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In this article, I discuss the early history of the expression of the European Parliament and analyse the political points of its different rhetorical nuances and connotations. I shall use as the background a wider discussion on the politics of naming, indebted to the rhetorical work of Quentin Skinner as well as to the historical repertoire of alternative titles for parliamentary assemblies. The expression “European Parliament” had already been in use in the post-war years, first among the pro-federalist wing of the European movement. In the initial sitting of the ECSC Common Assembly on 13 September 1952, Théodore Lefevre spoke of the Assembly as “la première à mériter le nom de ‘Parlement européen’” in the sense of both describing and legitimising the political novelty of that Assembly. In the Ad Hoc Assembly’s debates on the constitutional draft for the European Political Community in 1952/1953, which proposed a supranational parliamentary government, the expression—first in French and then in English—became a colloquial title for the two chambers of the Parliament of the European Political Community. The European Parliamentary Assembly of the EEC changed its name to the European Parliament on 30 March 1962. The title European Parliament has been used both for an existing assembly with a low “parliamentarity” and for a future assembly with full parliamentary powers.

Within academia as much as in political practice, democracy remains a contested concept. This issue focuses on the practices of the contestation of the concept of democracy—the debates, controversies, and contestations of democracy in theory, practice, and in historical perspectives. Special emphasis is put on the concept of liberal democracy—i.e, the form that democracy mostly takes nowadays. The key argument is that (liberal) democracy has always been contested as a concept, and it is still contested today. The thematic issue contains a selection of articles that analyse ways and modes of debating and contesting (liberal) democracy, from the past to the present.

In this article, the value of knowledge in politics is re-examined from the perspective of the rhetorical tradition. This alternative model contends that, unlike the assumptions made by such influential strands of scholarship as epistemic governance and knowledge brokerage, the disputability of knowledge derives from both the political actor(s) and their audience(s). Our aim is to deal with scholarly knowledge as it plays an inherent part in the parliamentary proce-dures and practices, when debating the items on the agenda from opposing points of view. Our research approach is to discuss the ideas of two major political theorists, Max Weber and Quentin Skinner, who both consider knowledge in politics in terms of interventions in debate. The main finding is that both authors regard 'knowledge' either as new arguments contrib-uting to an existing debate or as rhetorical moves to pursue new directions for debate. We examine this debate model of knowledge in relation to the practices of academic and parlia-mentary debates, the role of experts and officials in the parliamentary control practices, the rhetorical use of scientific knowledge by parliamentarians in the German Bundestag, and the role of parliamentarians as lay-scholars in the European Parliament. Finally, the debate model is applied to government officials' claims to monopolise the interpretation of the existing situ-ation, thereby restricting the extent of legitimate political discussion: the point of parliamen-tary debate and the responsibility of politicians concerns the situational judgment as well as the evaluation of the alternatives. En este artículo, se reexamina el valor del conocimiento en la política desde la perspectiva de la tradición retórica. Este modelo alternativo sostiene que, a diferencia de las suposiciones real-izadas por corrientes académicas influyentes como la gobernanza epistémica y la intermedi-ación del conocimiento, la disputabilidad del conocimiento deriva tanto del actor o actores políticos como de su(s) audiencia(s). Nuestro objetivo es abordar el conocimiento académico como una parte inherente en los procedimientos y prácticas parlamentarias, especialmente en los debates sobre los temas en agenda desde puntos de vista opuestos. Nuestra metodología de investigación consiste en analizar las ideas de dos destacados teóricos políticos, Max Weber y Quentin Skinner, quienes consideran el conocimiento en política en términos de interven-ciones en el debate. La principal conclusión es que ambos autores ven el 'conocimiento' ya sea como nuevos argumentos que contribuyen a un debate existente o como movimientos retóricos destinados a impulsar nuevas direcciones en la discusión. Examinamos este modelo de debate del conocimiento en relación con las prácticas de los debates académicos y parlamentarios, el papel de los expertos y funcionarios en las prácticas de control parlamentario, el uso retórico del conocimiento científico por parte de los parlamentarios en el Bundestag alemán, y el rol de los parlamentarios como académicos no especializados en el Parlamento Europeo. Finalmente, se aplica este modelo de debate a las afirmaciones de los funcionarios gubernamentales que buscan monopolizar la interpretación de la situación existente, restringiendo así el alcance de una discusión política legítima: el objetivo del debate parlamentario y la responsabilidad de los políticos radica en el juicio situacional y en la evaluación de las alternativas.

Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as the “Word of the Year 2016”, while the association of German linguists (Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache) did the same for “postfaktische Politik”. “Alternative facts”, launched by Kellyanne Conway concerning the attendance at Donald Trump’s inaugural, was a third variant in this cluster. In this article, I shall discuss Max Weber’s parliamentary perspective on the critique of given facts and of the powers of science in relation to the debates around post-truth politics. A critical assessment of Leo Strauss’s critique of Weber as a nihilist and relativist introduces the problematic. One aim of the article is to illustrate how even trivial slogans can be situated in the history of political concepts, political theory and rhetoric.

Parliamentary theory, practices, discourses, and institutions constitute a distinctively European contribution to modern politics. Taking a broad historical perspective, this cross-disciplinary, innovative, and rigorous collection locates the essence of parliamentarism in four key aspects-deliberation, representation, responsibility, and sovereignty-and explores the different ways in which they have been contested, reshaped, and implemented in a series of representative national and regional case studies. As one of the first comparative studies in conceptual history, this volume focuses on debates about the nature of parliament and parliamentarism within and across different European countries, representative institutions, and genres of political discourse.

The practices of debate are for Weber inherent to the very concept of scholarship. My aim in this essay is to offer along this line a parliamentary interpretation for Weber's writings on the status of values in the research process. My focus lies in Weber's Wertfreiheit essay and his university writings. I discuss Weber's concept of academic freedom with Quentin Skinner's neo-Roman opposition between freedom and dependence and its application to the Westminster parliamentary politics in terms of free mandate and free speech of the members. Weber's distinction between Wertfreiheit (value freedom) and Wertbeziehung (value relation) rougly corresponds to dualism between debates on the items on the parliamentary agenda and the procedural debates of parliamentary agenda-setting. Although the parallels between parliamentary and academic debate are incomplete, parliamentary analogies to scholarly debates are worth discussing. I further illustrate the parliamentary model of debates and Weber's applications of it with examples from contemporary university politics. It is not difficult to detect striking parallels to the situation of the Wilhelmine Germany and contemporary tendencies to build new forms of dependence for both agenda-setting and debate.

Politicisation, in a broad and basic understanding, means to turn something – an issue, an institution, a policy – that previously was not a subject to political action into something that now is subject to political action. So far, most definitions of the concept would agree. But besides this basic approach, there is much discussion: Politicisation is a concept that is currently much used in the social sciences, and also a concept that is contested in its definitions and understandings. Several paths and subdisciplines contribute to the debate, but they are not necessarily connected to one another. Political theory or political economy discusses politicisation and also what can be termed the counter-concept, depoliticisation, theoretically and often with a normative background, whereas comparative politics and EU studies have increasingly taken to deliver empirical studies on the politicisation of the European Union. These latter studies most often rely on the indicators of salience, actor involvement and polarisation in and of political debates and processes. International Relations, last not least, increasingly discusses the politicisation of international politics and international organisations. This is why the contributions in this Critical Exchange bring together differing strands of the debate and aim to rethink politicisation in both theoretical and empirical understandings and usages. Kari Palonen starts the exchange with an overview on historical usages of the concept. Claudia Wiesner follows with an approach to challenges and possible pathways of concept specification. Veith Selk discusses politicisation and its linkages to populism. Niilo Kauppi and Hans-Jo¨rg Trenz, as well as Claire Dupuy and Virginie van Ingelgom, critically regard the state of the art in studying EU politicisation and depoliticisation. Philip Liste closes with a discussion of the linkages between the concepts of juridification, depoliticisation, and politicisation in transnational politics. Taken together, the contributions raise a number of crucial issues in the academic debate on politicisation: the conception of politics and the political that politicisation relates to, its linkage to depoliticisation and juridification, and the relation of politicisation and populism.

The author argues that conceptual history is becoming increasingly indispensable due to the historical trend in political practices to move from a politics of answers to given questions to a politics of thematizing the questions themselves, that is, of agenda-setting. The very understanding of a certain question as contingent and controversial marks a politicizing change in the agenda. From the perspective of the history of concepts, the formulation of questions themselves become politically key issues, given that rhetorical problems of the renaming and reinterpretation of the meaning, significance and normative color of concepts play a key role in the decisions regarding inclusion and exclusion. Assuming that concepts function as \"pivots\" in the contemporary controversy, there is at least some possibility for change in terms of rendering the controversy intelligible by means of the instruments of conceptual history. If conceptual history were ever to play a direct political role, it might concern teaching politicians the styles of both a conceptual reading of politics and a political reading of the uses of concepts.