David Zaret – författare

Petitioning was the main route by which the agency of subjects engaged the authority of rulers. Most studies explore it as a practice for sending requests to central and local representatives of state power in empires, kingdoms, and city-states. Yet the practice occurs in other fields of power, for example, in medieval papal governance, seigneurial regimes and other types of lordship, e.g., queenship. Petition-and-response was the inverse twin to command-and-obey, and just as inherent and indispensable for managing pre-modern power relations. Requests by petitioners were endlessly diverse. Petitions were the universal request form for subjects who sought assistance with every conceivable problem or opportunity. In addition to resolving conflicts with other subjects or officials, there were requests for appointments, promotions to higher positions or social ranks, exemptions, pardons, privileges, pensions, salary increases, charitable relief, and more. Some petitioners were docile and ingenuous; others were ingenious, even predatory petitioners whose initiatives reveal high levels of agency.This is the first truly comparative analysis of pre-modern petitioning across Eurasia. Across a wide range of historical case studies and cutting against the grain of the dominant, one-dimensional social science perspective on pre-modern power relations, David Zaret shows petitioning in pre-modern Eurasia to have been a dynamic tool of state, and not (as is often assumed) merely an instrument of protest or imitation of religious prayer. Comparative study shows the practice to have been remarkably uniform, and one whose ubiquity and prominence are astounding for its diverse socio-cultural contexts: there are Sumerian, Akkadian, and Aramaic petitions in ancient Mesopotamia, demotic petitions in Egypt when Pharaohs ruled, then Greek ones after imposition of Ptolemaic rule. Other contexts for the practice include Zoroastrian Persia, Hellenic and Roman cultures of benefaction, Christianity, Islam, Daoism, Confucianism, and the syncretic mix of Shinto and Buddhism in Japan.In so doing, Zaret bridges literatures of two fields and makes important contributions to both - historical research on petitioning, which is often confined to case studies, and theories of power relations, arguably the most heavily plowed field in social theory - to offer revisionist perspectives on the fluid nature of power and politics in the pre-modern world.

Petitioning was the main route by which the agency of subjects engaged the authority of rulers. Most studies explore it as a practice for sending requests to central and local representatives of state power in empires, kingdoms, and city-states. Yet the practice occurs in other fields of power, for example, in medieval papal governance, seigneurial regimes and other types of lordship, e.g., queenship. Petition-and-response was the inverse twin to command-and-obey, and just as inherent and indispensable for managing pre-modern power relations. Requests by petitioners were endlessly diverse. Petitions were the universal request form for subjects who sought assistance with every conceivable problem or opportunity. In addition to resolving conflicts with other subjects or officials, there were requests for appointments, promotions to higher positions or social ranks, exemptions, pardons, privileges, pensions, salary increases, charitable relief, and more. Some petitioners were docile and ingenuous; others were ingenious, even predatory petitioners whose initiatives reveal high levels of agency.This is the first truly comparative analysis of pre-modern petitioning across Eurasia. Across a wide range of historical case studies and cutting against the grain of the dominant, one-dimensional social science perspective on pre-modern power relations, David Zaret shows petitioning in pre-modern Eurasia to have been a dynamic tool of state, and not (as is often assumed) merely an instrument of protest or imitation of religious prayer. Comparative study shows the practice to have been remarkably uniform, and one whose ubiquity and prominence are astounding for its diverse socio-cultural contexts: there are Sumerian, Akkadian, and Aramaic petitions in ancient Mesopotamia, demotic petitions in Egypt when Pharaohs ruled, then Greek ones after imposition of Ptolemaic rule. Other contexts for the practice include Zoroastrian Persia, Hellenic and Roman cultures of benefaction, Christianity, Islam, Daoism, Confucianism, and the syncretic mix of Shinto and Buddhism in Japan.In so doing, Zaret bridges literatures of two fields and makes important contributions to both - historical research on petitioning, which is often confined to case studies, and theories of power relations, arguably the most heavily plowed field in social theory - to offer revisionist perspectives on the fluid nature of power and politics in the pre-modern world.

Petitioning was the main route by which the agency of subjects engaged the authority of rulers. Most studies explore it as a practice for sending requests to central and local representatives of state power in empires, kingdoms, and city-states. Yet the practice occurs in other fields of power, for example, in medieval papal governance, seigneurial regimes and other types of lordship, e.g., queenship. Petition-and-response was the inverse twin to command-and-obey, and just as inherent and indispensable for managing pre-modern power relations. Requests by petitioners were endlessly diverse. Petitions were the universal request form for subjects who sought assistance with every conceivable problem or opportunity. In addition to resolving conflicts with other subjects or officials, there were requests for appointments, promotions to higher positions or social ranks, exemptions, pardons, privileges, pensions, salary increases, charitable relief, and more. Some petitioners were docile and ingenuous; others were ingenious, even predatory petitioners whose initiatives reveal high levels of agency.This is the first truly comparative analysis of pre-modern petitioning across Eurasia. Across a wide range of historical case studies and cutting against the grain of the dominant, one-dimensional social science perspective on pre-modern power relations, David Zaret shows petitioning in pre-modern Eurasia to have been a dynamic tool of state, and not (as is often assumed) merely an instrument of protest or imitation of religious prayer. Comparative study shows the practice to have been remarkably uniform, and one whose ubiquity and prominence are astounding for its diverse socio-cultural contexts: there are Sumerian, Akkadian, and Aramaic petitions in ancient Mesopotamia, demotic petitions in Egypt when Pharaohs ruled, then Greek ones after imposition of Ptolemaic rule. Other contexts for the practice include Zoroastrian Persia, Hellenic and Roman cultures of benefaction, Christianity, Islam, Daoism, Confucianism, and the syncretic mix of Shinto and Buddhism in Japan.In so doing, Zaret bridges literatures of two fields and makes important contributions to both - historical research on petitioning, which is often confined to case studies, and theories of power relations, arguably the most heavily plowed field in social theory - to offer revisionist perspectives on the fluid nature of power and politics in the pre-modern world.

This innovative work of historical sociology locates the origins of modern democratic discourse in the emergent culture of printing in early modern England. For David Zaret, the key to the rise of a democratic public sphere was the impact of this culture of printing on the secrecy and privilege that shrouded political decisions in seventeenth-century England. Zaret explores the unanticipated liberating effects of printing and printed communication in transforming the world of political secrecy into a culture of open discourse and eventually a politics of public opinion. Contrary to those who locate the origins of the public sphere in the philosophical tracts of the French Enlightenment, Zaret claims that it originated as a practical accomplishment, propelled by economic and technical aspects of printing--in particular heightened commercialism and increased capacity to produce texts. Zaret writes that this accomplishment gained impetus when competing elites--Royalists and Parliamentarians, Presbyterians and Independents--used printed material to reach the masses, whose leaders in turn invoked the authority of public opinion to lobby those elites.Zaret further shows how the earlier traditions of communication in England, from ballads and broadsides to inn and alehouse conversation, merged with the new culture of print to upset prevailing norms of secrecy and privilege. He points as well to the paradox for today's critics, who attribute the impoverishment of the public sphere to the very technological and economic forces that brought about the means of democratic discourse in the first place.