The fourth part of the project spans the Netherlands, Switzerland, the German Confederation/Germany, the Habsburg Empire, the divided lands of Poland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Use the drop-down menu for ‘Re-imagining Democracy: the wider project’ to follow up on the work associated with the three previous book projects.
The drop-down menu for ‘Re-imagining democracy in Central and Northern Europe’ allows you to access discussions relating to the forthcoming chapters, together with related meetings exploring the wider context, and also provides a link to a set of blogs on different democratic careers in the region hosted by the Oxford Centre for intellectual History.
In focusing on central and northern Europe, we have foregrounded the following themes:
- The fortunes of the word in these places, with attention to whether there was any special form of cross-fertilisation between places sharing the same language, or language-group
- The ways in which traditions of republicanism, elective monarchy, and government via assemblies of estates, found in many parts of the region, shaped ways in which democracy was subsequently imagined, and were themselves subject to re-imagining by people influenced by new ideas about ‘democracy’
- The relationship between ideas of nationhood and political theories and practices (associated e.g. with attempts to actualise ‘the sovereignty of the people’ – prompting the question, who are the people?)
- Ways in which ‘democracy’ was invoked in relation to contentious issues in rural society (eg the rights of peasants; the future of serfdom)
- Mid century and later interest in new devices to improve the functioning of democracy (in which connection, Switzerland especially functioned as a site of experiment).
We have explored the questions outlined here in a series of workshops and conferences, online and face to face.
We have also taken the opportunity to explore a number of themes not distinctively associated with this region, but which we haven’t focused on to date, including:
- The role of the word in learned traditions – and how these traditions, and their social reach changed over time
- Discourses about democracy which linked it either to individualism or socialism
- The ways in which people tried to express their self-conscious democratic commitment in daily life, especially in periods of heightened excitement about the potential of democracy to transform state and society (the 1790s; 1848 and after)
Re-imagining Democracy 