoureau. A global perspective on the Constitution of Cádiz. The revolution of coffee and the press.
3. The combat of tradition: the ideological bases of the counterrevolution (France and Spain), and conservatism (England and Spain); the religious revival in European bourgeois society and theorigins of Spanish national-Catholicism. From Barruel to Dou, passing through Burke, Balmes, Donoso and Menéndez Pelayo. The political culture of Carlism.
4. The slow advance of democracy: European Jacobinism; Democrats, Utopians and Republicanism in Spain. Freethinking From Rousseau in Paine, passing through Robespierre, Romero Alpuente, Castelar and Pi and Margall. The political culture of the federals.
5. Nationalism as an ideology: the existing theoretical models, the cultural and political construction of nations. From Fichte to Mill, passing through Michelet, Renan, Cánovas, the Spanish kraussisme, Prat de la Riba and Rovira i Virgili. Federalism and cantonalism. The political culture of Catalanism.
6. Criticism against the capitalist system: socialism, anarchism and communism. The Paris Commune, Social Democracy and Leninism. From Marx and Engels to Proudhon and Bakunin, going through Pablo Iglesias, Berstein and Lenin. Culture and sociability in Spanish anarchism.
7. The crisis of reason and the challenge of mass society: anti-parliamentarism, the modernization of the French right, the theory of the elites, fascism and the authoritarian update. From Maurras to Pareto, going through Ortega and Schmitt. The reactionary modernism as a cultural project to overcome the old liberalism.
8. The era of catastrophe: Nazism and Auschwizt; the political culture of Stalinism.
9. The ideological bases of post-war liberal democracies, and the various responses. From Hayek Bobbio, passing through Keynes and Berlin. Populisms. 
10. Socialism during the Cold War: May 1868 and the new social movements, Maoism and Pan-Arabism.
11. The return of God: North American fundamentalism, Catholic fundamentalism and political Islamism. Reagan, Khomeini, and Juan Pablo IIN.

Methodology

Assistance to lectures led by the teacher.
 
  Assistance to sessions of seminars and practices directed by the teacher in the classroom or online and in the special rooms of the Humanities Library.
 
  Attendance at private tutorials at the professor's office or online.
 
  Comprehensive reading of historical texts from the 19th and 20th centuries.
 
  Learn search strategies for information in libraries, hypermarkets and on the web.
 
  Carrying out analytical work and comments.
 
  Presentations and interventions in the classroom.
 
  Personal study strategies.

Annotation: Within the schedule set by the centre or degree programme, 15 minutes of one class will be reserved for students to evaluate their lecturers and their courses or modules through questionnaires.

Activities

Title Hours ECTS Learning Outcomes
Type: Directed      
Attendance to the theoretical and practical classes in the classroom or online and integration of the acquired knowledge. 35 1.4 1, 4, 3, 8, 11
Paired learning exercises. Practices. 15 0.6 2, 7, 5, 3, 10, 6, 11
Paused learning exercises. Questionnaire. 10 0.4 9, 2, 4, 7, 10, 6, 11
Type: Supervised      
Tutorials. 15 0.6 9, 2, 5, 3
Type: Autonomous      
Student self-employment, improvement of their critical training. 75 3 9, 2, 7, 5, 3, 8, 6, 11

Assessment

Evaluation regulations.
 
The assessment activities will be programmed throughout the academic year, but the partial ones will be in the middle of the course (first) and the last week of the course (second). The dates of the completion of the classroom tests or online and the delivery of the questionnaire will be communicated to the students sufficiently in advance, although the delivery of the questionnaire usually coincides with the last week of the course. The teacher will establish a specific tutorial hours to comment and review the assessment activities carried out.
 
The student who does not complete all the evaluation exams programmed in the classroom or online (partial) and is not present at compulsory assessment activities with a value of more than 66% of the final mark, will be qualified as Non-Valuable, and it will not be able to appear to the recovery.
 
Any irregularity committed by a student during the performance of a test (copy, plagiarism) will imply a note of zero in the specific assessment section. Several irregularities committed will involve a global grade of zero.
 
The recovery will consist of a global exam and synthesis of subject matter (neither the exhibitions nor the questionnaire will be recovered) and will be held on official dates established by the Faculty. In no case, the recovery can be considered as a means of improving the qualification of the students that had already passed the subject in the normal process of Continuous Assessment. The maximum grade that can be obtained in the re-evaluation is 5.0 (Approved).

Assessment Activities

Title Weighting Hours ECTS Learning Outcomes
Oral exhibitions of readings of articles or from historical documents 25% 0 0 9, 2, 7, 3, 8, 6
Questionnaire based on the reading of a text about the history of ideas and thought. 25% 0 0 1, 4, 7, 10, 6, 11
Two partial exams, one in between and one at the end of the course. 50% 0 0 1, 9, 2, 4, 7, 5, 6, 11

Bibliography

 -ANTON, J.; CAMINAL, M. (Coords.) Pensamiento político en la España contemporánea 1800-1950, Teide, Barcelona 1992.

-        ANTON, J. (Ed.), Ideologías y movimientos políticos contemporáneos, Tecnos, Madrid 1998.

-        BALCELLS, A. (a cura de), El pensament polític català. Del segle XVIII a mitjan segle XX, Edicions 62, Barcelona 1988.

-        BALL, Terence, BELLAMY, Richard (eds), Historia del pensamiento político del siglo XX, Tres Cantos: Akal, 2013. 

-        BEYME, Kaus von, Teoría política del siglo XX. De la modernidad a la posmodernidad, Alianza.

-        BURROW, Jhon W., La crisis de la razón. El pensamiento europeo 1848-1914, Crítica: Barcelona 2001.

-        CASASSAS, J., (Coord.), Els intel·lectuals i el poder a Catalunya (1808-1975), Pòrtic, Barcelona 1999.

-        CHARLE, Christophe, Los intelectuales en el siglo XIX. Precursores del pensamiento moderno, Siglo XXI: Madrid 2000.

-        DÍEZ RODRÍGUEZ, Fernando, Homo Faber. Historia intelectual del trabajo, 1675-1945, Siglo XXI: Madrid, 2014.

-        ECCLESHALL, Robert, GEOGHEGAN, Vincent, JAY, Richard, WILFORD, Rick, Ideologías políticas, Tecnos: Madrid 1999.

-        FERNÀNDEZ SEBASTIÁN, J.; FUENTES, J.F. (Dir.), Diccionario político y social del siglo XIX español, Alianza Editorial: Madrid, 2001.

-        Id., Diccionario político y social del siglo XX español, Alianza Editorial: Madrid, 2008.

-        Id., Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano: la era de las revoluciones, 1750-1850, Madrid: CEPyC 2009. 

-        FREEDEN, Michael, Ideología, una  breve introducción, Santander: Ediciones de la Universidad de Cantabria, 2013. 

-        GABRIEL, P. (Dir.), Història de la Cultura Catalana. Vol. IV-X, Ed. 62, Barcelona 1994, 1995.

-        GINER, S., Historia del pensamiento social, Ariel, Barcelona 1985.

-        HAMPSHER-MONK, I, Historia del pensamiento político moderno. Los principales pensadores políticos de Hobbes a Marx, Ariel, Barcelona 1996.

-        LECHTE, J, 50 pensadores contemporáneos esenciales, Cátedra, Madrid 1996.

-        LOIZAGA, P. (Dir.), Diccionario de pensadores contemporáneos, Emecé, Barcelona 1996.

-        MACRIDIS, Roy C., HULLIUNG, Mark L., Las ideologías políticas contemporáneas, Alianza Editorial: Madrid, 1998.

-        MINC, Alain, Una historia política de los intelectuales, Duomo: Barcelona 2012.

-        ORY, P. (Dir.), Breve Historia de las ideas políticas, Biblioteca Mondadori, Madrid 1992.

-        PRIETO, F., Manual de Historia de las Ideas Políticas, Unión Editorial, Madrid 1996.

-        RAYNAUD, Philippe, RIALS, Stéphane (dir.), Dictionnaire de Philosophie politique, PUF: Paris 1996.

-        RENYER, J. i PUJOL, E. (dir.), Pensament polític als Països Catalans, 1714-2014. Història i prospectiva., Pòrtic, Barcelona, 2007.

-        SABINE, G.H., Historia de la Teoria Política, F.C.E., Madrid 1980.

-        STROMBERG, R.N., Historia intelectual europea desde 1789, Debate, Madrid 1990.

-        VARELA, J. La novela de España.. Los intelectuales y el problema español, Taurus, Madrid 1999.

-        VALLESPIN, F. (Ed.) Historia de la Teoría Política, vols. 3, 4, 5 i 6, Alianza Editorial, Madrid 1991.

-        WATSON, P., Historia intelectual del siglo XX, Crítica: Barcelona, 2002.

-        WATSON, P., Ideas. Historia intelectual de la Humanidad, Crítica, Barcelona 2006. 

 

Note: the specific Bibliography of each subject will be provided through the Virtual Campus and it will carry books and magazines to the classroom.

  • Web Ressources: Biblioteca digital Saavedra Fajardo Universitat de Múrcia; Revista d’Història Constitucional; Projecte Iberconceptes; bases de dades a Dialnet i JSTOR; google books; Memoria Digital de Catalunya; Hemeroteca Digital Històrica (Biblioteca Nacional, Ministeri de Cultura); fons digital Biblioteca de Catalunya; fons digital Arxiu Congrés de Diputats; Gallica (fons Biblioteca Nacional de França).

 

Software

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