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The figure of the ‘politician’ occupies a central yet fraught position in the media landscape of contemporary Europe. A frequent source of criticism in everyday news bulletins, the term itself is loaded with an emotional significance that corresponds with prevailing perceptions of current political administrations. In this geographically wide-ranging assessment of the figure of the politician in modern and contemporary Europe, Pasi Ihalainen, Rosario López, Kari Palonen, and Henk te Velde re-examine the trajectory of terms like ‘politician’ and ‘statesman’, illuminating its correspondence with emerging, political trends. Drawing on a variety of data surveys from several European countries, this volume spotlights how profoundly the concept of representative democracy is shifting.
“Edited by a group of historians and a political philosopher who have been thinking innovatively about parliaments, politics and language for a number of years, this is a stimulating and timely book that does much to open up a new area of study in a new and striking way.” • Paul Seaward, History of Parliament
Pasi Ihalainen is Professor of Comparative European History at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His many publications include his most recent book The Springs of Democracy: National and Transnational Debates on Constitutional Reform in the British, German, Swedish and Finnish Parliaments, 1917–1919 (2017). He is a board member of the research network EuParl.net.
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Politicians in Representative Politics: An Introduction to an Ambiguous Conceptual History
Pasi Ihalainen, Rosario López and Henk te Velde
Chapter 1. A Long-Term Perspective on the Figure of the Politician
Kari Palonen
Chapter 2. ‘Politician’ and ‘Statesman’ in the Age of Revolutions: Sweden, the Netherlands, France and Britain, 1770–1815
Pasi Ihalainen and Joris Oddens
Available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from the Open Science Centre of the University of Jyväskylä, the Huygens Institute for the History and Culture of the Netherlands and the Kone Foundation
Chapter 3. New and Old Professional Politicians in Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands, 1860–1920
Anne Heyer and Henk te Velde
Chapter 4. Politicians of Principle: Spain and Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Rosario López
Chapter 5. Interests, Expertise and the Rejection of Politics in France and the Netherlands, 1900–1940
Ido de Haan
Chapter 6. What Are Politicians Doing? Parliamentarians on Politicians
Kari Palonen
Chapter 7. Politicians beyond the Nation State? From the League of Nations to the European Union
Pasi Ihalainen, Teemu Häkkinen, Anna Kronlund and Olivier RozenbergAvailable open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from the Open Science Centre of the University of Jyväskylä, the Huygens Institute for the History and Culture of the Netherlands and the Kone Foundation
Chapter 8. Politicians Seen through the Lens of Activists, 1980s–2000s
Carla Hoetink and Harm Kaal
Conclusion: Four Types of Politicians: Towards a Condensing Interpretation of Conceptual Histories
Kari Palonen
Appendix: Word-Embedding Models on the Most Related Words of ‘Politician’ in Parliamentary Debates, from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century
Index