Abstrakt
The author of this paper focuses on Czechs appointed as life peers at the upper house of the Austrian parliament and raises the question of whether and under what conditions one can distinguish a group of Czech civic peers. He does so not by emphasis on the Czech national history, but, on the contrary, by presenting the uniqueness of historical research of the parliamentary political culture, especially that of the upper houses.
The purpose of the paper is to present the process of change of the political culture of Cisleithania on the example of the appointment of the members of the Austrian House of Peers between the years 1900-1908. The author assumes that it is methodologically beneficial to analyse the government recommendations for the emperor in order to study the life careers of peers and note the emphasis on the peers' usefulness to civil society.
It is further showed that relevant to these categories is the social role of the peer, which can be viewed as the most prestigious position in an early modern civil society. The author shows that although the government still used traditional strategies and followed its own interests, it also started at that time to use in its recommendations a new argument, namely collective representation.
This concept is compared to Max Weber's idea of politics as a vocation. The author comes to the conclusion that it is possible to talk of representational politics if the representative of the society or its part (the peer) has gained their trust with a set of socially cognitive merits, which should be used for the representation of the state.