1st Edition
Parliamentarism in Northern and East-Central Europe in the Long Eighteenth Century Volume I: Representative Institutions and Political Motivation
This volume investigates the history of the representative assemblies of Sweden (the riksdag), Poland (the sejm) and Hungary (the diaeta) in the final period of the ancien régime. It concentrates on the practices and ideas of parliamentarism and constitutionalism, and examines the ideologies that motivated the members of these parliaments. Attempts at the suppression as well as the restoration of the estates’ power in all these three countries are examined, as well as, in the case of Hungary, the establishment of popular representation that eventually replaced the estates. These three early modern representative assemblies have never before been explored systematically in a comparative framework.
Introduction: parliamentarism in the age of absolutism
István M. Szijártó with Wim Blockmans and László Kontler
Comparing Representative Institutions: the historiography and the challenges
Wim Blockmans
Part I: Institutions and political machineries
Chapter 1: The peasant estate of Sweden: its rise and early modern evolution
Joakim Scherp
Chapter 2: The ‘common good’ or the particularism of the nobility? The political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the first half of the eighteenth century
Adam Perłakowski
Chapter 3: Instruments of Conviction in the Political Culture of eighteenth-century Hungary
András Forgó
Chapter 4: The Estates in the middle: populist absolutism and constitutionalism in early modern Swedish politics
Joakim Scherp
Part II: Concepts and motivations
Chapter 5: From confession to constitution: the motivation of the Hungarian political elite in the middle of the eighteenth century
István M. Szijártó
Chapter 6: Maria Theresa’s Monarchy: between inheritable merits and remunerable loyalty
Olga Khavanova
Chapter 7: Political ambition: The concept in Montesquieu and in his Hungarian reception, 1748–1848
László Kontler
Chapter 8: Domicilium libertatis or a threat to liberty? Eighteenth-century discussions on the role and place of the Sejm within the system of government of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz
Part III: The eclipse, revival and transformation of estates’ politics
Chapter 9: The growth of political instability and the royal coup in Sweden, c. 1760-1780
Patrik Winton
Chapter 10: Pragmatism triumphant: Hungary's political culture in the age of the French Revolution
Orsolya Szakály
Chapter 11: Role perception in the first modern Hungarian parliament, 1848–1849
György Miru
Biography
István M. Szijártó is a professor in the Department of Economic and Social History at Eötvös University, Hungary.
Wim Blockmans is professor emeritus in Medieval History at the University of Leiden, Netherlands.
László Kontler is a professor in the Department of History at the Central European University, Austria and Hungary.
