How we’ll proceed
We hope to explore the questions we have outlined in a series of workshops and conferences, online and face to face, between early 2023 and perhaps 2025. We aim to engage some dozens of scholars based in diverse places within and beyond the region in these discussions, to refine the shape of the project and start fleshing out the stories that can be told.
Past experience is that these activities will give rise to publications in various places, often in the form of journal articles. In due course, we would expect to identify from among those who’ve contributed to the workshops and conferences a team of contributors who will work collaboratively to compile a fourth and final volume of essays in our series.
We hope to explore these and other questions in a series of workshops and conferences, online and face to face, between early 2023 and perhaps 2026. We aim to engage some dozens of scholars based in diverse places within and beyond the region in these discussions, to refine the shape of the project and start fleshing out the stories that can be told.
Past experience is that these activities will give rise to publications in various places, often in the form of journal articles. In due course, we would expect to identify from among those who’ve contributed to the workshops and conferences a team of contributors who will work collaboratively to compile a fourth and final volume of essays in our series.
In focussing on central and northern Europe, we are interested in foregrounding 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 may also take the opportunity to explore some themes not distinctively associated with this region, but which we haven’t focussed on to date, and could explore in this context:
- 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
- In what ways 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 