Ilustración y liberalismo en la obra de Juan Sempere y Guarinos (1754-1830)

Abstract

Juan Sempere y Guarinos was an outstanding member of the elite of the Spanish Enlightenment. His ideas were the outcome of the mingling of various modernist-oriented crosscurrents: Spanish humanism and «arbitrismo» and the Italian, French and English Enlightenments. Given his interest in Spanish legal and institutional history, as well as in economic liberalism, as shaped by his unconditional «regalismo» and his solid belief in the political virtues of the centralized state embobied in the Bourbon monarchy, he is a typical representative of the thinking thrown up by periods of crisis and transition. In his particular case this involves the somewhat strained merging of Enlightenment thought with early moderate and conservative Liberalism