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ABSTRACT
In around 1900 debating rules came under attack. This special issue examines debates in parliaments as well as popular meetings. Changes in parliamentary ideals and the rise of democracy put the rules of parliamentary debate under pressure. This article considers the question whether there existed an alternative ideal to reasonable parliamentary debating. As a competing ideal for political debates, this contribution discusses the agonistic notion of honour. Honour is the claim to be respected by significant others. Honour is competitive, gendered, public and theatrical, and ought to be defended in a fair fight. Honour is local rather than universal, i the exclusive code of a certain community, a relevant ‘honour group’. Using examples from Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and from parliaments as well as political popular meetings, this article argues that honour helps us to understand public and parliamentary meetings in around 1900.
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Notes
1 M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice. A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York, 1983), p. 304. On the same page, Walzer mentions ‘inclusiveness’ as a democratic ideal.
2 D. Demetriou, ‘Fighting Together. Civil Discourse and Agonistic Honor’, in D. Demetriou and L. M. Johnson (eds), Honor in the Modern World. Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Lanham, 2016), pp. 21–41.
3 Demetriou, ‘Fighting Together’, p. 40, endnote 1. Cf. among other things S. Chambers, ‘Behind Closed Doors. Publicity, Secrecy, and the Quality of Deliberation’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 12, (2004), pp. 389–410; C. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London and New York, 2009) and other work by the same author; I. M. Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford, 2000), pp. 36–51.
4 J. Bentham, Political Tactics, M. James, C. Blamires and C. Pease-Watkin (eds) (Oxford, 1999), p. 1.
5 For example, P. D. G. Thomas, ‘The Beginning of Parliamentary Reporting in Newspapers, 1768–1774’, The English Historical Review 74, (1959), pp. 623–36.
6 For example, T. Haapala, Political Rhetoric in the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, 1830-1870 (London, 2016).
7 Bentham, Political Tactics, pp. 73 and 64, respectively. Cf. K. Palonen, ‘Parliamentary Procedure as an Inventory of Disputes: A Comparison between Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Erskine May’, Res Publica. Revista de Filosofía Política, 27, (2012), pp. 13–23. See for context, among other things, C. Blamires, The French Revolution and the Creation of Benthamism (Houndmills, 2008).
8 Bentham, Political Tactics, p. 132.
9 Later, in a different form, published as Bentham’s Handbook of Political Fallacies, H.A. Larrabee (ed.), (Baltimore, 1952).
10 British aristocratic government was allegedly in decline, which is why the famous conservative Friedrich Julius Stahl in his Die gegenwärtigen Parteien in Staat und Kirche. Neunundzwanzig akademische Vorlesungen (Berlin, 1863), pp. 160–2 (text from 1850 to 1851) thought that parliamentary government which had only proven to be really successful in Britain had had its day by the middle of the nineteenth century.
11 See the in-depth overviews of deliberative democracy in A. Bächtiger, J. S. Dryzek, J. Mansbridge, and M. Warren (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (Oxford, 2018). An accessible short introduction is to be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democracy#:~:text=Deliberative%20democracy%20or%20discursive%20democracy,decision%2Dmaking%20and%20majority%20rule.
12 See the overview in A. Floridia, From Participation to Deliberation. A Critical Genealogy of Deliberative Democracy (Colchester, 2017).
13 A. Gutmann and D. Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, NJ, 2004) p. 7, chapter 2, and passim.
14 C. M. Hendriks, J. S. Dryzek, and C. Hunold, ‘Turning Up the Heat: Partisanship in Deliberative Innovation’, Political Studies 55, (2007), pp. 362–83; esp. p. 366. This is an example of practical research and of the direction deliberative democracy has more recently been taking.
15 F. Guizot, The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe (Indianapolis, IN, 2002), first French edition dates from 1851.
16 J. Elster, ‘Arguing and Bargaining in two Constituent Assemblies’, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 2, (2000), pp. 345–421; different versions of this study exist.
17 B. Dolný, ‘Possible Application of Deliberative Democracy in Parliament’, Human Affairs 21, (2011), pp. 422–36.
18 C. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Ellen Kennedy, trans. (Cambridge MA, 1988; original publication 1923).
19 As Kari Palonen has convincingly argued in numerous publications, mainly on the basis of the British Parliament, for example, K. Palonen, Parliamentary Thinking. Procedure, Rhetoric and Time (London, 2019); cf. my review of the book in Parliaments, Estates & Representation 40, (2019), pp. 372–3.
20 For a first orientation, see for instance C. Stewart, ‘Honor and Shame’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2nd edn, Elsevier, 2015), pp. 181 ff.
21 J. Bowman, Honor. A History (New York, 2006) is a quite recent example of this idea (p. 7: ‘Today, cultural honor survives only in a degraded form (…) among urban gangs and the hip-hop culture’). P. Berger, ‘On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor’, European Journal of Sociology 11, (1970), pp. 339–47, is the classic reference for a modernization approach to honour.
22 J. Pitt-Rivers, ‘Honour and Social Status,’ in J.G. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago, 1966), quoted in, for example, F. Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago and London, 1994), p. 13; A. Welsh, What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives (New Haven, CT and London, 2008) p. 9; P. Olsthoorn, Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy (Albany, 2015) p. 8.
23 Stewart, Honor, p. 21. Probably the most quoted study of honour in the last decades.
24 T. Sommers, Why Honor Matters (New York, 2018), pp. 17, 90.
25 For example, Bowman, Honor, pp. 311, 324; Olsthoorn, Honor, p. 27.
26 John Morley about Palmerston, quoted by P. S. Meisel, ‘Humour and Insult in the House of Commons. The Case of Palmerston and Disraeli’, Parliamentary History 28, (2009), pp. 228–45; esp. p. 235. Sexual innuendo: Canning vs Hobhouse and Hobhouse vs Canning, M. Bevis, The Art of Eloquence. Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (Oxford, 2007), pp. 79–80.
27 A. Reynaert, Histoire de la discipline parlementaire, 2 vols (Paris, 1884), vol. I, pp. 286, 323–8.
28 J. Turpijn, Mannen van gezag. De uitvinding van de Tweede Kamer 1848-1888 (Amsterdam, 2008) p. 162; D. van Eck, Politieke herinneringen van een enfant terrible, C.A. Tamse (ed.), (s.l., 1975), p. 111; personal communication from Professor Wessel Krul, Groningen.
29 H. te Velde, Sprekende politiek. Redenaars en hun publiek in de parlementaire gouden eeuw (Amsterdam, 2015), pp. 229–31; T. Bouchet, Noms d’oiseaux. L’insulte en politique de la Restauration à nos jours (Paris, 2010), pp. 131–50; H. Fayat, ‘Bien se tenir à la Chambre. L’Invention de la discipline parlementaire’, Jean Jaurès. Cahiers trimestriels, 153, (2000), pp. 61–89; J.-M. Guislin, ‘Parlementarisme et violence rhétorique dans les années 1870’, Revue du nord, (1998), pp. 697–728; E. Chamontin, Essai sur la discipline parlementaire dans les assemblées législatives principalement en France, de nos jours (Marseille, 1903), pp. 148–51.
30 M. Gallo, Le grand Jaurès (Paris, 1984) pp. 161, 227–8, 378–9.
31 This is admittedly a rather vague term. I focus on the ‘contradictory meetings’ with debate, and more in particular, though not exclusively, on electoral meetings.
32 R. Schlögl, ‘Kommunikation und Vergesellschaftung unter Anwesenden. Formen des Sozialen und ihre Transformation in der Frühen Neuzeit’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34, (2008), pp. 155–224; esp. pp. 216–17.
33 J. van Rijn, De eeuw van het debat. De ontwikkeling van het publieke debat in Nederland en Engeland 1800-1920 (Amsterdam, 2010), ch. 5; J. Davis, ‘Working-Class Make-Belief. The South Lambeth Parliament (1887-1890)’, Parliamentary History 12, (1993), pp. 249–58; B. Jerrold, ‘On the Manufacture of Public Opinion’, The Nineteenth Century 13, (1883), pp. 1080–92.
34 See the contribution to this issue by Josephine Hoegaerts for more detail, examples, and the ambiguities when it came to women and people from the colonies.
35 Lawrence, Electing our Masters, passim; cf. M. Schoups, Meesters van de straat. Collectieve actie en de strijd om de publieke ruimte: Antwerpen (1884-1936) (University of Ghent, PhD thesis, 2022), p. 60: ‘faire entendre leur voix’.
36 P. Cossart, Le meeting politique. De la délibération à la manifestation (1868-1939) (Rennes, 2010), pp. 94–5; M. L. Anderson, Practicing Democracy. Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2000), p. 295 (Dutch socialists such as Louis Hermans and Johan Schaper did the same). T. Jung, ‘Streitkultur im Kaiserreich. Politische Versammlungen zwischen Deliberation und Demonstration’, in A. Braune, M. Dreyer, M. Lang and U. Lappenküper (eds), Einigkeit und Recht, doch Freiheit? Das Deutsche Kaiserreich in der Demokratiegeschichte und Erinnerungskultur (Stuttgart, 2021) is a recent overview, comparing Germany to Britain and France.
37 Cossart, Meeting, pp. 96–7; Anderson, Practicing Democracy, p. 300.
38 For example, Lawrence, Electing our Masters, pp. 1, 5, 10 etc.
39 For example, Cossart, Meeting, p. 99; J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People. Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867-1914 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 181 (‘lack of pluck’). Angry: for example, Schoups, Meesters van de straat, pp. 62 ff.
40 For example, for a region in the Netherlands, R. de Jong, Electorale cultuur en politieke oriëntatie. Verkiezingen in Gelderland 1888-1940 (Hilversum, 2005) p. 43.
41 Cossart, Meeting, p. 123.
42 See, for the Netherlands, H. te Velde, ‘Een aparte techniek. Nederlandse politieke acteurs en de massa na 1870’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 110, (1997), pp. 198–212.
43 For example, ‘De parlementairen in Constancia’ [sic], Algemeen Handelsblad, 2 October 1894.
44 Souvarine (= Alexander Cohen), ‘Ontboezeming’, Recht voor Allen, 23 March 1888.
45 For example, H. Roodenburg, ‘Ehre in einer pluralistischen Gesellschaft. Die Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande’, in S. Backmann, H.J. Künast, S. Ullmann and B.A. Tlusty (eds), Ehrkonzepte in der frühen Neuzeit. Identitäten und Abgrenzungen (Berlin, 1998); H. de Waardt, ‘De geschiedenis van de eer en de historische antropologie’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 23, (1997), pp. 334–54; R. Walz, ‘Agonale Kommunikation im Dorf der frühem Neuzeit’, Westfälische Forschungen 42, (1992), pp. 215–51.
46 T. Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz (Bonn, 2000), pp. 599–602 (Welskopp uses debates in popular meetings as a prominent example).
47 A. van Veldhuizen, De partij. Over het politieke leven in de vroege S.D.A.P. (Amsterdam, 2015).
48 D. Bos, ‘Verborgen motieven en uitgesproken persoonlijkheden. Eer en reputatie in de vroege socialistische arbeidersbeweging van Amsterdam’, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 115, (2000), pp. 509–31.
49 For example, Jung, ‘Streitkultur’, p. 110.
50 See also the contribution by Martin Schoups in this special issue.
51 D. Bos, Waarachtige volksvrienden. De vroege socialistische beweging in Amsterdam 1848-1894 (Amsterdam, 2001) p. 272.
52 W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), p. 45. The title of the book and much of Ong’s work seems to assume a change from orality to literacy, but the development is not straightforward and in modern times the two cultures exist side by side.
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Henk te Velde
Henk te Velde is Professor of Dutch History at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is President of the Royal Netherlands Historical Society as well as of the (European) Association for Political History. In addition to the history of the Netherlands, his research interests include the comparative history of political culture, rhetoric and parliaments in Western Europe. His recent English language publications include Organizing Democracy. Reflections on the Rise of Political Organizations in the Nineteenth Century (Cham, 2017), edited with Maartje Janse; Democracy in Modern Europe. A Conceptual History (New York & Oxford, 2018), edited with Jussi Kurunmäki and Jeppe Nevers; The Ideal of Parliament in Europe since 1800 (Cham, 2019), edited with R. Aerts, C. van Baalen, M. van der Steen and M.L. Recker; Civic Continuities in an Age of Revolutionary Change, c.1750–1850. Europe and the Americas (Cham, 2023), edited with Judith Pollmann.