ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on the process of political modernisation in Mediterranean countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, criticising the unilinear and hegemonic interpretation of the process of state building that has privileged formal aspects and neglected informal powers. The author points out that the artificial separation between formal and informal aspects in the study of the process of political ‘modernisation’ has blurred the image of a world in which traditions and non-institutional sociopolitical relations have been viewed as a symbol of backwardness. The text focuses on the figure of the ‘notable’, the cacique, who, far from being an anachronistic, extemporaneous and immobile figure, is a key actor in movement for understanding the ‘modernising’ process itself, insofar as he formed part of the clientelistic network inherent to any contemporary political system. To properly understand the mix of formal and informal aspects of the political transformation process, we should look more to the countries of North Africa and the Middle East and less to European countries whose analytical and methodological framework is constrained by a linear vision of the political modernisation process that neglects the informal aspects.
