This book explores the nature and evolution of classical parliamentarism by reexamining its most significant exponents. Probing parliamentarism’s main ideological currents against the backdrop of events, it tells a riveting story about the historical ascent and intellectual elaboration of parliamentary institutions, from the eighteenth century to the end of World War I.
William Selinger argues that parliamentarism is a coherent tradition of thought and practice and among the greatest institutional achievements of political modernity. Institutionally, parliamentary government rests on the pillars of a powerful legislature, a constitutional monarch, robust party competition, and ministers present in parliament, while its practice is oriented by the norms of representation, deliberation, executive responsibility, and harmony as well as balance of powers. So understood, parliamentarism originated in Britain as an attempt to resolve the revolutionary crisis of the seventeenth century, yet it was influentially theorized in the course and aftermath of the French Revolution, whose key thinkers helped generalize the English experience into a global model. Arguing that parliamentarism should be considered among the most important legacies of the French Revolution, the book aims to restore its theoretical stature and contemporary relevance.
The inquiry is organized in six chapters, two of which are more contextual, while the rest showcase the great champions of the parliamentarian cause: Burke, Constant, Tocqueville, and Mill. Each chapter does substantial work, adding new material and revisiting already established theses in light of new contexts. The argument is framed by a programmatic introduction and a conclusion that takes the inquiry into the twentieth century with a brief homage to Max Weber. Though focusing on England and France, Selinger conceptualizes parliamentarism in contrast to American constitutionalism as the main alternative for how to be liberal in the modern world.
Learned, stimulating, and highly readable, Selinger’s account lays the groundwork for rethinking liberal institutions and norms—an urgent task today—and raises the fundamental questions that such a rethinking must address. Engaging with numerous literatures, it navigates astutely between history and theory; between recasting celebrated thinkers in a new, often contentious, light and canvassing the intellectual context, in which figures largely forgotten today such as Jean-Louis de Lolme or the so-called Edinburgh Reviewers are given their historical due. The book as a whole offers an informed reflection on the aspirations that have underpinned parliamentary institutions, helping us appreciate their intellectual and moral foundations.
“Appreciate” is an important verb here. Although much contemporary scholarship is animated by the urge to deconstruct traditional narratives about liberalism and to unmask their oppressive hypocrisy, this account makes a spirited case for liberal norms and practices. To make that case, it paints the complex panorama of events and considerations within which parliamentary politics unfolded, and of the political and moral trade-offs with which it was confronted. Nor is hypocrisy passed over in silence. Zooming in on the problem of corruption, the troubling question of whether parliamentary government, premised on persuasion, negotiation, and consensual social change, is achievable in practice is the book’s central concern.
Admirably ambitious, Selinger’s inquiry is not equally successful in all it proposes to achieve. For one, the aspiration to attend to individual thinkers, often against the grain of scholarly consensus, while also fitting them into a larger narrative, is productive of tensions that are not easy to reconcile. This problem is especially acute in the case of Montesquieu, who is targeted in every chapter yet not systematically discussed. If the contention, running through the book, that Montesquieu got England wrong is to be persuasive, a more sustained engagement with his complex constitutionalism would be necessary. Tocqueville is another uneasy fit in Selinger’s narrative. The claim that Tocqueville preferred British-style parliamentary government to the United States’s one forces the question (pondered by François Furet) of why it was to America, not England, that Tocqueville traveled to gather constitutional wisdom. Also, by assuming a linear progression, the narrative obscures the degree to which earlier authors may have been aware of possibilities that transpired later in time, as well as the role this awareness played in the constitutional solutions they championed. Weber’s worry, for example, that democratization elevates the executive would not have surprised Tocqueville or the American framers.
If closer attention to individual authors would have been desirable, so would bringing in more context, especially at junctures where theory and practice seem to part ways. Queen Victoria is a case in point. Selinger avers that Constant’s idea of a neutral monarchy elevated above the political fray became a constitutional common sense in Victorian Britain, to which the monarch herself scrupulously adhered. In the same breath, however, he notes that Victoria “was quite involved in political affairs behind the scenes” (p. 166). Though flagged, the distance between appearance and reality is not probed; and without probing how parliamentary principles worked (or did not) in practice, their value cannot be fully appreciated. Full appreciation likewise demands an engagement with the empire. Is it a coincidence that parliamentarism achieved its historical zenith at the time when Britain attained global hegemony? How did the Victorians reconcile parliamentary norms with ruling over dependencies? And to what extent did “the culture of political deliberation” (p. 177) they celebrated require the systematic exclusion of certain groups, views, and policy areas? Without an honest reckoning with these questions and with Parliament’s role in shaping imperial and social policy, parliamentarism cannot be fully understood.
A comment on the conceptual frame. In explicating parliamentarism’s core values of representation, deliberation, and responsibility, Selinger leaves out of the account (and from the index) a pivotal one: sovereignty. This is all the more striking because the concept, present throughout the book, pervades the Victorian debates. As chapter 6 shows more than tells, the gist of Selinger’s story and its key dilemma—the problem of corruption—cannot come into full view without the lens of sovereignty. Take Macaulay’s History of England, which argued that patronage had become necessary in a period Selinger dubs “transitional” when “the House of Commons was no longer overawed by the Crown but not yet dependent on public opinion” (p. 190). Patronage, on that view, was deployed to manage the change from monarchical to popular sovereignty. Once the Commons were recognized as the “true sovereign of the state” (in Mill’s words, p. 167), its “daily practical supremacy” (in Bagehot’s, p. 175) made patronage, for some at least, no longer necessary.
If glossing over sovereignty leaves out crucial aspects of the conceptual history, it stands in the way of realizing Selinger’s agenda to reclaim classical parliamentarianism for political theory and contemporary concerns. This agenda is often articulated in the language of regimes. The introductory chapter suggests that the rise of parliamentarism should be understood in contradistinction to democracy (p. 5). Later on, the US Constitution is said to be the “defining antagonist” (p. 144) and “a political regime very different from parliamentarism” (p. 145). These claims and the meaning of regime that undergirds them are puzzling and unexplained. So is the assertion that parliamentarism constitutes “an entirely different tradition” (p. 83) from the ideological legacy—republicanism, democracy, human rights—usually associated with the French Revolution. What Selinger gestures at is that classical typologies, which define regimes according to the locus of sovereignty, are no longer relevant in a world where most polities, including Weber’s “decisive political alternative” (p. 203)—the USSR—are (or were) based on popular sovereignty and representative institutions. So how to rethink the notion of regime, and of political alternatives, in the twenty-first century is a question that may restore parliamentarism, as Selinger envisions it, to the frontline of theoretical debates.
This brings me to Carl Schmitt, parliamentarism’s greatest detractor. Making two cameo appearances, Schmitt is the éminence grise lurking behind Selinger’s account and its stated concern with reconciling parliamentarism and democracy. Schmitt famously insisted on the incompatibility between the two and the necessity to choose between undemocratic liberalism and democratic dictatorship. Although not engaging with it directly, Selinger dubs Schmitt’s analysis “prophetic” (p. 204). If the intellectual history of classical parliamentarism can bear on contemporary concerns, it is by helping us address the Schmittian challenge. As it stands, Selinger’s argument is not yet up to this task. It is, nevertheless, an impressive beginning.
