Preliminary Programme

I would like to present my paper at your conference to discuss the social grasp of state formation through the ordinary administrational proceedings of the state. The study of early modern state formation should be a study of social and cultural practice channelled through the institutions of the state. It should be about what took place every day. Of course extraordinary events such as wars and uprisings or different elites have had a large impact, but too much emphasis on such matters neglects the routinized and commonplace spaces that enabled popular participation in the process. Through for example judicial courts, supplications and petitions the populace was able to negotiate their wishes and needs. A negotiation that was less visible on a grand scale but regularized and equally fundamental for the state formation as it mended various agendas of the populace with the development of the state.
In my research I have focused on supplications, letters of prayer, sent to the diet or the king in 18th century Sweden. This period was constitutionally dramatic and swung from militaristic despotism to parliamentary rule to enlightened absolutism but the right to supplicate the authorities existed throughout, guaranteed by law. These letters were mostly submitted by individual persons and the topics ranged from pensions and taxes to international trade. As spaces of political action they theoretically safeguarded social and political rights of the individual subject.
In my paper I would like to use the supplication system and its continual development as an exponent of the large institutional processes that shaped the state behind the main political events, in the ‘grey areas’. In the habitual handling of the supplications, the populace and the authorities constantly negotiated the correct usage, although the limits for these channels were constantly tested through action. The political culture of the time was constantly reaffirmed and reshaped through institutions like the supplication system that harnessed, channeled and was affected by certain behaviors and opinions. Following the last sentence, I would also like to discuss what parts of the populace were more frequent in writing supplications and why, to see how the institutional processes helped to both include and exclude.
I think this topic would be highly suitable for international comparison. Regardless of which way states were organized, they still exercised habitual and day to day interaction with the population. This dialogue and the terms for its continuance has as much to tell us about similarities and differences between the different trajectories of states as does wars or revolutions. (Show less)

Contrast or convergence: The evolution of presidential and parliamentary systems
Comparative constitutionalism, political science and political economy literatures have continuously stressed the differences of constitutional systems and their impact on the workings of political systems ( Stepan, Linz , Bagehot) foreign policy (Waltz). social policies and economies (Guido and Tabellini). Yet little attention has been paid to the historical evolution of both presidential and parliamentary systems and their possible convergences.
Presidential systems have been characterized by their imperial character and unilateralism , with following confrontation between the executive and legislative branches. On the other hand, parliamentary systems were considered to be less conflictive, due to the political solidarity between the legislative and executive branches . Yet, historically the contrast is not so clear. In the periods after the Jackson and Lincoln presidencies , one discerns a series of weak presidents and congressional predominance. But the nineteenth century England has not been a model of political stability. After the decline of Royal influence, the House of Commons would prove to be a very rebellious institution. Prime ministers would be subject to the challenge of changing parliamentary majorities and hardly allowed to long term political survival. The system would evolve to party discipline towards the end of the nineteenth century. But party discipline would be of top down nature. Prime ministers as Lloyd George would be strongly unilateral and presidential .
Moreover, both American presidents and British prime ministers have seen their proposal powers increase in the fields of war foreign policy and budget matters. The papers tries to highlight these convergences with particular focus on the USA and the UK , but with comparative references of systems as France , Sweden and the Latin American presidential systems. As explanatory factors we highlight the role of the expansion of democracy and of the military in designing and influencing constitutional arrangements. (Show less)

My paper will put forward the thesis that the political and social regulation of prostitution in Luxembourg during the first half of the century should be understood as a specific intersectional form of governmentality.
In reconstructing the discourses pertaining to matters of prostitution and debauchery, as found in parliamentary debates, executive correspondences and police reports, as well as within civil society (i.e. women's organizations, interest groups), I will argue that these discourses and actions can be interpreted as parts of a permanent state formation. To underline this thesis, my paper will draw on Foucault's “History of Governmentality” (2006a; 2006b), where he argues for the reconstruction of the formation of the state as an analysis of government, which he opposed to an essentialist “theory of the state”.
Theoretically, I aim to further develop Foucault's concept of governmentality by drawing on gender studies' recent discussions on intersectionality. I will argue for the necessity to expand his analytical framework of governmentality, so as to include more explicit notions of gender, nation and class. An intersectional approach – by now buzzword for the request to reshape gender studies as a discipline and to transform the analysis of core categories like identity, inequalitiy and difference as well as of social structures (see Davis 2008) – argues that gender relations cannot be theorized and understood by itself, but only in their intersections with other lines of differences or categorizations such as gender, race and class (see Crenshaw 1989) for the introduction of the term).
Whilst Foucault suggests that sexuality is the link between two distinct forms of power – discipline and biopower - and that both aim “to make live and to let die”, he does not fully develop the function of sexuality neither in gendered nor in intersectional terms. Therefore, the paper will draw links between Foucault's understanding of sexuality with his conception of racism as a way to govern and “enhance” a population by means of eugenics and “racial wars”.
My paper will then exemplify these links empirically by presenting the regulation of prostitution in Luxembourg during the first half of the 20th century from three different angles: Gender, Nation and Class.
I will point to shifts in gender relations with respect to the public/private distinction as a result of the prosecution of prostitutes. At the same time, bourgeois women inscribed themselves into the national community in their efforts to rally for the deportation of foreign prostitutes and to protect the morally and physically well-being of Luxembourgian girls and families. Finally, class differences can be traced as an influential factor in the public dealings with the supportive milieu of prostitution like innkeepers and customers.
Following the development of the empirical material from the different angles, the paper will conclude that relations of gender, nation and class are inextricably intertwined in the regulation of prostitution in Luxembourg as a specific form of intersectional governmentality. (Show less)

The proposed paper analyzes the evolution of the concept of “official” and its practice in an early modern State, taking Milan as a case study. Studying the printing press production, it is possible to highlight a process that deeply changed the “official” documents, their nature and the practices linked to the exercise of power. On the one hand, the outcome of the press modified the “diplomatic” nature of the official documents, and, on the other hand, it deeply changed the organization of the production and circulation of the same document. These two aspects are deeply linked each other, as well as they are connected to the practice of power. Moreover, in Milan, this process took place in a “grey area” between the public authority and the private interests (the one of the printers).
In the manuscript era an official document was a unique specimen, provided with all the “signs” of the authority (e.g. seals, signatures): those signs gave to the paper the “effectiveness”, the strength of the imperium of the prince. Once the authorities started to use the printing press, instead, the edicts, even if they remained identical in the juridical level, deeply changed both their physical appearance and their potential use: in fact, the printed papers by which the authorities exercised the command, were “repetitive” texts, mere copies of the original documents, reproduced in hundreds of identical exemplars. The direct command from the prince to the subject was suddenly supplanted by a “depersonalized” way to exercise the power (which so far happened only with the “oral” command, i.e. the public reading of the edict). From another point of view, the “publication” moved from the oral practice (the reading) to a written practice (the printing).
In Milan, the last quarter of the 16th century (from the 1576-77 plague) was a crucial period. In the previous decades the production of printed edicts grew constantly: the impulse to produce an increasing number of printed edicts came especially from the printers rather than from the authorities.
Another important factor was the concentration, in the same years, of the production of edicts in the hands of a sole printer. Made for pure commercial purposes (thus registered with a “pure commercial” privilege) this fact nevertheless this fact increased the identification between the “Royal Chambers Printers” and the production of “official documents” (mostly edicts). The “intermediate nature” between public and private is particularly clear in Milan: the printers had two workshops (one in a street, the other one in the court) and, after many years of activity, had a “private” archive of “their” printed edicts (in the court) that was very useful for the administration.
It is remarkable that the printers underlined the “public” nature of their service (when they had to renew their commercial privilege), while, on the other hand, the sovereign authority took many years to recognize them a particular “official” status, limiting their “agreement” in a private sphere (the commercial privilege). Moreover, the title of Royal Chamber Printer remained informal for centuries. (Show less)

The proposed paper seeks to explore some perspectives on how revolutionary engagement and constitutional promulgation strategies affected moral, emotional and cultural understandings of the self.
The continuous struggles to draw up viable constitutions in Spain, Portugal, Latin America and Greece during the early nineteenth century have led historians to speak of a broad constitutional experiment. The first constitutions of Greece and Portugal (1822), the Spanish constitution (1812, 1820), and the various Latin American constitutional proposals (1810-1827) have been widely and carefully investigated as products of the modernization process; in terms of imported modern political discourses and institutions; in terms of crisis of the absolutist and the colonial system; and as products and vehicles of the ideology and the movement of nationalism.
The main concern in this paper is to draw attention not to the institutional changes the different constituent assemblies and congresses strove to implement, but to a change of manners; to how manners and codes of conduct were insinuated into the vortex of change.
My argument is that starting a government from scratch was a matter of social and political engineering but also a ‘place’ of ongoing cultural interaction within which people negotiated and gave meaning to their lives.
Reflecting current critical trends, the suggestion here is to consider this process as a series of contentious performances through which different social agents, bearers of diverse mentalities and social backgrounds, gradually started to produce improvised meanings of the condition of the social being.
This constitutional culture produced new concepts of identity and selfhood.
The new self was portrayed in idealized terms. Polite social behaviour, philanthropy, tolerance, education, theatre, travel, and the comforts of ‘civilized’ life were assumed to provide what has been termed as a reform of manners.
In the proposed paper, the appropriation and utilization of new models of cultural practices, of new conceptual models and aesthetics are investigated not merely as receptacles for abstract ideas, but as integral components of the constitutional experience. (Show less)