Political Science as a Topic in Post-War German Bundestag Debates.

Already William Gerard Hamilton in his maxims (Parliamentary Logick, first ed. 1808) understood conceptual revisions as important moves in parliamentary rhetoric. The digitalisation of parliamentary debates opens up new chances for conceptual reading. The uses of concepts can be situated to their procedural and rhetorical contexts, the government vs. opposition divide or parliamentary timetables. My broader interest in focusing on parliamentary debates as sources of conceptual changes is to revise my own interpretations on the history of the concept of politics with other source types (esp. Palonen, The Struggle with Time, 2006, 2. edition 2014). The conceptual history of politics in post-WWII (West-) Germany is connected to the history of academic political science. From the Bundestag plenary debates (beginning in September 1949) both the controversies on the political science itself and the contributors of both contemporary scholars and the ‘classics’ of the understanding of politics can be studied. One possibility is to study the conceptual commitments in the use of the discipline titles (Politikwissenschaft, Politische Wissenschaft, Politologie, Politikforschung, Politische Theorie, also political science) and actors (Politologe, Politikprofessor, Politstudent etc). Or we can look at who and how are mentioned in debates, for example political scientists in early West Germany (Dolf Sternberger, Theodor Eschenburg, Wilhelm Hennis), emigrants (Hannah Arendt, Alfred Grosser), remigrants (Ernst Fraenkel, Ossip K. Flechtheim) or theorists preceding academic political science (Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Herman Heller). Formulae from Weber’s Politik als Beruf seem to be most frequently evoked in the Bundestag.