Of the trickle of books on Catalonia that have appeared of late in American university presses, quite a few address the issue of nationalism. Although the connection would seem logical, not all of these books assume that their object of study is a stateless nation, a premise whose presence or absence necessarily bears on the authorial point of view. Some argue that there exists nationalism without nations. Under such premises the doctrinal history of a particular society cannot be predicated on the political awakening of a subject people (the nationalist “myth”) but is the self-serving fantasy of an interest group, which infects irrational and prejudiced masses.

Stephen Jacobson's Catalonia's Advocates belongs in the skeptical group that does not take Catalonia's claim to be a national entity for granted. He historicizes that claim by tracing it to the corporate interests of a professional elite affected by oscillations in their status as a result of the rise of the liberal state and of increased competition. Jacobson clearly endorses so-called modernist theories of nationalism, whose exponents argue for a belated origin (typically late eighteenth century, as in this book) and tend to see the nation's theoretical and sentimental underpinnings as the self-serving construct of disingenuous elites.

There is significant merit in Jacobson's choice of answerable elite. Shifting from the literary protagonists of the Catalan revivalist movement to the members of the Barcelona bar, he opens a new scenario of considerable historical interest and in the process provides a painstakingly researched and admirably written account of the development of a profession, which provides a convenient case study for the history of the European bar.

But the luminous insight into a specific profession within a conveniently demarcated, yet ample, time frame comes at the cost of a certain blindness. Jacobson hopes to show that Catalonia's national imaginary is the legacy of professional ambitions and calculations for advancement, reminding this reader of the materialistic anthropology of Marvin Harris, in which, among other feats of demystification, Hindu cow worship was explained by widespread reliance on cow dung for fuel. Espousing the notion of the “invention” of nationalism, he dismisses evidence of latency of patriotic self-consciousness, treating its manifestations as a by-product of bar-specific developments. That lawyer-historians Josep Pella and Josep Coroleu could in 1876 recall the abolition of Catalonia's self-governance one century and a half earlier and base on that memory the demand for restoration of home rule does not require us to posit the intervening excitement of Romanticism, although such goals do not exclude the appropriation of whatever theoretical tools lay at hand.

It suffices to observe the publication date to realize that these lawyers were writing shortly after the failure of the federal republic, the first of several Catalan attempts to reform the state in order to resolve the imbalance inaugurated by Catalonia's violent assimilation in 1714. Jacobson suggests that these lawyers' defense of Catalan private law and their goal of reclaiming the country's derogated public law were out of step with enlightened rationalism. As “proof” of the alleged untimeliness of these efforts, he opposes Victor Balaguer's and Antoni de Bofarull's earlier “integrative” view that “ancient Catalan constitutionalism had been a precursor to Spanish constitutionalism” (215), which Jacobson appears to interpret in the sense that Spanish constitutions superseded the Catalan.

However, the rationality of amalgamation into the Spanish nation-building project versus recuperation and modernization of Catalonia's institutions and legal traditions is a philosophical problem that can only be resolved through pragmatism or through a more encompassing historical analysis of the consequences of either option. That is to say, centralism's alleged rationality hinges on how Catalonia fares with and without self-governance, an analysis for which modern Spanish history supplies abundant data, but which lies beyond the scope of this book, notwithstanding a few considerations about the contemporary situation in the conclusion. Within the book's purview, however, would seem to be the analysis of why Balaguer and Bofarull defended Catalonia's constitutional precedence. It is not so hard to understand that in the transition from absolutism to constitutionalism it was essential for Catalan jurisprudence to influence the development of Spanish legislation regardless of any ulterior claim to salvaging Catalan legal specificity. There is simply no contradiction between the earlier and the later stance, especially if one takes into account the decapitation of the single Spanish regime ever led by Catalans in 1874.

Catalan gradualism also goes a long way toward explaining tensions within the bar between conservative members cozily adapted to the status quo and the more lively and politically driven ones. If the young lawyers were, like everyone else in Europe, affected by Romanticism, the alleged explanatory force of Romantic thought dwindles to little more than the rhetoric with which they validated their political goals. Since a reflected Romanticism saturated the entire peninsula, its intellectual features do not help to distinguish genealogically the rise of a particular nationalism. In other words, was Catalonia more romantic than other regions? Or was it always already a polity that did not square with the regional casing to which Spanish centralism (and Jacobson's chosen terminology) would reduce it?

Jacobson is aware of the limitations of his thesis. As a result the book is dotted with qualifications that even while detracting from its explanatory force also evince the honesty of a scholar who knows that reality is more complex than a pat thesis might suggest. Thus, while making much of Romanticism as ideological catalyst, he also admits that it does not teleologically evolve into nationalism (238), noting that elsewhere revivalism failed to give birth to broad-based political movements. The difference, he claims, lies in the corporatist nature of Catalanism, a movement led by lawyers who made all the difference, who were indeed the “differential fact,” as Catalanists themselves might put it. But when it comes to the question of why Catalan lawyers so determined their country's history, Jacobson produces a tautology—what distinguished Barcelona lawyers from others was their nationalism (244).

Thus we are led to the conclusion that nationalists engender nationalism, and the reader is left wondering about the peculiarity of a bar that, singularly in the age of nationalism, turned legal disputes into a full-fledged political program that gained huge popular support seemingly out of the blue. In the end, these lawyers were nationalists, suggests Jacobson, because they framed the same “generalizations and stereotypes” that were operative throughout the continent in terms of the history of Catalonia rather than of the Spanish monarchy (245). This is surprising, because although one would expect the French to frame generalizations within the context of the French republic, the Germans within the context of the newly unified German state, and the English within the British Empire, apparently Catalans were exceptional for doing the same. That they were Catalan before becoming lawyers does not seem relevant to Jacobson.

Catalonia's Advocates opens a window on a corporation that greatly influenced the political development of modern Catalonia, as it did elsewhere. It packages considerable information and succeeds in foregrounding an often neglected stage of doctrinal operations in the formulation of modern Catalanism. Certainly respectful of the complexity of the social realities it deals with, it should be approached, however, with awareness of the author's political sympathies, of the semantic implications of his irony, and with a cautious understanding of the moments in which interpretation moves into areas foreclosed by the available documentation.