“I Shall Divide and Subdivide Power”: The Fiduciary Conception of Sovereignty in Francisco Pi y Margall’s Republican Federal Project

The fiduciary conception of political power that the republican tradition adopted in its struggle against absolutism was dissolving during the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, some attempts appeared that represent a reemergence of the fiduciary demo...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Montés Mora, Jaume, Mundó Blanch, Jordi
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2025
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Barcelona
Repository:Dipòsit Digital de la UB
OAI Identifier:oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/225359
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2445/225359
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Federalisme
Història econòmica
Republicanisme
Filosofia política
Societats fiduciàries
Federalism
Economic history
Republicanism
Political philosophy
Trust companies
Description
Summary:The fiduciary conception of political power that the republican tradition adopted in its struggle against absolutism was dissolving during the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, some attempts appeared that represent a reemergence of the fiduciary democratic (or proto-democratic) scheme. One of them was the case of Spanish federalism and its greatest exponent, Francisco Pi y Margall. This article shows that the core of Pimargalian federal republican thought is based on a fiduciary conception of sovereignty, which is grounded in a recovery of the language of revolutionary natural law. (...)