This book offers much-needed insight into the Oxford and Cambridge Unions and the important role they have played in nineteenth-century British political culture. Despite this role, or perhaps for that very reason, the Unions have received very little scholarly attention as to their political activities. This study will focus particularly on debating practices through which their members became knowledgeable of the parliamentary way of doing politics. More significantly, it uses the original Union records as primary research material to show that they also had unique political practices of their own. Presenting a detailed analysis of their debates, the book argues that the Unions should be appreciated as independent political arenas, not mere extensions of Westminster politics.

The Politics of Dissensus inverts the traditional perspective on the study of parliamentary politics by focusing on its less obvious and less well-known aspects. Dissensus instead of consensus becomes the condition for the intelligibility of parliamentary politics. Such politics is indebted to the rhetorical culture of addressing issues from opposite perspectives and debating the alternatives pro et contra: no motion is approved without a thorough examination of, and confrontation among, imaginable alternatives. Establishing the openness of political debating, parliamentarism has become a distinctive historical contribution to the rise of parliamentary democracy. Parliament in Debate refers to the paradigmatic institution for political deliberation, the debates surrounding its legislative activity, as well as the supervision of government and administration. Parliament has become a fascinating object of scrutiny as a political institution adopted and developed by different political traditions. In a nutshell, the book retrieves the study of parliamentary politics to present political theory and action in the parliamentary mode. It is a book on the relevance of parliamentarism to the study of politics and a book on the comparative conceptual and institutional history of parliamentary politics. The Politics of Dissensus: Parliament in Debate is the outcome of an international team of contributors coordinated by two ongoing research projects, relying on a long-lasting international cooperation, namely the Academy of Finland project The Politics of Dissensus and the Spanish National Research Fund projects The Rhetorics of Democracy and The Civic Constellation.

The authors deal with the place of parliamentary politics in democracy. Apparently a truism, parliamentarism is in fact a missing research object in democratic theory, and a devalued institutional reference in democratic politics. Yet the parliamentary culture of politics historically explains the rise and fall of modern democracies. By exploring democracy from the vantage point of parliamentary politics, the book advances a novel research perspective. Aimed at revising current debates on parliamentary politics, democratization and democratic theory, the authors argue the role of the parliamentary culture of politics in democracy, highlighting the argumentative, debating experience of politics to recast both some of democratic theory’s normative assumptions and real democracies’ reform potential.

This alphabetical catalogue documents John Willis Clark's collection of over ten thousand Cambridge-related books, pamphlets and pieces of print.