The Domestication of a Machine. The Debate About Political Parties Around 1900

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, the new party organizations were seen as a threat to established politics: they mobilized the common people by using methods that had previously been in the province of political outsiders. Because the parties affected the state, political scientists who had been used to studying formal state structures now began to study these strange new organizations in society. Eventually, the nineteenth-century organization of outsiders turned into a mainstay of the established liberal democracy. Scholarly comments on this new phenomenon prepared this development. While these comments at first criticized the manipulation of social groups by the parties, they finally presented parties as useful governmental instruments in the hands of responsible politicians. By that time, some of the most appealing aspects of late-nineteenth-century political mobilization had disappeared.