Relaciones ciudadanas, gubernamentalidad liberal y utopía cooperativista. El proyecto de Elías Zerolo en Santa Cruz de Tenerife

The organization of urban social relationships was a source of inspiration to projects of social reform during the 19th century. In the social question debate, several thinkers rejected the liberal regime implemented in Spain and other Western countries for not having brought about the promised society of freedom. In their view, the very existence of poverty among workers prevented many citizens from exercising their freedoms and rights. These thinkers inferred that existing political regimes were incompatible with the main principles of self-regulated freedom, which in turn was pivotal to liberal governmentality. Furthermore, workers’ misery was more obvious in cities. This was especially flagrant since cities were the privileged spaces for the implementation of liberal techniques of government. This explains why solutions were designed as ways of restoring individual freedom in urban communities. This paper tackles one of these projects of urban social reform: the relatively unknown plan of republican Elias Zerolo, who attempted to change urban relationships in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1870. Zerolo was inspired by cooperativism when imagining a new social framework based on solidarity. The utopian urban projection derived from that project was that of a city directly controlled by free citizens via their cooperatives, which allowed them to implement real free social relationships. Yet, this image came from the same principles that shaped the same liberal governamentality in which existing liberal regimes were grounded. Thus, this project did not represent a radical breakdown with the political regime, but an alternative organization inspired by the same principles, assumptions, and logics