Irish Political Thought under the Union: Visions of Representative Government, 1798-1922

爱尔兰的政治历史长期以来都是通过暴力冲突的镜头来解读的。几个世纪以来，爱尔兰内部的政治关系，以及爱尔兰和英国之间的政治关系，都以国家忠诚和宗教信仰的深刻差异为特征，而政治，反过来，也呈现出一种看似棘手的特征。但爱尔兰的冲突并不仅仅是原始仇恨的结果；它是通过对当代关于政府性质的政治观念的相互冲突的解释来维持的。美国和法国革命帮助改变了对代议制的理解，推动了人民主权和民主的思想进入政治主流，彻底改变了欧洲各国、民族和公民之间的关系。爱尔兰当然不能幸免于这些更广泛的国际和知识潮流。1800年的《联合法案》建立了一个多民族的议会国家。随后，这一解决方案遭到了几代爱尔兰政治活动家和思想家的质疑，他们利用代议制政府的语言来重塑与英国关系的条款。在爱尔兰占主导地位的政治框架是由不同的合法性概念支撑的，这些概念借鉴了民主、人民主权和历史连续性等概念。在每一种主要的意识形态选择中，政体的宪法设置，以及它与帝国所在地的关系，都截然不同。争论的基本领域是代议制政府的构成。在公共生活中释放的宗派主义和暴力是这种意识形态对抗的症状，而不是原因。在探索迄今为止未知的地形在爱尔兰的政治思想在联盟的时代，这个项目开创了爱尔兰历史写作的新方法。标志着英爱关系的暴力、不稳定和接连不断的危机仍然是现有史学的主要焦点，然而这种强调剥夺了这些争论所有严肃的知识内容。最重要的是，它掩盖了对代议制政府性质分歧的重要性。因此，这个项目打破了狭隘的高度政治方法，这种方法往往集中在政治精英的活动上，而是研究了支撑从合并联盟到权力下放和联邦制的一系列宪法建议的哲学假设。政治代表性提出了深刻而全面的问题。因此，该项目在政治范围内探索其中心主题，从有条件的工会主义和契约忠诚的保守党概念，到“主权人民”的共和概念的发展。通过对Henry Grattan、Arthur O’connor、Thomas Addis Emmet、John Wilson Croker、Isaac Butt、Robert Holmes、John mitchell、W. E. H. Lecky、Thaddeus O’malley、Eoin MacNeill、Alice Stopford Green、Hanna sheehyy - skeffington和Patrick Pearse等人物政治思想的考察，我们可以清楚地认识到联邦制爱尔兰代议制政府的多重含义。在漫长的19世纪，联邦为爱尔兰的几代人构建了政治格局，形成了正式权力行使的结构。代议制政府的思想对联邦构成了深刻的挑战：1800年后的印刷文化中，大部分都是关于联邦合法性和遗产的开放式辩论。从这些材料开始，有可能追踪整个时期的辩论，并在此过程中调查政治词汇的连续性和变化。通过这种方式，这个项目将提供一个联盟的思想史，因此将提供19世纪和20世纪初爱尔兰政治思想的第一个持续研究。

The political history of Ireland has long been interpreted through the lens of violent conflict. Over the course of several centuries, political relations within Ireland, and between Ireland and Britain, were marked by profound differences in national allegiance and religion, with politics, in turn, assuming a seemingly intractable character. But conflict in Ireland was not simply the result of primordial hatreds; it was sustained by clashing interpretations of contemporary political ideas about the nature of government. The American and French Revolutions, which helped transform the understanding of representation, propelled ideas of popular sovereignty and democracy into the political mainstream, revolutionising relations between states, nations and citizens across Europe. Ireland was certainly not immune from these wider international and intellectual trends. The Act of Union of 1800 created a multi-national parliamentary state. This settlement was then contested by generations of Irish political activists and thinkers who drew on the language of representative government in order to recast the terms of the British connection. The political frameworks that predominated in Ireland were underpinned by divergent conceptions of legitimacy, drawing on such ideas as democracy, popular sovereignty and historical continuity. Within each of the main ideological alternatives, the constitutional setup of the polity, together with its relationship to the seat of empire, was starkly different. The fundamental area of contention was the constitution of representative government. The sectarianism and violence unleashed in public life were symptoms rather than causes of this ideological antagonism. In exploring the hitherto uncharted terrain of political ideas in Ireland in the era of the Union, this project pioneers a new approach to Irish historical writing. The violence, instability and successive crises that marked the British-Irish connection remain the chief focus of existing historiography, yet this emphasis has deprived these disputes of all serious intellectual content. Above all it has obscured the significance of disagreements over the nature of representative government. Accordingly, this project breaks with a narrowly high political approach, which has tended to concentrate on the activities of the political elite, and examines instead the philosophical assumptions that underpinned the range of constitutional proposals from incorporating union to devolution and federalism. Political representation raised profound and all-encompassing issues. Consequently, the project explores its central theme across the political spectrum, from Tory notions of conditional unionism and contractarian allegiance, to the development of republican conceptualisations of the 'sovereign people'. Through an examination of the political thought of such figures as Henry Grattan, Arthur O'Connor, Thomas Addis Emmet, John Wilson Croker, Isaac Butt, Robert Holmes, John Mitchel, W. E. H. Lecky, Thaddeus O'Malley, Eoin MacNeill, Alice Stopford Green, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and Patrick Pearse, the multiple meanings ascribed to representative government in the Ireland of the Union are thrown into sharp relief. The Union framed the political landscape for successive generations in Ireland across the long nineteenth century, forming the structure under which formal power was wielded. Ideas of representative government profoundly challenged the Union: much of the print culture after 1800 hosted an open-ended debate about the Union's legitimacy and legacy. Beginning with this material, it is possible to track debates across the entire period, and in the process investigate continuities and change in political vocabulary. In this way, this project will offer an intellectual history of the Union, and will therefore offer the first sustained study of political thought in Ireland during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.