In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • "Lazy, Improvident People": Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History
  • David R. Ringrose
"Lazy, Improvident People": Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History. By Ruth MacKay (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2006) 298 pp. $65.00 cloth $24.95 paper

Recent years have seen an attack on the established historiography of Spain, challenging perceptions, interpretations, and conclusions. The examination of established narratives in Spanish historiography and of empirical data by such scholars as Phillips, Kagan, and Ringrose has shown that Spain has been badly misread and misunderstood.1 The problem can be attributed to Spain's own historians, to the "Black Legend" created by the English, and to other non-Spaniards intrigued by Spanish history.

MacKay attacks the negative stereotypes that pervade the dominant view of Spanish attitudes about labor, practical work, noble status, and social exclusion. The book's focus is on labor, craft skills, and social status, but it encourages a total re-reading of the Spanish history written during the last two centuries and prompts historians of other countries to review their own historiographies. The core of the argument is that the reformers of Spain's Enlightenment, reinforced by "Enlightened" outsiders, were responsible for faulty assumptions regarding Spanish history: for example, that Spaniards have been obsessed with nobility, defined in part as an exemption from manual labor; that Spaniards regarded mechanical skills and nonagricultural labor as vile and degrading; that early modern Spain was a caste-ridden society that precluded social mobility; and that Spain's social exclusion combined the denigration of work with such pseudo-racial practices as pureza de sangre.

MacKay does a remarkable job of demolishing these stereotypes. Though never denying that they were part of contemporaneous discourse, [End Page 454] she shows that they were only one of several strains within the relevant rhetoric. Artisans and guilds emerge, not as excluded and denigrated, but as honorable, integral, and dynamic elements of the "republic," both at the municipal and the royal levels. Moreover, artisans filtered upward (as nobles often slid downward) in the social and political hierarchies of urban life. The much-discussed pureza de sangre was always part of the discourse, but it was honored as much in the breach as in enforcement. MacKay shows that it only became prominent in the discourse about guilds, labor, and status in the seventeenth century, when many institutions were on the defensive against unwanted change.

MacKay sees great irony in the fact that the leaders of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment elevated one element of the old discourse into the sweeping stereotypes about labor that have dominated Spanish history. As they promoted reform, which they saw as a form of moral regeneration that would stimulate an industrious society similar to what they thought they saw elsewhere, they wrote into the historical canon only the negative side of the earlier discourse about labor. In this way, their reforms stood out as new and progressive. As MacKay shows, the very reforms that they touted were filled with positive rhetoric about labor that repeated parts of the earlier discourse. The men of the Enlightenment were thus conservative reformers without admitting it.

At the same time, they imposed a social structure on Spain that pointed to the modern tension between labor and capital. MacKay's argument in this context is complex but convincing. She follows it with shorter chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As MacKay puts it, historians "took what had been largely a rhetorical and metaphysical concept [the discourse of work, not-work, and anti-work] and transferred it to the physical and economic world" (197), reinforcing it with a rhetoric of national failure derived from imperial disasters. The result was assimilated into accepted stereotypes of "national character," the content of which can also be traced to the eighteenth century and to the Cuban disaster of 1898.

The upshot was a widely accepted Spanish "exceptionalism," massively reinforced in the twentieth century by the misguided Américo Castro. Thus did the "Spaniards' own history of themselves [place] Spain at the margin," leaving others prone to evaluate Spain's health "by looking at Spaniards' capacity and aversion to labor" (260).

This remarkable piece of historiography...

pdf

Share