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On this page you will find the syllabus for J. B. Owens' spring 1998 upper-division undergraduate and graduate course CONSTITUTING MODERN SPAIN, 1808-1982. To move to other pages, point and click on the links indicated in this text by special highlighted areas ("hot links"). If you need to contact the instructor, J. B. Owens, you may send a message to my e-mail address (owenjack@isu.edu) or do so now by activating this button: Mail Now. Please include your name and e-mail address in the text of your message.
I have designed this course to allow you to consider one of the most gripping issues of our time --the attempt to create a country on the basis of a written constitution. Although it now seems natural to us that a country have a written constitution, the movement to establish such regimes really only got underway in the eighteenth century. Since the cultural basis of constitutionalism has become global, it will be studied through encompassing comparison of various types of constitutional regime. Comparative study is essential if we are to understand which of the historical factors leading to the establishment of a constitutional regime in a particular country were the most important. In the end, we want to understand better not only the global culture of constitutionalism, but also something about the "peculiarities" of the particular groups whose constitutional regimes we study, especially those of Spain.
The course's "backbone" will be the dozen or so Spanish constitutional regimes from 1808 to the present. Spain is a good focus for a study of constitutionalism. During the formative period of constitutionalist culture in the nineteenth century, no continental European country had more years governed by representative assemblies than Spain --not even France whose constitutional history is more famous. Moreover, the Hispanic Constitutional of Cádiz of 1812 was one of the most influential in Europe and Latin America. The idea of establishing individual liberty by imposing limits on government through a written constitution was what was meant by Liberalism in its classical, nineteenth-century formulation. That the word "Liberalism" came out of the Spanish political experience is another testimony to Spain's place in the global culture of constitutionalism.
The course is also designed to promote an active and intense dialogue about the difficulties of constructing a constitutional regime, a matter of vital importance to all of us.
This draft constitution must be delivered to the Secretary of the Department of History by 3:30 PM on THURSDAY, 23 APRIL at the latest. Since only one student will be allowed to lead the team working on a particular country, we will have a lottery on THURSDAY, 22 JANUARY to determine the order of selection. Come to that class with a list of several possibilities, selected from the project locations list, about which you would like to do research.
You will need to begin your research immediately because I will begin, soon after you select the country on which you will work, to request regular reports from you for the on-line class discussion about your analysis of its particular problems and about the measures you would include in your draft constitution to deal with them. Your analysis and constitutional proposals will then become the focus of team discussions.
Because you must begin your research immediately after you have selected your country, we will also discuss the project in class on 22 JANUARY. Prior to this class, therefore, you MUST have read the page about the Institute for Constitutional Research. Moreover, since you will be using books, journal articles, and published documents in your defense of the provisions in your draft constitution, you must also have read prior to the 22 JANUARY class the pages on bibliography and citation style and on citation requirements and plagiarism.
For this course, there are strict standards, explained on these pages, for the style of bibliography entries and notes and for the citation of any words or ideas that are not your own. Because failure to observe these standards precisely will lower significantly the evaluation of your participation in the work of the Institute for Constitutional Research, make sure you come to this class prepared to seek clarification of anything on these three pages which you do not understand.
HISTORY MAJORS: This project responds to central aspects of the major program in History. Your work should help you better to formulate important historical questions, to obtain from primary and secondary sources information necessary to answer such questions, and to develop and defend your hypotheses. To understand better the goals of the History Major, you should read the page on the History Major at Idaho State University, especially the PREFACE and STUDENT OUTCOMES sections.
You may mail your questions now.
HISTORY MAJORS: One of the skills you should be developing is the ability to express your hypotheses about historical material and defend them. This project is designed in part to give you the experience necessary for your to develop this ability.
If it is submitted sufficiently before the due date in electronic form, I will be happy to raise queries in the text of your team's draft constitution and supporting defense. You may then rewrite your draft constitution and defense to respond to these queries (as well as dealing with flaws of style and content), improving the quality and evaluation of what you have written. You should clarify with me the meaning of my queries before you begin your revisions.
There will be no limit to the number of times you can rewrite your draft constitution and defense. To solicit my comments, you must submit your draft constitution as an ASCII ("plain text") e-mail message that I can read on my screen without having to open any sort of file. If you do not know how to convert a wordprocessor file to an ASCII format, you should post a query about how this is done to the course discussion list.
Of course, I will spend substantial amounts of time both before and after your class sessions in room 344 of the Liberal Arts Building, located near our classroom. Yet we both know that often our schedules will not mesh sufficiently for us to have adequate time to sit down for a discussion of your ideas, questions, and writing. The solution: Send your ideas, questions, and writing problems to my e-mail address (owenjack@isu.edu), and I promise to respond just as soon as I can. Moreover, by handling the matter in this way, I will have more time to consider what you are saying, check on facts and bibliography, and respond clearly in writing so that you will have a record (I will keep one too). Therefore, you can seek the assistance you need, and you can do so in a way that is compatible with your schedule and life-style.
But it gets better than this. Naturally, I will respond to anything of a personal nature with an individual response to you alone. However, many of your questions and comments, about the work of the Institute for Constitutional Research for example, will be of importance to everyone in the class. Therefore, you will post these messages to a special address from which it will be distributed to me and all other members of the class. The other students and I will do the same with any responses we have to your message. That way I, and you, will derive much more benefit from my interactions with students outside of class. We will be able to have this type of communication because we will all be members of an online discussion list.
In the materials received during the first class session, you will find instructions about how to subscribe to the Internet discussion list for this course. Any message sent to the discussion list e-mail address will be sent to the e-mail boxes of each course member.
This discussion list will not only allow you to raise questions and make comments about reading assignments and classroom activities for which there was too little time in class, it will be vital to your leadership of team development for the Institute for Constitutional Research. You are also welcome, indeed encouraged, to post statements of your ideas on particular subjects, messages of an informational nature (e.g., about sessions of the International Affairs Conference), and YOUR responses to the questions and requests for help of other students.
Your participation in the dialogue of the list will be an important component of your grade in the course. You MUST respond promptly (within 72 hours) to any online questions directed to you by other list members, including me.
Since Internet discussion lists are rapidly becoming a major component of professional communications in all fields, you must learn how to use them well. For suggestions on how to ensure the high quality of your messages and of the responses to them, turn to the page on Using Lists Effectively. You MUST DEVELOP traits that encourage positive forms of interaction among class members if this course is to be a satisfying experience for you and others.
You may also find it intellectually useful and stimulating to join a relevant international list, at least as an observer (a "lurker" in Internet language), and I will advise you on how to find those most appropriate for your needs.
You may send me your questions now.
"One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin
with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end
having lived only one."
-- Clifford Geertz
All contents copyright © 1995-98. J. B. Owens All rights reserved.Revised: 10 January 1998
URL: http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/conmodsp/syllabus.html