Contents
Main
Project
People
Events
Contact
Publications
Links
Pasi Ihalainen, PhD, adjunct professor, Acting Professor of General History, Visiting Research Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala (until 11 June 2010)
As the leader of the project, I supervise the work of the researchers and take care of administrative duties. Yet my research interests are related to the themes of the project throughout. Having previously done comparative research on political meanings communicated by sermons given to parliaments and diets, I have recently completed a comparative analysis of the uses of the concepts of democracy and popular sovereignty in late-eighteenth-century British and Swedish parliamentary debates. I am also coordinating an international project of twenty-three scholars who discuss Scandinavian political cultures in the Age of Revolutions and contribute myself with a co-authored chapter on the debates of the Swedish and Finnish diets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My more recent interests include interconnections between parliamentary debates and the rising extra-parliamentary media in this period (including the Netherlands) and the analysis of the changing meaning of the concept of politics in Swedish and Finnish parliamentary debates from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. I am also one of the editors of a project aimed at compiling a European conceptual history of parliament.
Moving from the eighteenth to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I shall provide long-term historical background for the other sub-projects. I intend to write an article analysing several debates in which two politicians confronted one another verbally in Parliament regarding constitutional issues. I am particularly interested in finding out how the debaters redefined key constitutional concepts (the people, sovereignty, representation, democracy) in order to win the argument in constitutional disputes. Furthermore, I shall write at least one article summarising the results of the project and considering possibilities for further research.
I am a member of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions and of the History of Political and Social Concepts Group. Together with Academy Professor Kari Palonen’s project, I have applied for the membership of the EuParl Network. Furthermore, I am a part-time Senior Researcher in the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Political Thought and Conceptual Change.
Selection of publications:
The Discourse on Political Pluralism in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Helsinki 1999, 375 pp., diss.).
Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of the English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 1685–1772 (Leiden and Boston 2005, 686 pp.). [Link]
“I vilken mån talades det om folksuveränitet och representativ demokrati på den svenska riksdagen 1771–1772?”, Historisk Tidskrift för Finland, 2/2008, pp. 125–159.
Ihalainen, Pasi & Kari Palonen, “Parliamentary sources in the comparative study of conceptual history: methodological aspects and illustrations of a research proposal”. Parliaments, Estates & Representation, Vol. 29, 2009, pp. 17-34.
Agents of the People: Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public Debates, 1734–1800 (Leiden and Boston 2010). [Link]
Contact me via email:
pasi.t.ihalainen _at_ jyu.fi
tel. +358 (0)14 260 1284
GSM +358 (0)0400 247457
[More information about Pasi and his other publications please click here.]