| In the last fifteen or twenty years there has been a revival of political history. Inspired by new methods of (socio-)cultural history and also by the linguistic turn in historical research the old institutional political history has been amplified by a history of 'the political' and of political culture. This approach raises questions such as what actually made up politics in a certain period, what was then considered to be part of politics, what was considered appropriate behaviour in politics? In our research program we have taken the tension between parliamentarian politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries as one departure point, and the emerging mass politics of the political parties as another. In many countries, but certainly in the Netherlands, there was a rather clear-cut break between the aloof, distant liberal parliamentarianism of the middle of the 19th century and the mobilising mass politics of the parties of the end of that century. The liberal parliamentarism limited suffrage and its concept of representation stressed MP independence. Political parties wanted to close the gap between the representatives and the represented and rejected the independence of the individual representative. Thus, the concept of representation changed: under the new circumstances Parliament was to be an exact portrait or copy in miniature of the country. The metaphor of the 'photo' was used in many countries. The style of politics changed too: new symbols were adopted and a new passionate style of mobilisation, in which religious metaphors abounded. There was also a rather drastic change in the concept of political discussion: liberal parliamentarianism had assumed that civilised discussion and debate would lead to the truth. Party politics were based on the assumption that the truth was already there; all one had to do was to convince or convert the other parties. In the first case parliamentarians shared a common bourgeois culture, in the second the parties provided a new sort of community with symbols and styles of their own. In the Dutch case not only the socialists but also the orthodox Protestants embodied this new style of politics. |
