British and Swedish Parliamentary Debates in a Comparative Study of Political Vocabularies -- Variations in British Parliamentary Conceptions of the People, 1734-1771 -- The Swedish Case: Did Popular Sovereignty and Representative Democracy Exist in Sweden before 1772? -- The Re-Evaluation of the Representation of the People and Democracy in Westminster, 1772-1789 -- Reactions to the Revolutionary Concepts of Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in Westminster, 1789-1800
Summary
This book on the pre-history of democratization shows how and why more modern attitudes to democracy started to emerge in the late eighteenth century. Focusing on the language of parliamentarians, the author reconstructs and compares debates on the political role and representation of the people in Britain and Sweden. His analysis demonstrates not only the persistence of the classical, pejorative, conception of democracy but also the gradual re-evaluation of the notion prior to the French Revolution. The author analyses the clash between British and French conceptions of democracy as well as t
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 497-515) and indexes
