Parliamentary Procedure as an Inventory of Disputes:A Comparison between Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Erskine May

Parliamentary politics is inherently procedural. The parliament debates and decides only questions that have been put on its agenda. Two famous tracts on the British parliamentary procedure, Jeremy Bentham’s Essay on Political Tactics and Thomas Erskine May’s A Treatise upon the Law, Privi-leges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament provide an inventory of con-troversies for competent parliamentarians. Both tracts regard parliamentary procedure itself as controversial, and both discuss how to deal with the con-troversies in a fair manner. The tracts differ in style: Bentham, relying on his own parliamentary imagination, is able to identify possible items of dispute, whereas May’s interpretation of parliamentary procedure includes the history of parliamentary controversies. For both, playing with time is an inherent part of the Westminster procedure, based on a combination of spending and saving time, in linking the parliamentary itinerary of the motions to the parliamen-tary calendar. Both strongly defend the Parliament as an exemplary delibera-tive assembly. May, however, thematises the increase of agenda items and the increasing scarcity of parliamentary time as well as ways of preventing par-liamentary paralysis due to obstruction. This leads May to revise the fair play principle to include the fair distribution of parliamentary tim

Parliamentarism: A Politics of Temporal and Rhetorical Distances

Frank Ankersmit has revised our understanding of political representation in terms of an aesthetic distance between the represented and representatives. The advantage of the parliamentary politics lies also in a rhetorical and temporal distance between the practices of MPs and those of the citizen-voters. The parliamentary democracy is constituted temporally through its procedures and practices. The parliamentary time is rhetorical, based on speaking for and against, in utramque partem, and the parliamentary procedure consists of temporal units aiming at guaranteeing that opposed points of view can be heard. To speak in the presence of the adversaries in the parliament alludes to the omnipresence of alternatives in parliamentary politics. The citizens, occasional politicians (Weber), can liberate themselves in the ballot box from their everyday ›being‹ and vote as if they were MPs. So we could give a rhetorical redesciption to Rousseau’s dictum that Englishmen are free only on the election day.Frank Ankersmit has revised our understanding of political representation in terms of an aesthetic distance between the represented and representatives. The advantage of the parliamentary politics lies also in a rhetorical and temporal distance between the practices of MPs and those of the citizen-voters. The parliamentary democracy is constituted temporally through its procedures and practices. The parliamentary time is rhetorical, based on speaking for and against, in utramque partem, and the parliamentary procedure consists of temporal units aiming at guaranteeing that opposed points of view can be heard. To speak in the presence of the adversaries in the parliament alludes to the omnipresence of alternatives in parliamentary politics. The citizens, occasional politicians (Weber), can liberate themselves in the ballot box from their everyday ›being‹ and vote as if they were MPs. So we could give a rhetorical redesciption to Rousseau’s dictum that Englishmen are free only on the election day

Max Weber als Begriffspolitiker

Max Weber’s well-known distinction between science and politics should not prevent us from recognising that his view of scholarly activity has resemblance to politics in several respects. Both refer to forms of contingent and controversial striving for power shares and their redistribution, and in so far is the scholarly activity part of politics. This does not hold only for the struggles for academic power shares but also for the contest between theories and approaches among scholars. Weber’s own use of concepts for contesting or legitimising standpoints or perspectives is worth discussing. Weber uses different rhetorical strategies. Occasionally he refers to a seemingly shared sense of a concept but subverts the apparent consensus and advocates an entirely different view. For example when Weber defends ‘objectivity’ this does not refer to the object-dependency of research but to the fair competition between different perspectives of interpreting the object. He also uses rhetoric of provocative laughter, for example against the politically dilettantish ”ink bottle” literati. Demagogy is a concept that Weber uses in depreciating, neutral or appreciating tone depending on the context. Also in his academic politics Weber prefers the politician to the official

Parliamentary Procedure as an Inventory of Disputes: A Comparison between Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Erskine May

Parliamentary politics is inherently procedural. The parliament debates and decides only questions that have been put on its agenda. Two famous tracts on the British parliamentary procedure, Jeremy Bentham’s Essay on Political Tactics and Thomas Erskine May’s A Treatise upon the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament provide an inventory of controversies for competent parliamentarians. Both tracts regard parliamentary procedure itself as controversial, and both discuss how to deal with the controversies in a fair manner. The tracts differ in style: Bentham, relying on his own parliamentary imagination, is able to identify possible items of dispute, whereas May’s interpretation of parliamentary procedure includes the history of parliamentary controversies. For both, playing with time is an inherent part of the Westminster procedure, based on a combination of spending and saving time, in linking the parliamentary itinerary of the motions to the parliamentary calendar. Both strongly defend the Parliament as an exemplary deliberative assembly. May, however, thematises the increase of agenda items and the increasing scarcity of parliamentary time as well as ways of preventing parliamentary paralysis due to obstruction. This leads May to revise the fair play principle to include the fair distribution of parliamentary time

Begriffsdebatten und Debattenbegriffe: das parlamentarische Paradigma des Begriffsstreits und -wandels

Quentin Skinners Vorschlag, Hobbes’ Leviathan wie eine Parlamentsrede zu lesen, bildet hier den Ausgangspunkt für eine Begriffsgeschichte, die die prozedurale Debatte des Parlaments zum Modell des Begriffsstreits nimmt. Die Leitidee besteht in der gegenseitigen Bedingtheit zwischen Begriffen und Debatten in der parlamentarischen Politik. Aus dieser Sicht wird hier eine Skizze der möglichen Typen einer rhetorisch inspirierten Begriffsgeschichte entworfen. Von empirischen Studien einzelner Begriffe in Debatten über die Debatten um die Begriffe und Begriffe bestimmter Debattentypen gelangt man zu Begriffsdebatten und Debattenbegriffen. Aus einer lockeren Verbindung zwischen Debatten und Begriffen entsteht so ein Begriff-Debatten-Komplex, in dem beide Seiten ohne Verweis auf die andere nicht zu verstehen sind. Der Parlamentarismus im doppelten Sinne eines Regimes und einer rhetorischen politischen Kultur markiert aus dieser Sicht ein historisches Momentum im Streit um Begriffe, die zugleich Fragestellungen für eine Geschichte politischer Debatten und Begriffe eröffnet.Quentin Skinner's proposal to read Hobbes's Leviathan as if it would be a speech in parliament opens up a possibility for a form of conceptual history that takes the procedural style of the parliamentary debate as a paradigm for conceptual controversies. Its guiding idea is the inherent connection between concepts and debates in the parliamentary politics. From this perspective the author sketches a typology of the possible forms of a rhetorical history of concepts. Its range reaches from empirical studies on concepts in debates via debates on concepts and the concepts of debate types to concept debates and debate concepts. In other words, with this shift the loose links between debates and concepts are replaced by a concept-debate complex, the poles of which are not intelligible without a reference to each other. Parliamentarism in the double sense of a regime and a rhetorical political culture marks a historical momentum in this struggle on concepts and opens up at the same time a research question for the history of political debates and concepts

Playing Against Contingency: The Common Agenda of Four Different Studies

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Valolla voidaan säädellä tomaatin kypsymistä sadonkorjuun jälkeenkin

Lehtiartikkeli (rinnakkaistallennusluvan asianumero: 2097/12 05 01 02/2019)201

Politiikkaa on luettava luovuuden kielellä : Ilkka Heiskanen in memoriam

Tässä numerossa Politiikka haluaa erityisesti muistaa professori Ilkka Heiskasta (1935–2019). Kunniotamme muistoa neljän kollegan yhteisellä muistikirjoituksellaNon peer reviewe