Re-imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean is a Leverhulme funded network-building project. Joanna Innes is the Principal Investigator, and Mark Philp, Maurizio Isabella, and Eduardo Posado Carbo are the project’s Advisory Board.
This projects sets out to examine the ways in which the language of democracy, and cognate terms and correlated concepts and practices, developed in the countries of the Mediterranean between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries.
As can be seen from this ngram, the patterns of use of the central term differ dramatically French, Spanish and Italian – providing a striking illustration of the extent to which, for all the eventual apparent convergence, the language was something that developed locally, differently, and in response to distinct events and pressures within these countries. And it is precisely this variety, and these distinctive trajectories and their associated practices and institutional developments that we are concerned to map.
