‘Biography of Freedom (II). Baroque ‘, by Benigno Pendás: two spirits

What is clear, once read this second movement of what is a broad spectrum project on the conquest of freedom, also of even economic proposal, that the well -locked erudition facilitates the understanding of the scenarios in which that change and evolution, progress, in lAs forms of individual and social human management.

Our author, Professor of Political Science at the San Pablo CEU University, enters a period of contrasts, in which a new world is brewing. A contrast that could be synthesized as that of the severity of the Baroque on the joy of the Renaissance. Nothing exists in the history of culture that intends to arise from nothing. It is thus task of the historian to unravel that line of continuity and highlight what is being created, both from the point of view of the contribution of individualities and institutional development, if not state.

The Baroque, as a historical period, liked the romantics excessively because what it was about is to take the opposite to the Enlightenment. Now we are postmodern to the way of tardomodernos. What we like about the Baroque is not what it presents as a macro-relationship, but of the art of absolutism, of Counterpoints, a seemingly sad time, full of wars, “confusion concert” as Gracian, at the end of the cycle and the beginning of new horizons of thought and government would say. This Américo Castro was called an immature period.

Professor Benigno Pendás bets in an achieved overall vision to recognize that at that time, the seventeenth century, we must recognize “the incongruity and admit that there are two spirits that They live on the same ground and at the same time », the double polarization of a changing Europe.

A contrast that is perceived even in the same structure of the book. If this baroque treaty begins with the definition of what we understand by “the” baroque and “the” baroque, and It goes up soon in what was absolutism, The mercantilist economy and the great French century, then stop in the Spain case, still with the airs of greatness, in the Germanic, under the sign of the Holy Empire, and, of course, the English, in addition to some interesting brushstrokes over the Netherlands and the less eternal Rome.

From there we get what I found a book within a book, the descriptions of text and context of personalities synthesis: Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Diego Velázquez and Johann Sebastián Bach. Teling of a final closing movement dedicated to the new role of science, even as social power. All this with freedom as a conjugation of the human.