ABSTRACT
This last section of the volume might be regarded as dealing with what has been left over: after the high politics of monarchy and estate debates, the economic dominance of commercial interests and the ever-important emergence of the press, what remains are women and the lower orders. To regard political cultures of such significant groups in society as mere redundancies is, however, to grossly misrepresent one of the main features of the Age of Revolution, namely the ongoing struggle to define a new form of political competence according to criteria involving the individual, which replaced the old one based on the corporate order. This struggle was largely a process of including certain groups and excluding others, and it was felt throughout society. It was primarily the nobility and the ‘middling sorts’ who regarded themselves as citizens, and their resetting of the borders of political participation affected not only those groups that came to be excluded but the state as well, which had to rearrange its modes of treating all groups in society. The eighteenth century saw not only an expansion of opportunity for political participation, but − what is often neglected − it also saw an ever-growing desire on the part of common men and women to take part in politics. This section, therefore, is devoted to the continually shifting boundaries of political participation in Scandinavia in the second half of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries.
