InhaltsangabeContents I. Introduction The Political as Communicative Space in History: The Bielefeld Approach - Willibald Steinmetz and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt II. Contested Concepts: "Politics" and "the Political" Introduction - Willibald Steinmetz From "Interest" to the "Political": Speaking of Ruling and Reigning in Early Modern Europe - Martin Papenheim From a Despised French Word to a Dominant Concept: The Evolution of "Politics" in Swedish and Finnish Parliamentary Debates - Pasi Ihalainen What Did They Mean by Política? Debating over the Concept, Value, and Place of Politics in Modern Spain - Javier Fernández Sebastián Navigating Around Politics: British Progressive Thought and the "Political" in an Expanding Transnational Perspective - Michael Freeden III. Boundary Disputes: The Political and Other Spheres Introduction - Heinz-Gerhard Haupt Drawing Boundaries between Politics and Religion: Early Modern Politics Revisited - Matthias Pohlig Political Economy and Statistics in the Late Ancien Régime - Lars Behrisch Laws as the Basis and Object of Political Communication - Christoph Gusy Depoliticalisation of the Private Life? Reflections on Private Practices and the Political in the Late Soviet Union - Kirsten Bönker Moving across Boundaries: Rudolf Virchow between Medicine and Politics - Tobias Weidner IV. Violence: Means, Object or End of Political Communication? Introduction - Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey "Catholic and Breton Forever": Violence and the Visual in Early Twentieth-Century France - Eveline G. Bouwers The Limits of the Legitimate: The Quarrel over "Violence" between Autonomist Groups and the German Authorities - Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier Vie chère, Violent Protest, and Visions of Protection: The Vie chère Controversy on the Eve of WWI in France (1905-1914) - Marcel Streng V. Epilogue: Moving beyond the "New" Political History Writing Political History after the "Iconic Turn" - Bettina Brandt The Political, the State, and Governance: Reflections on Essentially Contested Concepts - Thomas Risse Historical Politics Research - Luise Schorn-Schütte The Opening Up of Political History - Henk te Velde Political History Matters: Everyday Life, Things, and Practices - Frank Trentmann Notes on Contributors

InhaltsangabeContents I. Introduction The Political as Communicative Space in History: The Bielefeld Approach - Willibald Steinmetz and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt II. Contested Concepts: "Politics" and "the Political" Introduction - Willibald Steinmetz From "Interest" to the "Political": Speaking of Ruling and Reigning in Early Modern Europe - Martin Papenheim From a Despised French Word to a Dominant Concept: The Evolution of "Politics" in Swedish and Finnish Parliamentary Debates - Pasi Ihalainen What Did They Mean by Política? Debating over the Concept, Value, and Place of Politics in Modern Spain - Javier Fernández Sebastián Navigating Around Politics: British Progressive Thought and the "Political" in an Expanding Transnational Perspective - Michael Freeden III. Boundary Disputes: The Political and Other Spheres Introduction - Heinz-Gerhard Haupt Drawing Boundaries between Politics and Religion: Early Modern Politics Revisited - Matthias Pohlig Political Economy and Statistics in the Late Ancien Régime - Lars Behrisch Laws as the Basis and Object of Political Communication - Christoph Gusy Depoliticalisation of the Private Life? Reflections on Private Practices and the Political in the Late Soviet Union - Kirsten Bönker Moving across Boundaries: Rudolf Virchow between Medicine and Politics - Tobias Weidner IV. Violence: Means, Object or End of Political Communication? Introduction - Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey "Catholic and Breton Forever": Violence and the Visual in Early Twentieth-Century France - Eveline G. Bouwers The Limits of the Legitimate: The Quarrel over "Violence" between Autonomist Groups and the German Authorities - Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier Vie chère, Violent Protest, and Visions of Protection: The Vie chère Controversy on the Eve of WWI in France (1905-1914) - Marcel Streng V. Epilogue: Moving beyond the "New" Political History Writing Political History after the "Iconic Turn" - Bettina Brandt The Political, the State, and Governance: Reflections on Essentially Contested Concepts - Thomas Risse Historical Politics Research - Luise Schorn-Schütte The Opening Up of Political History - Henk te Velde Political History Matters: Everyday Life, Things, and Practices - Frank Trentmann Notes on Contributors

The Political as Communicative Space in History: The Bielefeld Approach Willibald Steinmetz and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt Political History and its Discontents: Towards a New Consensus? There was a time when political history was declared outdated by promi-nent members of the historical profession in most Western countries. The high point of the assault on political history was reached in the 1970s and 1980s under the double blow of, first, social history, and second, cultural history. It is true that the traditional topics of political history - the rise and fall of nations, the making and unmaking of constitutions, the strategies of political parties, the encounters between great leaders and the people, in short: the business of government - continued to dominate teaching in schools and universities as well as TV documentaries and popular text-books. However, although still an important subject, this kind of conven-tional political history had lost much of its former attraction by the 1970s, especially among younger scholars. The slackening of interest was due partly to the fascination exerted by new and until then largely unexplored fields such as gender history, the history of the body and sexuality, or the history of marginal and subaltern groups. Furthermore, critics were dis-satisfied with the unresponsiveness of traditional political historians to new methods and approaches such as comparison, discourse analysis, or the study of images. At times, these discontents culminated in more funda-mental calls for a paradigm shift in the entire discipline. Politics, it was claimed, was only a dependent variable in the historical process. The real forces shaping long-term developments were assumed to be either socio-economic "structural" constraints, or the mentalities and sign systems that - together - make up the "culture" inhabited by the historical agents and informing their beliefs and behaviour. Political history, the critics argued, had to be dethroned from its top position, because social history, or respectively cultural history, possessed much more explanatory potential. The French historians of the Annales school were among the earliest, and most outspoken, opponents of political history. They not only refused the positivistic traditions of French republican history, but struggled against the priority of politics in historical writings in general. As Jacques Le Goff stated in 1978 - nearly fifty years after the founding of the Annales journal - the fight was not over yet: "Detrôner l'histoire politique, ce fut l'objectif numéro un des Annales, et cela reste un souci de premier rang de l'histoire nouvelle." Not surprisingly, this massive challenge caused angry reactions and a stiffening of attitudes with some practitioners of old-style political history, whereas it encouraged others, in France and elsewhere, to promote revisions and apply new concepts to the historical study of politics. Thus, René Rémond, historian of the French Right, coordinated a volume defending political history in 1988 in which he defined its goal in almost Weberian terms: to study the political as an "activité qui se rapporte à la conquête, à l'exercice, à la pratique du pouvoir." And Jacques Julliard, historian of the French Left and labour movement, directed the attention of historians to the "strategies of actors in the face of historical necessities" and stated that "in modern societies, the interrelations are sufficiently numerous to give birth to events, institutions, and even structures that are sufficiently complex for the word political to remain the only one capable of describing them." Political history as a history of structures, not just events, became conceivable. From another angle, cultural history in France was particularly productive in questioning the practice of political history. Important works on political culture, such as Mona Ozouf's study on revolutionary celebra-tions (1976), as well as a sustained interest in national myths and the rituals of memory were outcomes of this shift of focus. Pierre Nora's project on the French Lieux de mémoire (1984-1992) found international followers and brought the content, form, agents, and effects of myth making and memory building to the attention of political historians. In spite of, or rather because of the Annales historians' criticisms, and inspired also by the works of social scientists like Pierre Rosanvallon, Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, French political history has again become a differentiated and lively field of historical research. Objections to conventional political history were less pronounced in Anglo-American academia than in France. British historian Susan Pedersen could state in a 2002 article on the prospects of the discipline, that the "study of politics has always been the British historian's first concern", and she only cautiously criticised her fellow political historians for still concen-trating primarily on the doings of statesmen and stateswomen, party orga-nisations, parliamentary affairs, and governmental and electoral politics. Similarly, Mark H. Leff adopted only a mildly revisionist tone in his 1995 article on the state of U.S. political history for the centennial issue of the American Historical Review. As a "working definition" that reflected "com-mon practice", he put forward that "political history deals with the devel-opment and impact of governmental institutions, along with the proximate influences on their actions." While he had some harsh words to say about conservative historians who abhorred multiculturalism and wanted to im-pose an orthodox, "patriotic" view of U.S. political history, the only inno-vations he found worth commenting upon were, first, the abortive "new political history" of the 1960s and 1970s relying solely on quantitative methods; second, the more successful, qualitative approach of "new institutionalists" such as Theda Skocpol who aimed at explaining how public policy was shaped by complex "interactions between governmental structure, legislative actions, private groups, and underlying social assump-tions", and third, the endeavours of some historians of labour, gender, and race relations to more thoroughly consider the "infrapolitics of oppressed groups" as yet another element for explaining institutional and policy changes. In the meantime, however, major challenges for political history in the Anglophone world came from the sidelines rather than the core of the discipline. As in France, cultural history and the (comparative) history of nation building introduced new themes, approaches, and concepts to political history. Lynn Hunt's books on the symbolic and gendered dimen-sions of political culture in the French Revolution (1984, 1992), Eric Hobs-bawm's and Terence Ranger's collection of essays on the "invention" of tradition (1983), Linda Colley's work on the "forging" of Britons and the British nation (1992), and, most notably, the path-breaking study on "imag-ined communities" by Benedict Anderson, specialist on South East Asian history (1983), all helped historians to contend with the fact that the politi-cal communities they wrote about: states, nations, peoples, empires, and so on, were "constructed" entities in the first place, entities that could not be treated as given, but whose emergence had to be part of the story. The construction of the polity itself, and along with it, the notions of identity and difference, of citizenship and political space thus came to the fore in the writings of English-speaking political historians.

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