There have been legions of individual studies of the history of the English/British/United Kingdom parliament, which is not surprising, since its history is widely acknowledged to be so closely bound up with the history of the nation state itself. But there have been remarkably few attempts to put the story together, to try to consider the long‐term development of parliament as an institution. What would such a story look like? This essay discusses some of the critiques of the whiggish narrative of constitutional and parliamentary development to recognise a common theme in whiggism's tendency to anthropomorphise parliament, to describe it as a single organism with agency and purpose. To forgo that temptation, however, makes it difficult to provide a satisfying narrative of parliament over time. The essay tries to imagine how one might construct a history of parliament as an institution which no longer sees it as an actor in its own story, but, instead, a complex collection of ideas, processes, customs, and conventions, which competing forces struggle to organise in order to achieve their goals, and which is also an arena and forum for that competition.

中文翻译：

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为何未撰写国会历史*

英格兰/英国/联合王国议会的历史已有大量的个人研究，这并不奇怪，因为人们普遍认为其历史与民族国家本身的历史息息相关。但是，很少有人试图将这个故事放在一起，以考虑议会作为一个机构的长期发展。这样的故事是什么样的？本文讨论了对宪政和议会发展的歪曲叙事的一些批评，以认识到歪曲主义倾向于使人为化议会的一个共同主题，并将其描述为具有机构和目的的单一有机体。但是，要想避免这种诱惑，就很难随着时间的推移提供令人满意的议会说明。