DEL HONOR A LA HONRADEZ: UN RECORRIDO POR EL CAMBIO DE VALORES SOCIALES EN LA ESPAÑA DE LOS SIGLOS XVIII Y XIX*

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the concepts of honor and honorability in Spain during the 18th and 19th centuries in order to offer an approximation of the changes in social values that took place in this period. Specifically, it is studied the development of these concepts, the transformations in their meanings and the reciprocal relations of these mu-tations. However, what is here so-called as from honor to honorability should not be in-terpreted as a finalist trajectory or a process of an evolutionary nature, but a complex de-velopment, composed of several variables and multiple directions. The work is organized in four sections that seek to show the complexity of these transformations. A first exami-nation was made through the national and international bibliography that focus on it and a second part is an analysis by means of primary sources of different nature —literature, presses, philosophical treatises, moralistic writings. One of the main conclusions that emerges is that the transformations of the concepts honor and honesty are closely linked with a deep variation of the sense of virtue, which gradually abandoned its traditional meaning —synonym of social inheritance— and acquiring a more personal matrix.

Keywords

• social change
• social values
• honor
• honorability
• virtue
• upstanding man.