The paper focuses on the tendency for parliaments to produce and organizeknowledge according to comprehensive “encyclopaedic” patterns. This featurecan be traced back to the origins of modern parliamentarism and can be studiedtogether with the parallel emergence of the great national encyclopaedias as oneof the predominant intellectual enterprises of the XIX century bourgeoisie. Thepaper maintains that the encyclopaedic pattern is still relevant to understandhow parliaments operate in contemporary democracies, even if we have to takein due consideration the “paradigm shifts” undergone by parliamentaryrepresentation from the XVIII century to the contemporary age. The paper willstart from a short consideration of the essential features that have marked theorigins of modern encyclopaedism with the pathbreaking work of Diderot andD’Alambert; it will then discuss some analogies between the success ofencyclopaedism especially in XIX century Europe and the emergence ofparliamentarism as the form of government of the liberal bourgeoisie;subsequently, it will focus on the changes occurred in the “parliamentaryencyclopaedia” in the XX century; finally, the paper will address the radicalchallenges posed to the parliamentary encyclopaedia in contemporary societies.

Giovanni Rizzoni, "Parliamentarism and encyclopaedism:how Parliaments produce andelaborate knowledge". SOG Working Paper 65, February 2021.