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This volume investigates the history of the representative assemblies of Sweden (the riksdag), Poland (the sejm) and Hungary (the diaeta) in the final period of the ancien régime. It concentrates on the practices and ideas of parliamentarism and constitutionalism, and examines the ideologies that motivated the members of these parliaments. Attempts at the suppression as well as the restoration of the estates' power in all these three countries are examined, as well as, in the case of Hungary, the establishment of popular representation that eventually replaced the estates. These three early modern representative assemblies have never before been explored systematically in a comparative framework.
List of contents
Introduction: parliamentarism in the age of absolutism / Comparing Representative Institutions: the historiography and the challenges / Chapter 1: The peasant estate of Sweden: its rise and early modern evolution / Chapter 2: The 'common good' or the particularism of the nobility? The political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the first half of the eighteenth century / Chapter 3: Instruments of Conviction in the Political Culture of eighteenth-century Hungary / Chapter 4: The Estates in the middle: populist absolutism and constitutionalism in early modern Swedish politics / Chapter 5: From confession to constitution: the motivation of the Hungarian political elite in the middle of the eighteenth century / Chapter 6: Maria Theresa's Monarchy: between inheritable merits and remunerable loyalty / Chapter 7: Political ambition: The concept in Montesquieu and in his Hungarian reception, 1748-1848 / Chapter 8: Domicilium libertatis or a threat to liberty? Eighteenth-century discussions on the role and place of the Sejm within the system of government of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth / Chapter 9: The growth of political instability and the royal coup in Sweden, c. 1760-1780 / Chapter 10: Pragmatism triumphant: Hungary's political culture in the age of the French Revolution / Chapter 11: Role perception in the first modern Hungarian parliament, 1848-1849
About the author
István M. Szijártó is a professor in the Department of Economic and Social History at Eötvös University, Hungary.
Wim Blockmans is professor emeritus in Medieval History at the University of Leiden, Netherlands.
László Kontler is a professor in the Department of History at the Central European University, Austria and Hungary.
