Vergaderen. Verhoofsing en parlementarisering

Samenvatting

Holding Meetings. Courtization and Parliamentarization. The way people hold and used to hold meetings, in Dutch Vergaderen’, i.e. to gather, to confer and to decide on their common future, is a suitable object for further investigation into the civilizing process in the wake of Norbert Elias. The transformation of warrior into parliamentary upper classes from the Middle Ages onwards is part of a development, in the course of which fighting with words replaced more and more fighting with weapons. Two successive stages can be distinguished within this civilizing process: courtization and parliamentarization. On the basis of prescriptions for speaking found in manner books and the precepts of manuals and textbooks for holding meetings the authors trace the development of two more distinguished and regulated modes of speaking: speaking in predominantly public meetings and speaking in predominantly private conversations.