In the King's Shadow E-Book

Philip Manow

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 220

Beschreibung

It is commonly assumed that the rise of modern democracies put an end to the spectacular and ceremonial aspects of political rule that were so characteristic of monarchies and other earlier regimes. The medieval idea that the king had two bodies - a mortal physical body and an eternal political body - strikes us today as alien and remote from our understanding of politics: with the transition from monarchy to modern representative democracy, the idea of the body politic was abandoned. Or was it? In this remarkable and highly original book Philip Manow shows that the body politic, though so often pronounced dead, remains alive in modern democracies. It is just one of the many ideas that we have inherited from our predecessors and that continue to shape our modern forms of political life. Why did the semi-circle become the main seating plan for modern parliaments? Why do we think that parliament should mirror the diversity of society? Why does the president's motorcade always have more than one identical-looking Cadillac? Why do we pay so much attention to the physical features and appearance - the body - of our political leaders today? In answering these and other questions Manow sheds fresh light on the pre-modern origins of our modern political institutions and practices and shows convincingly that all political power - including democracy - requires and produces its own political mythology.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

1: Does the Republic Have a Body?

Notes

2: Parliament as Body Politic – House Seating Plans

2.1  Does democracy have no imagery?

2.2  Basic parliamentary seating plans and how they came about

2.3  The shadow of the king's body

2.4  The parliamentarization of divine right doctrine

Notes

3: Parliament as Body Politic – Immunity, Publicity, Proportionality and Discontinuity

3.1  Republican body-snatching

3.2  ‘A degree of sanctity’ – parliamentary immunity

3.3  The parliamentary puppet can speak! – the question of public debate

3.4  ‘A recognizable likeness of the populace’ – parliamentary proportionality

3.5  

Le parlement ne meurt jamais?

Parliamentary discontinuity

3.6  Farewell to the body of the people?

Notes

4: Democratic Bodies/Despotic Bodies

4.1  Deputies and Doubles

4.2  In corpore/in effigie (1)

4.3  In corpore/in effigie (2)

4.4  In corpore/in effigie (3)

4.5  Hot and cold representation

4.6  Violent/thaumaturgic

4.7  

Dignitas/humanitas

4.8  Disenchantment/Re-enchantment

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Tables

Table 2.1:  Basic types of parliamentary seating arrangement

Table 2.2:  Place from which members address parliament

Table 2.3:  Overview 1: A chronology of modern parliamentary seating plans

List of Illustrations

Figure 1  The parliament chamber in the Palais des Tuileries

Source

:  Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes, Paris

Figure 2  The Manège in Paris

Source

:  Suhrkamp Verlag picture archive

Figure 3  The converted Salle des Menus-Plaisirs (arch. Pâris), 1789

Source

:  Suhrkamp Verlag picture archive

Figure 4  Plans for the conversion of the Madeleine church, 1791

Source

:  Suhrkamp Verlag picture archive

Figure 5  Frontispiece of Hobbes's

Leviathan

, 1651

Source

:  British Library, London

Figure 6  Charles VII at a

lit de justice

, 1458

Source

:  Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, aus München BSB, Cod. Gall. 6, fol. 2v

Figure 7  Assembly in Appenzell, Switzerland, eighteenth century

Source

:  Bibliothèque nationale de France Landesarchiv Appenzell

Figure 8  The Body Politic, or the March of the Intellect

Source

:  National Library of Medicine, Bethseda

Figure 9  Food for thought for crowned impostors

Source

:  Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

Figure 10  The blood of the dead cries for vengeance

Source

:  Suhrkamp Verlag picture archive

Figure 11  Le Gouvernement de Robespierre

Source

:  Art media/Heritage–Images

Figure 12  A US soldier destroys a portrait of Saddam Hussein

Source

:  Reuters/CORBIS, Düsseldorf

Figure 13  ‘Studies of a man suspended by his left leg’ by Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530)

Source

:  Devonshire Collection, ChatsworthReproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees

Figure 14  Mussolini's corpse on the Piazzale Loreto, Milan

Source

:  akg-images, Berlin

Figure 15  The busts of Necker and the Duc d'Orléans

Source

:  Courtesy of Madame Tussaud's Attractions

Figure 16  Berlusconi's hair transplant – before

Source

:  Ullstein Bild – Unkel, Berlin

Figure 17  Berlusconi's hair transplant – after

Source

:  Ullstein Bild – AP, Berlin

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

CHAPTER 1

Index

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First published in German as Im Schatten des Königs © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 2008

This English edition © Polity Press, 2010

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the German Publishers & Booksellers Association.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4766-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4767-8(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9472-6(epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9379-8(mobi)

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1Does the Republic Have a Body?

Rex est populus: this is how Thomas Hobbes summed up his theory of political representation during the years of the English Civil War. This conception of king as people, ‘because the people manifests itself as a unit through the single royal will’ (Duso 2006: 24), was directed against the Parliamentarians, who, in their polemical writings, ascribed the function of ‘representing the kingdom as a whole’ to parliament rather than the king (Skinner 2005: 163). The English Revolution ended in a constitutional compromise, which left the king – and the House of Lords – with their eminent function of representation. In the French Revolution, however, the idea of an exclusively parliamentary representation of the new sovereign, the people, triumphed over the principle of (full or partial) monarchical representation of the nation. Now ‘the Convention is the People’ (quoted from Heurtin 2005: 768): that is, the people manifests (and constitutes) itself as a political unit through the popular will expressed by parliament (see section 3.2 in chapter 3 of this volume). Although not completely undisputed, this idea of parliamentary representation of the sovereign people still dominates our democratic imaginary. In 1962, in a speech in the French Assemblée Nationale, Paul Reynaud explained: ‘In all civilized countries, parliament is seen as the representative of the nation. When the elected deputies debate and vote, they have this special quality of representing the nation. For us republicans, France exists here and nowhere else.’ This did not go without contradiction in the Assembly. Deputy Roulland protested: ‘It [France] is not only on your side’, while Guillon declared that ‘France exists in the people’ (all quotes from Mopin 1998: 159).