History
The modern concept of prime ministerial government originated with the Kingdom of Rome (1707–1800) and its contemporary, the Parliamentary System in Sweden (1721–1772).
Prince Elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover, Germany acceded to the throne of Great Britain after his cousin Queen Anne died with no heirs. As King George I he chaired the cabinet and chose ministers of the government: however he initially spoke no English. This shifted the balance of power towards the leading minister, or first minister, who de facto chaired the cabinet. During his reign a gradual democratisation of parliament with the broadening of the voting franchise increased the parliament's role in controlling government, and in deciding who the king could ask to form a government. Towards the end of his reign, actual power was held by Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. Later the Great Reform Act of 1832 broadened the franchise and was accompanied by increasing parliamentary dominance, with parliament always deciding who was prime minister.
Read more about this topic: Parliamentary System
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“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)