IntroductionPerspectives on Agency and Citizenship

Resumen

This introductory chapter surveys the current historiographical moment regarding relationship between agency and citizenship status and introduces the chapters of the book. The nineteenth-century struggles of the non-enfranchised groups have been understood, under T. H. Marshall’s inspiration, as quests for inclusion, in a double loop that would encompass access to the status of citizenship and emancipation from different forms of tutelage: servitude, patronage, wage system, imperialism and male domination. From this perspective, the history of politics presumes a narrative of modernisation in which successive waves of inclusion, mainly through the expansion of suffrage rights, build up democracy. This is a powerful theme that serves to make sense of some aspects of our collective history, but at the same time, it projects a shadow over many political experiences of conflict and participation in the recent past which cannot be understood as struggles for inclusion or emancipation. The teleological narrative imposes a retrospective agenda over history that obscures the many potential futures that were at play in the conflicts and struggles of the past. It also puts at the centre of the narrative a selection of supposedly forward-looking actors and political projects—the bourgeoisie, the working class, liberalism and nationalism—and tends to disregard the weight and potential influence of groups and individuals that are cast, often without due care, as mere relics of the past.