This book offers much-needed insight into the Oxford and Cambridge Unions and the important role they have played in nineteenth-century British political culture. Despite this role, or perhaps for that very reason, the Unions have received very little scholarly attention as to their political activities. This study will focus particularly on debating practices through which their members became knowledgeable of the parliamentary way of doing politics. More significantly, it uses the original Union records as primary research material to show that they also had unique political practices of their own. Presenting a detailed analysis of their debates, the book argues that the Unions should be appreciated as independent political arenas, not mere extensions of Westminster politics.

This book explicates how debates and documents can be understood, interpreted and analysed as political action. It offers the reader both a theoretical introduction and practical guidance. The authors deploy the perspective that debates are to be understood as political activity, and documents can be regarded as frozen debates. The first chapter discusses what is to be understood as politics and political. The second chapter explains the concept of debate as an exchange of arguments in speaking pro and contra. The third chapter presents concrete approaches, research practices and experiences that help analysing debates and documents as politics. The fourth chapter consists of a number of case studies that demonstrate how researchers can proceed in analysing parliamentary debates, documents, laws, and media articles. This book will be of use to all students and scholars interested in analysing texts and documents, as well as in political rhetoric and parliamentary debates. &n bsp;

This book seeks to develop Rhetoric as a field of knowledge in an important new direction, European Union politics. The authors analyse what could be called a “European style of politics”: textual strategies and rhetorical styles evolving within and around the EU’s supranational and national institutions. By fusing rhetorical and sociological approaches, political thought and culture, the book contributes to the analysis of the ‘political’ as a way of thinking and judging the political aspect of any phenomena.

This comprehensive Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of parliaments, offering novel insights into the key aspects of legislatures, legislative institutions and legislative politics. Connecting rich and diverse fields of inquiry, it illuminates how the study of parliaments has shaped a wider understanding surrounding politics and society over the past decades.

This book is about the life and times of Richard Congreve. This polemicist was the first thinker to gain instant infamy for publishing cogent critiques of imperialism in Victorian Britain. As the foremost British acolyte of Auguste Comte, Congreve sought to employ the philosopher’s new science of sociology to dismantle the British Empire. With an aim to realise in its place Comte’s global vision of utopian socialist republican city-states, the former Oxford don and ex-Anglican minister launched his Church of Humanity in 1859. Over the next forty years, Congreve engaged in some of the most pressing foreign and domestic controversies of his day, despite facing fierce personal attacks in the Victorian press. Congreve made overlooked contributions to the history of science, political economy, and secular ethics. In this book Matthew Wilson argues that Congreve’s polemics, ‘in the name of Humanity’, served as the devotional practices of his Positivist church.

This book decisively advances the academic debate on politicisation beyond the state of the art. It is the first book to theorise and conceptualise ‘politicisation’ across the epistemic communities of different subdisciplines, bringing together the different strands in the debate: (international) political theory, political sociology, comparative politics, EU studies, legal theory and international relations. This provides a comprehensive discussion of different concepts of politicisation, their ontological and theoretical backgrounds, and their analytical value, including speech-act, practice- and actor-oriented approaches. Furthermore, the linkages of politicisation to the concepts of politics and the political, democracy, depoliticisation, juridification, populism, and Euroscepticism are clarified. Finally, the book shows how the methodological toolbox in empirical politicisation research can be completed regarding different arenas, actors and modes of politicisation. The volume thus provides a much-needed theoretical and conceptual reflection to the newly emerging research field of politicisation in order to recognise and define the key issues and build a solid foundation for further debate and empirical research. ‘When does something come to be considered political - for good or for ill? In social scientific terms, what is politicisation, under what conditions does it occur, created by whom, and with what consequences. These questions drive this outstanding collection of papers that explore how politicization is to be theorized and methodologies for its study. Rather than just a special sphere of activity, the volume demonstrates how politics is best thought of as an activity that can occur across individual and various collective levels. One of the signature contributions of this volume is its exploration of these issues across disciplines: political science, philosophy, sociology and international relations. The texts will be of interest to all students of politics at a time when the very basis of political identity, action, and organization is contested, normatively and analytically. The texts will help bring clarity to these debates.’ —David L. Swartz, Department of Sociology, Boston University, USA ‘Politization has become a widely used and disputed term In International Relations (IR) and more recently in comparative politics as well. This edited volume tries to elevate the term politization onto an analytical concept by i.a. opening it up for action theoretical and organizational approaches. One of the great achievements of the editor is to bring conceptual order into a dispersed debate across political science and its subdisciplines. Moreover, the contributions show how to apply the concept(s) of politization on such different subjects such as democratization, de-democratization, transitions, denationalization or the emergence of populism and Euroscepticism. This is a muchawaited book which can become a conceptual point of reference for better understanding the evolution of national and international regimes.’ —Wolfgang Merkel, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

The parliamentary style of politics has been formed over centuries; nobody theorised it in advance. This book presents a thought experiment to spell out key principles of the parliamentary ideal type of politics. Max Weber offers the main intellectual inspiration, Westminster parliament provides the main historical reference and the author’s studies on parliamentary procedure and rhetoric provide the background for the book. Parliamentary acting and thinking offer us the best example of politics as a contingent and controversial activity. Using a parliamentary imagination, the author constructs the ideal type in five main chapters: dissensual modes of proceeding; rhetoric of parliamentary debate; parliamentary formation and control of government; parliamentarians as politicians; and parliamentary time as their common subtext. In the last two chapters, the book outlines the possibilities of extending parliamentary judgment to politics beyond parliaments proper and the chances for parliamentary politics succeeding today.