Present
Jo Innes, Mark Philp, Anne Norgaard, Elias Buchetmann. Alvar Blomgren
Apologies: Helder Mendes Baiao, Bertel Nygaard, Anne Heyer, Kai Ostberg, Håkon Evju, Jana Hunter
Welcome to those there – and apologies – turns out this is not the best time for many others and have had a number of apologies.
Agreed it would be most useful to have general comments, either across the three pieces, or in relation to specific pieces – and that people could send more minor points in emails to MP.
The three pieces will be further edited and we hope we’d be in a position to submit them by the end of July. We are hoping for others from Bertel (on Grune); Anne N and Anne H, Elias, and Håkon – and are still looking for people on Austro-Hungary and Poland/Galicia. Ideally these would be complete by the end of September – even more ideally we would be able to update the introduction in the light of the full range – which is why sending things in early – even if just a sketch – would be very helpful.
One issue Anne Heyer raised in a comment she sent in on the pieces was that we were using Democratic identity – but not saying much about what that might consist in – and it ties up with the sense on Mark’s part that having started by emphasizing the performative – beards, hats etc., – the blogs were more about subscription to ideas. He wondered whether we should be trying to say a bit more in the third ‘context talked about in the introductory blog. In that we might recognize thatpeople can advocate for democracy, discuss it, rework it etc., but without identifying themselves as a democrat. Identifying as an X ( socialist, republican, communist, democrat, liberal etc.,) seems to require the word and the networks – but, even if they are jointly necessary, they aren’t sufficient. Adopting such a label/identity involves making a certain kind of commitment – that one is ‘one of these people’ not one of those – that is says something about what someone ‘stands for’ and is prepared to defend. It is the assertion of a – to some extent – combative identity – responding to, reacting against, foreseeing or imagining a certain kind of opposition. When that context changes that stand and the associated identity might become less relevant.
Clearly, some identities may be shallow – some deep; some fleeting, some enduring; but if we take the idea of identity and identification with the term seriously, it must involve some commitment for the agent.
Jo – pointed out that in Alvar’s blog we should probably see the use of Democrat as being less combative and more an assertion of an identity that was less contentious than others (such as communist). So taking a stand might have affirmative or defensive modes – be an identity that one could retreat to – being assertive about being a democrat might be either a bold or a timid gesture!
Elias – wondered if we could say more in detail about identities that are also in the mix – democrat but also Jacobin, liberal, republican and the relation between these terms.
Mark – thought we just have to accept that this is a period in which these ‘partisan names’ are emerging and the boundaries between them are fluid and contested, and that is something the blogs can explore in making their cases.
Anne N asked about whether the idea was to have individual biographies or whether blogs on larger groups might be considered.
Jo – happy to have biographies which covered several people, but she thought they should still bring out the individuality (the subjectivity, agency etc) of those discussed, even if information about any given person is fragmentary. They should not be treated only as a collective.
Mark We might need to adjust the introduction accordingly if there are group portraits – but if people let us know the direction of thinking that will help us to do that.
Jo pointed to the fact that both posts were very biographical – and more might be done to make them less of a biographical story and more analytical or thematic in content She also thought that themes should be brought more to the fore in the writing: the first sentences of paragraphs should do more to make the point of the paragraph clear. She had reordered Mark’s draft post on Bamberger to make it more thematic, but on rereading it she thought it still needed more thematic signposting.
Elias said he is proposing to look at a group of Mainz radicals under the republic – and was interested in knowing whether it was Ok to look at this specific moment rather than what went before and after.
Jo and Mark thought that was fine. Mark said unless there’s a significant legacy worth mentioning – or significant precursor activity that is a part of the story. Jo said she thought there was positive value in giving some sense of where people had come from and went on to from the moment, if that info was available, but it could be very brief; the main focus should be on the moment.
Jo suggested as a hypothesis to be tested that before 1848 when people were called or called themselves democrats, a reference to French example and experience was implicit– and that takes us all the way up to 1848 for most of the region – and in some cases beyond. Is that people’s experience?
Anne N True for some people in the Danish context – but in 1848 the terminology spread beyond educated people aware of what went on elsewhere and came to have more purely local reference for the peasant farmers who begin to use it. [Afterthought from Jo: that would also be true in both north and south America: US by 1800, Latin America from 1820s]
Jo – this looks like a theme that could be explored comparatively across posts. She thought that in Alvar’s case he was implying that his subject’s French experiences were crucial, but not spelling that out..
Ellias also wanted to know about gender in the Swedish case
Alvar in many cases people were not opposed to more equal rights for women and women’s participation in meetings etc. – but it was not something that was ‘front of mind’ and something that gets consistently moved off the main agenda for male reformers.
There is clearly a theme here – Jo said she had recently read that many women attended the Hambach Festival – and that they are often not commented on but one cannot deduce much on that basis.
There was a discussion about the sharpshooting turn in Löwstedt’s career and its significance – Jo pointed out that militias may be routes to violence, but they could also be seen as counterweights to conventional forces – or they could be seen as ways of exerting pressure.
Alvar said that he thought though that the ethos was focused on the male body and its capacity for violence.
On suggestions for other blogs: Jo mentioned Cody Inglis (who had already done an oral presentation on a Hungarian Jacobing conspirator) and Claire Morelon, Till von Raden, and Andriy Zayarnyuk and Ostap Sereda.
Mark will send out a final version of the blogs in the first tranche at the end of July, – it would be good to get the other material by September at the latest – but also good to know what is coming so that we can integrate that into the introduction. And for that – the sooner the better.
We sent the following notes out earlier in discussions. They maybe helpful (especially the second half of the notes) as a guide – but with the caveat (see above) that we welcome more collective accounts – involving several people.
Being a democrat: Intellectual history blog series
‘Democracy’ was an idea, which changed content and significance across the course of the nineteenth century.
But ‘being a democrat’ was also an idea, which stood in a complex and uncertain relationship to the other.
What it means to have a political identity or political subjectivity are questions that have preoccupied theorists across a variety of disciplines since the mid twentieth century.
Whatever these things are, they must also have histories. The opportunity or need to identify oneself with one or another perspective on politics is not a transhistorical given: it has developed in particular places at particular times. Across Europe, this opportunity or need came into being unevenly and sometimes discontinuously across the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Even in a given time and place, political identities are not necessarily homologous. ‘Being a democrat’ might mean something different in kind and not just in content from ‘being a liberal’ or ‘being a conservative’.
The category ‘political subjectivity’ which is now gaining ground over ‘political identity’ gestures towards the complexities of the mental and emotional operations that might be involved. But if we’re talking about something that’s just in the mind, then that’s not something that we as historians have access to. We can only surmise that people oriented themselves in this way through their practices: because of things they said or wrote or did. And practices of all these kinds surely also played a constitutive part in political identity.
In this series of blog posts, we aim to explore what was involved in ‘being a democrat’ in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. For much of this period, the identity was more often ascribed by others than personally owned – not least because it often carried a lot of negative baggage. Negative ascriptions were things that people who came to own the identity had to negotiate. But here we’re not directly concerned with the observation or charge that other people were democrats. We are primarily interested in those who owned the identity, and in how the experience of being a democrat interacted with democratic ideas, as more conventionally conceived. That said (this is a set of post meeting thoughts – we should emphasise that:
In some settings that might mean looking at people who were called democrats but didn’t clearly own the term (though did obvious things to earn it, and might have owned it, but we don’t know that). In other circs there may have been more owning of the term so ‘best fit’ will encourage a focus on those people over others with a loose relationship to it (so Bamberger over Hecker). Sometimes it may mean including people who talk positively about ‘democracy’ without calling themselves democrats.
This loose, permissive, contextual approach we think is best because if we make the criteria too rigid, that’s going to tend to privilege some milieux and perhaps some kinds of people over others. Whereas a looser approach allows us to explore how much people owned the term and what that entailed to be part of what’s under investigation. We don’t want to flatten them all into one thing; we want to bring out the differences.
Questions that might inform an individual blog post:
What’s the reason for considering this person a democrat ? What mix of being described as such and self-describing as such? What kind of thing was being conveyed in each case (perhaps varying with audience?), eg was the term used to excuse, to explain, to express partisanship?
What alternative identities were available in their milieu which they also embraced or conversely rejected?
At what points in this person’s life was the label applied? If at a particular period only, why at that time? Were they influenced by particular other people – or by wider political events? How did this period relate to other parts of the person’s life – did they have similar attitudes and affiliations but used a different vocabulary, or did their views and affiliations change in the course of their life, and if so why?
Was this identity affirmed or expressed in other affiliations, and if so which, eg family, neighbourhood, club, party organisation, employment, reading habits?
More generally, what was this person’s milieu – in what kinds of circles did they move? Did their identity as a democrat pertain especially to some but not other milieux? Were there some in which it had to be concealed?
If they expressed their identity as a democrat in ways that went beyond just owning the name, in what words or practices did they do this?
If they held elaborate views about democracy and its significance in the past, present or future, what was the tenor of those views?
Did this person’s life experience or lifestyle colour how they conceptualised democracy? If so, in what ways? Was being a democrat associated with wanting certain things to happen in their own lives, or was it more a wish for the world without immediate consequences for them?
What was being a democrat like as an emotional experience? What kinds of pleasures or pains did it bring?
Given all the above, what do you see as having been the cognitive content of being a democrat for this person? Was it a form of ethical outlook? A form of orientation to local, national or global political events? An affiliation expressed in employment, membership of an organisation or support for a party? Or what mix of these? Something else? Did its meaning in their life change over time?
‘Democracy’ could be used as an analytical concept, and in argument, without it necessarily being the case that any particular individual was labelled or still more identified with ‘being a democrat’. How should we think about ‘democrat’ occasionally emerging as an identity?
Re-imagining Democracy 