Laureano Calderón’s social foundry: industrial imagination and social prescription in Restoration Spain

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article introduces a new critical tool through which to analyze discursive production in fin-de-siglo Spain. Considering the cognitive transformations triggered by industrialization, it examines the conceptual models that intellectuals and artists used to evaluate social and economic problems. I propose that the industrial economy, particularly in its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work, produced a new logic that permeated the ways in which literary, political and social discourses of the period appropriated scientific frameworks concerning the material changes of modernization. The article demonstrates how the metaphor of the foundry came to operate as a central element of late nineteenth-century diagnoses and prescriptions concerning Spanish society. It does so by interrogating two public interventions by physicist and educator Laureano Calderón, which demonstrate that industrial, scientific and technological models determined the strategies of representation used to evaluate the most urgent problems of the country.