THE ROLE OF LEGAL SCIENCE IN 19TH CENTURY SPANISH LIBERAL REFORMISM

The truth is that 19th Century Spanish society began to integrate - with its unique socio-cultural particularities and somewhat later than other countries - into what we might call the world system of Western capitalist modernity, to the extent that it could - and indeed did - create the conditions for governing its own reproduction. Spanish society, with its differences and its "traditional way of being," could not remain oblivious for any longer to a new order, a paradigmatic configuration of reality that, in turn, shaped the order of things, events, and categories. Indeed, well into the 19th Century, Spain had not yet embarked fully on the processes of Western modernity (secularisation and democratisation). The role modern legal science has carried out a crucial part in the Spanish contemporary history. It was essential in the arrival to Spain of the process of the Age of Enlightenment, linked to the principles of secularization and democratization.