Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber
| Author | Anna Plassart |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885120937574 |
| Published date | 01 October 2022 |
| Date | 01 October 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Review Articles |
Review Article EJPT
Parliamentarism: From
Burke to Weber
Anna Plassart
The Open University, UK
William Selinger, Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
2019; 246 pp.: ISBN 978-1-108-4564-7, £75 (hardback)
Abstract
William Selinger’s Parliamentarism: from Burke to Weber aims to redefine our understand-
ing of what it means to live in a free state. It displaces the concept of “democracy” as a
(supposedly) central concern for a range of canonical nineteenth-century authors, and
demonstrates that another concept, that of “parliamentarism”, stood at the core of
many European liberal writers’ quest for liberty. Selinger shows that Montesquieu’s
description of a “balanced” English constitution protected by a system of checks and
balances was challenged by a number of contemporary observers of British politics
(including Jean-Louis de Lolme and Edmund Burke), who elaborated rival accounts
emphasizing instead the dominant position of a powerful representative assembly
which mirrored the nation it represented. The resulting doctrine of “parliamentarism”,
the book demonstrates through a series of case studies that include Tocqueville, Mill
and Weber, subsequently became the “dominant paradigm of a free state across
Europe” (p. 9) in the nineteenth century.
Keywords
Burke, Constant, de Lolme, democracy, liberalism, Mill, Montesquieu, parliamentarism,
Smith
Corresponding author:
Anna Plassart, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK.
Email: anna.plassart@open.ac.uk
European Journal of Political Theory
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1474885120937574
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
2022, Vol. 21(4) 836–846
To continue reading
Request your trial