António Manuel Hespanha, Vísperas del Leviatán; Instituciones y poder político (Portugal, siglo

XVII), trans. Fernando Jesús Bouza Alvarez, Taurus Humanidades, Madrid, 1989, 482 p.

António Manuel Hespanha has in recent years, first in a series of publications relating to his
course on the History of Institutions at the Law Faculty of Lisbon University, currently through the
projects he directs at the Institute of Social Sciences in Lisbon and by means of the journal Penélope,
established himself as one of the more interesting and original voices in contemporary Portuguese
historiography. This substantial volume, which is an abridged Spanish translation of his doctoral
thesis (As Vésperas do Leviathan, privately printed, Lisbon, 2 vols., 1986), can only serve to
consolidate his reputation.
Its subject is the political system of early modern Portugal. As the title indicates, AMH
proposes to analyse that system in the light of discussions about the origins of the modern State and,
more specifically, about the early centralization of the Portuguese monarchy. Such discussions, he
argues, suffer from marked anachronism, in that they often interpret the political structures of early
modern Europe in the light of subsequent developments, ignoring their internal logic. Each element
is often considered in isolation and regarded as an anticipation of a 'corresponding' element of the
modern State; "the Crown as an embryonic form of State sovereignty; assemblies of estates as an
anticipation of parliaments; municipal councils (concelhos) as antecedents of delegated peripheral
administration; seigniorial power as the eternal egotistical element that the State must dominate and
conform to the general interest" (p.20). Within such a conception, a concern with "centralization"
leads to the search for a genealogical relation between the King, the Crown, and modern State power,
with the King representing an embryonic form of modern State functions. Projection on to the past of
the present-day distinction between 'politics' and 'administration' makes it possible to speak, in the
context of ancien régime Portugal, of a combination of administrative decentralization and political
centralization, and leads to an over-valuation of political doctrine.
In rejecting such an interpretation, particularly associated with the work of M. Paulo Merêa
and José d'Oliveira França, AMH draws on perspectives developed by Otto Brunner and recent
Spanish and Italian historiography. His alternative characterization of the ancien régime "system of
power" is based on a Weberian definition of political power (defined by the explicit or implicit resort
to coercion) rather than on the notion of all-pervasive power associated with Foucault, Guattari,
Clastres and others, but he nevertheless recognizes the need to pay lateral attention to certain 'non-
political registers of power' - linguistic, territorial, economic, religious, symbolic,
statistical/cartographic, cultural, technical - and to give subsidiary consideration to mechanisms (e.g.
administrative practices) whose virtually coercive nature derives from their habitus-creating
characteristics. He devotes little attention to formal political theory, whose application to the political
system of the ancien régime derives from an anachronistic definition of the political sphere. Instead,
he concentrates on legal texts by Portuguese authors and other theorists widely read in Portugal,
arguing that legal doctrine was effectively applied in the exercise of power - both through legislation
and, above all, in different kinds of courts. Finally, in attempting to reconstruct the internal logic of a
pluralistic system, he gives central consideration to two informal manifestations which in a Statist
perspective are often considered as distortions or abuses: the power wielded by officials, and the
autonomy of unofficial political and legal life.
Having thus defined his object, AMH proceeds to characterize the ancien régime "system of
power". His starting-point is the context within which political power was exercised. He first
attempts a political/administrative cartography of continental Portugal and a demarcation of political
space, including an analysis of seigniorial donations and a detailed reconstruction of the
administrative apparatus. He then moves on to what he terms an "archaeology" of power, identifying
the spatial framework, those over whom power was exercised, the means employed (finance,
personnel, etc.) and the scope of political vis-à-vis other spheres of power. In the light of this, he
examines the doctrinal model underlying the system and the unofficial forms of power that existed
beyond the fringes of the formal system, like local judicial practices or the habitual resort to extra-
judicial means of resolving conflicts. Within the pluralist constellation thus described, AMH then
proceeds to analyze the monarchical function itself, stressing the limits imposed both by the relation
between the Crown and other centres of power and by the actual conditions under which the power of
the Crown was exercised. His conclusion is that the political system of the ancien régime was indeed
a system with its own internal logic, and that attempts to interpret it in the light of subsequent
developments inevitably lead to serious distortions.
A bare summary such as the above may be able to suggest the scope of AMH's analysis, but it
can scarcely do justice to the work that underlies it or to the advance that it represents in the
historiography of early modern Portugal. In order to establish the context within which power was
exercised in Portugal, he has constructed a disaggregated database containing statistical and other
information (e.g. on royal and seigniorial jurisdictions, administrative officials, taxes, population) on
individual localities. This information, reproduced in the original Portuguese version of the thesis,
but for obvious reasons omitted from this Spanish edition, will constitute an obligatory starting-point
for future analyses, even if, as is inevitable, revisions will be necessary. It is possible to disagree with
some of his criteria - for example, the perhaps excessive confidence placed in the population figures
provided by Carvalho da Costa in his Corografia portugueza (1706-12) - or to have doubts about the
statistical presentation, but this does not diminish the importance of the evidence he has assembled.
A further question relates to the methodological assumptions underlying the study. AMH
rejects as teleological the Statist perspective underlying much of the historiography on the political
system of early modern Europe, and prefers to think in terms of a "system of power" with its own
internal logic. He refers explicitly to the contribution of socio-anthropological studies of non-
European legal systems, and the whole study, while not explicitly synchronic, is cast in terms that
presuppose the functional interdependence of institutions. His appeal for a deeper understanding of
the irreducible internal logic of such a system is reminiscent of anthropological relativism, which in
turn recalls past historicisms. Insofar as he relies on Weber for a transhistorical definition of political
power (as derived from coercion) it would be possible to argue that these methodological traps have
been avoided, but on the other hand the adoption of a restricted, Weberian, definition of political
power might in turn be classified as anachronistic. These methodological questions, which are not
explicitly faced in the study, are of more than purely theoretical interest, inasmuch as they concern
the possibility of relating it to the whole question of the development and crisis of the ancien régime
political system and the origins of the modern State. At the beginning of his study AMH argues that
consideration of early modern political institutions has suffered from being subordinated to the
history of the rise of the modern State. It would be a pity if the balance were now to swing too far in
the opposite direction.
I do not want to give the impression, however, of demanding too much. António Hespanha
has, with this important and original book, raised discussion of early modern Portuguese society and
institutions to a new level. For a long time, this study will constitute the starting-point for discussion.