Organizing Democracy

Reflections on the Rise of Political Organizations in the Nineteenth Century

Henk te Velde, Maartje Janse, Henk te Velde, Maartje Janse

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319500195
• eBook ISBN: 9783319500201
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book explores the new types of political organization that emerged in Western Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, from popular meetings to single-issue organizations and political parties. The development of these has often been used to demonstrate a movement towards democratic representation or political institutionalization. This volume challenges the idea that the development of 'democracy' is a story of rise and progress at all. It is rather a story of continuous but never completely satisfying attempts of interpreting the rule of the people. Taking the perspective of nineteenth-century organizers as its point of departure, this study shows that contemporaries hardly distinguished between petitioning, meeting and association. The attraction of organizing was that it promised representation, accountability and popular participation. Only in the twentieth century did parties reliable partners for the state in averting revolution, managing the unpredictable effects of universal suffrage, and reforming society. This collection analyzes them in their earliest stage, as just one of several types of civil society organizations, that did not differ that much from each other. The promise of organization, and the experiments that resulted from it, deeply impacted modern politics.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Biographies of Contributors
• List of Tables
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Perspectives on Political Organizing
• Chapter 2: ‘Association Is a Mighty Engine’: Mass Organization and the Machine Metaphor, 1825–1840
• Chapter 3: ‘Petition! Petition!! Petition!!!: Petitioning and Political Organization in Britain, c. 1800–1850’
• Chapter 4: Can ‘The People’ Speak? Popular Meetings and the Ambiguities of Popular Sovereignty in the United States, 1816–1828
• Chapter 5: Law and Voluntary Association in the Early United States
• Chapter 6: Organizing in a Moment of Madness: Political Meetings and Clubs in 1848
• Chapter 7: The Democratic Framing of Protest in the Age of Revolution: The Language of Civil Rights and the Organization of Pe itions and Demonstrations in Belgium, 1830–1848
• Chapter 8: Brilliant Failure: Political Parties Under the Republican Era in France (1870–1914)
• Chapter 9: The German National Association 1859–1867: Rise and Fall of a Proto-Party
• Chapter 10: Manipulation or Participation? Membership Inclusion in the Party Organizations of the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party and the British National Liberal Federation
• Chapter 11: Agitate, Educate, and Organize: Radical Networks in New York in the Early 1880s
• Chapter 12: Party Versus Party: Beatrice Webb and the Ascent of the British Labour Party
• Chapter 13: The Domestication of a Machine. The Debate About Political Parties Around 1900
• Bibliography
• Index