Agents of the People

This is Pasi Ihalainen’s third book-length study of eighteenth-century Britain, and his second setting it in a comparative Northern European context. Ihalainen writes in the ‘conceptual history’ tradition, which derives from Reinhard Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte. However, breaking with such scholars’ customary choice of dictionary-entry and essay format, he proceeds by means of unusually full and systematic studies of large bodies of material: in this case, reports of debates in the British Parliament and Swedish Diet, complemented by glances at associated publications. He focuses on words and concepts related to the people and government, especially ‘democracy’, the popular or national ‘will’, and ‘the sovereignty of the people’. His central argument is that changes in the use of these phrases resulted not only from dramatic developments in Britain’s American colonies and in France, but also from pressures within traditional representative systems. Of Ihalainen’s four main chapters, only one looks at Sweden, during the final years of the ‘Age of Liberty’. Between 1769 and 1772, inter-party conflict and the indignation of the lower estates about the nobility’s recent assertion of exclusive rights to high office combined with the removal of limits on the press to produce explosive debate, which spread beyond the walls of the Diet—such that the widening of debate itself became a contested topic. By contrast, he surveys debates in the British Parliament over a much longer span, from 1734 (debates over parliamentary reform following Walpole’s failed excise scheme) to 1800 (debates over Irish union), devoting one chapter each to the eras of the American and French revolutions. Ihalainen positions himself clearly within Swedish historiography. In response to a late nineteenth-century scholarly tradition, recently renovated, which sees in the closing years of Sweden’s Age of Liberty anticipations of participatory democracy, Ihalainen concedes that the period witnessed innovations in discourse and practice. He argues nonetheless that these were firmly contained within an estates political culture: would-be reformers sought to advance or protect corporate rights, not to change the nature of politics (though ultimately members of the noble estate, who had once deployed the language of democracy to attack ministers, did bring about constitutional change by allying with the king to reassert royal power, with the aim of neutering other estates). Ihalainen does not position himself within British historiography to the same degree, but does contrast the British with the Swedish case. Though ‘democracy’ remained, in most British discourse, an element within a mixed constitution, Ihalainen argues that the word both grew in use and came to be more positively evaluated: in the 1790s, even fierce critics of French revolutionary democracy often distinguished that as a bad version of democracy. The more essentially French-revolutionary concept of ‘the sovereignty of the people’ was also taken up in Britain; opposition Whigs sought to domesticate it by showing its compatibility with English political traditions. Ihalainen discerns in these developments an indigenous shift, influenced but not driven by developments elsewhere, towards a more ‘modern’ conception of ‘democracy’ as a political system in its own right (and a dynamic one at that), which unleashed energy and opened the way to improvement

Context (archaeology · Democracy · Irish · Parliament · Parliamentary sovereignty · Political science · Politics · Popular sovereignty · Sociology · Sovereignty · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Historical Legal Studies and Society · History · Law

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