BAGEHOT, WALTER (1826–77)

BAGEHOT, WALTER (1826–77)

Walter Bagehot is probably the most quotable of nineteenth-century British political thinkers and writers. His pithy, often provocative, and some-times aphoristic statements have proved eminently long-lived, even memorable. He has been called ‘[t]he Greatest Victorian’ by G.M.Young, and early twentieth-century US President Woodrow Wilson, an avid reader of Bagehot himself, has remarked that ‘To ask your friend to know Bagehot is like inviting him to seek pleasure.’ This is not as much of an exaggeration as it may sound to readers familiar only with his more ‘serious’ major works. Much of Bagehot’s journalistic writing, to say nothing of his correspondence, displays a refreshing facetiousness that was not common among Victorian writers. His most ambitious work was Physics and Politics (1872), but he is more remembered to subsequent generations as the author of The English Constitution (1867), a work that proved particularly influential in some respects (both books were first published in several instalments as articles and later in book form). Yet, Bagehot was not a systematic political thinker or philosopher, but rather primarily a journalist with philosophical interests. Perhaps the most accurate description of the nature of the bulk of Bagehot’s work has been given by himself while categorizing the writings of another Victorian, Nassau W.Senior, after the latter’s death. He wrote that Senior was ‘a publicist’, which meant:

He devoted much of his time to temporary politics, but has always dealt with them in an abstract and philosophical manner. He always endeavoured to deal with the permanent aspects of them, he addressed only thoughtful men, he was a ‘didactic member’ of the republic of letters; and this we suppose is the idea of a publicist.

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(Bagehot 1965–86, Vol. II:374–86) Born on 3 February 1826 at Langport, Somerset, the son of a Unitarian banker, Bagehot

was educated at Langport Grammar School and then at Bristol College. Due to his Unitarian background, he could not study in Oxford or Cambridge, so he went to University College London in Gower Street instead (UCL being, since its founding by Benthamite Radicals, secular and welcoming to all, independently of religious affiliation). During his student years he developed a close friendship with R.H.Hutton (later to become the editor of the Spectator as well as Bagehot’s co-editor of the National Review between 1855 and 1864). At UCL Bagehot was awarded a BA with first-class honours in Classics (1846) and an MA (accompanied by a gold metal) in Philosophy (1848). Between 1848 and 1852 he studied Law; as a result he was called to the Bar but never practised. Between the summer of 1851 and the summer of 1852 the young Walter (twenty-six now, indecisive about his future direction and somehow depressed) spent a year in Paris, a sojourn which worked wonders for his moods. Besides observing French life and mores, he had the chance to witness the events associated with the coup d’état of President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in December 1851. He was favourably disposed to the President’s action (as he reported in a letter:

I wish for the President decidedly myself as against M.Thiers and his set in the Parliamentary World; …and also as against the Red party who, though not insincere, are too abstruse and theoretical for the plain man….

I am in short what they would call a reactionnaire, and I think I am with the majority—a healthy habit for a young man to contract. (Bagehot 1956–86, XII:327)

It was from Paris that he sent his notorious ‘Letters on the French Coup d’Etat’, a series of seven letters to the Inquirer, a Unitarian paper (between 10 January and 6 March 1852). The provocative lightness of tone of these letters incurred a great deal of criticism; even his close friend Hutton admitted that ‘They were light and airy, and even flippant, on a very great subject’ (quoted in Varouxakis 2002:87). Bagehot’s main argument in these letters—to the horror and disgust of mainstream liberal opinion back in Britain— was that, first of all, Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état was necessary and therefore justified, in order to end the constitutional uncertainty and the paralysing fear of the comfortable classes about imminent revolution; and, second, that, regarding the overall and long-term issue of the appropriate constitutional settlement for France, what the President seemed to

be proposing, a system with a strong Head of the Executive accompanied by a representative body with only a consultative role, without legislative or veto powers, was ideal for France given the attributes of the French ‘national character’. The French were ‘a vain, a volatile, an ever changing race’, ‘a mobile, a clever, a versatile, an intellectual,

a dogmatic nation’. Due to these traits, French parliamentary assemblies were always bound to be quarrelsome and divisive, as compromise was anathema to the French mind (Varouxakis 2002:86–90). In articles-letters with titles such as ‘On the Aptitude of the French Character for National Self-Government’ (Bagehot 1965–85, IV:50–3, 54–62) he depicted these national character traits, offering a memorable comparison and contrast

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between what he presented as the ‘clever’-yet-unsuccessful French character and the ‘stupid’-yet-successful English national character (Varouxakis 2002:119–22).

He was, however, to change his mind about the appropriateness of Louis Napoleon’s system even for the ‘volatile’ French themselves, let alone as a model for other nations, such as newly emerging nations like Italy (even including Britain, as some were arguing in the 1860s). In a great number of articles in The Economist during the 1860s, Bagehot offered what has been perhaps the most classic and the sharpest description of the political system embodied by Louis Napoleon (now Emperor Napoleon III), what he called ‘Caesarism’. His grasp of how exactly this system worked, and what were the reasons for its popularity as well as its major weaknesses, was not the least of Bagehot’s achievements as an observer of the contemporary European political scene (Varouxakis 2002:90–6, 98–99, 164–70).

In 1861 Bagehot became editor of The Economist, succeeding his father-in-law, founder and proprietor of the paper, James Wilson, MP—whose daughter Eliza he had married in 1858. Besides his leading role in the running of The Economist and the National Review,

he was also one of the people (including, among others, George Eliot and G.H.Lewes) who established the Liberal Fortnightly Review in 1865. Both The English Constitution and Physics and Politics were first published as series of articles in the Fortnightly Review before they came out in book from (The English Constitution starting from May 1867; Physics and Politics starting from November 1867). He was on intimate terms with the leaders of the Liberal Party and he tried several times (unsuccessfully) to enter Parliament as a Liberal MP. He was respected as an authority in financial matters (no lesser a figure than Gladstone asked for his advice at least twice).

As befits a man as influenced by Burke as he was, Bagehot has been claimed by some as a Conservative and by others as a Whig (Jones 2000:68). He clearly was not a democrat. Like many Victorian Liberals as well as Conservatives, he feared the consequences of universal manhood suffrage, of giving power proportionate to their numbers to the ignorant ‘multitude’. However, this does not mean that Bagehot had no wish to have them educated gradually—but rather just take advantage of their ignorance as has been argued (Smith 2001:xxii, xxvi–xxvii). It has to be remembered that ‘Bagehot’s cast of thought… was dynamic’, which is the reason why he was critical of static views of ‘the foundations of communal cohesion’ (Jones 2000:67). Thus, Bagehot argued that liberalism—with which he identified—consisted in a quest for equilibrium between the ‘predominance of the politically intelligent’ and the ‘gradual training of the politically unintelligent’ (Jones 2000:70). In the same spirit, in a review of MILL’S Considerations on Representative Government in The Economist (11 May 1861), Bagehot ‘defined liberalism as “the faith in the possibility, nay the duty, of constant political expansion—of drawing a larger and larger portion of the population into the circle of political duties which connect them with the government, give them a control over it, and interest in what it does”’ (Jones 2000:70).

Bagehot is most remembered for some of the arguments he put forward in The English Constitution . Among those arguments two stand out. In the first place, he dismissed what

he presented as the orthodox misreading of the Constitution, the ‘literary theory’ of the Constitution, as he called it, to the effect that power was divided between separate branches, legislative, executive and judicial (separation of powers) or balanced in a mixed system (crown, Lords and Commons). Most subsequent commentators agree that

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he overplayed the prevalence of these views, which were already becoming obsolete before he wrote. This being as it may, clearly it was he who most famously proposed the alternative view that in fact the ‘efficient secret’ of the British Constitution was cabinet government, that is, ‘the close union, the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers’, which was effected by the cabinet, which joined them together. According to Bagehot the cabinet was ‘a committee of the legislative body selected to be the executive body’. As a result, it was the House of Commons (which was in a position to choose and dismiss the cabinet) that was the ruling body, exercising the effective sovereign power (Jones 2000:66–7; Smith 2001:xi–xii).

In the second place, Bagehot is still remembered and quoted in textbooks for having formulated the distinction between the ‘dignified’ and the ‘efficient’ parts of the constitution. The efficient parts were the House of Commons with the cabinet, which had to do the business of government, and the dignified parts were the monarchy and the House of Lords, which provided the former with the legitimacy they needed in order to rule, thanks to the instinctive and unreflecting deference of the masses to the monarchy and, more generally, to the ‘theatrical show of society’.

Bagehot has been charged ‘that he seriously—and influentially—misread the nature of the constitution in a way that masked the full potential power of government in the British system’ (Smith 2001:xxvi). On the other hand, Vernon Bogdanor has seen in him

a ‘founding father’ of British political science, in ‘groping towards something very much like the modern notion of “political culture”, basic elements of which were those norms and values which affected behaviour’ (quoted in: Smith 2001:xxvi)

Finally, there is a most important aspect of Bagehot’s thought that needs to be examined and highlighted here. He was, next to Mill, one of the two Victorian thinkers most keen to establish a ‘scientific’ study of what they called ‘national character’. For, as we have already seen, although today he is remembered mainly thanks to The British Constitution, his most ambitious work, and therefore the most important in his own eyes, was Physics and Politics. The latter book was ‘one of the earliest attempts to work out the implications of Darwinism for social thought’ (Jones 2000:67), and directly dealing with national character. In Physics and Politics Bagehot addressed explicitly and head on the question (which, he wrote, had ‘puzzled’ him a lot) whether there is one character for an entire nation and how it came to be formed and to change. The book was subtitled: Or thoughts on the application of the principles of ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Inheritance’ to political society . And Peter Mandler is right in maintaining that this title (and for that matter its opening pages) have misled commentators into taking it as clear evidence of the biologising effect of Darwinian thought’ (2000:234). Yet it was not, for Bagehot (whatever he may have written earlier, in his youth) explicitly rejected biological racial inheritance as well as climate as explanations of how each national character was formed or changed. So, what accounted then for the diversity among nations and national characters that he thought was obvious and indisputable? ‘But what are nations? What are these groups which are so familiar to us, and yet, if we stop to think, so strange; which are as old as history…? What breaks the human race up into fragments so unlike one another, and yet each in its interior so monotonous?’ (Bagehot 1965–86, VII:65). He discarded the commonplace explanation that such distinctions could be accounted for ‘by original diversity of race’. He retorted that there might have been originally distinct great racial groups, but that this could not account for subsequent differentiations. Instead,

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Bagehot argued that nations were the product of two great processes: ‘one race-making force which, whatever it was, acted in antiquity, and has now wholly, or almost, given over acting’; and ‘the other the nation-making force…which is acting now as much as it ever acted, and creating as much as it ever created’ (Bagehot 1965–86, VII:67).

According to Bagehot, national character was the result of chance predominance of some types and ‘unconscious imitation’ by the rest. What was at work was the principle of ‘elimination’, the ‘use and disuse’ of organs that naturalists spoke of. ‘At first a sort of “chance predominance” made a model, and then invincible attraction, the necessity which rules all but the strongest men to imitate what is before their eyes, and to be what they are expected to be, moulded men by that model’ (Bagehot 1965–86, VII:37–8). It was not easy, he conceded, to understand the effect of ordinary agencies upon the character: ‘We get a notion that a change of government or a change of climate acts equally on the mass of the nation, and so we are puzzled—at least I have been puzzled—to conceive how it acts.’ But such changes, he maintained, did not at first act equally on all people in the nation. ‘On many, for a very long time, they do not act at all. But they bring out new qualities, and advertise the effects of new habits.’ As a result, ‘the effect of any considerable change on a nation is thus an intensifying and accumulating effect’. It acted with its maximum power only on ‘some prepared and congenial individuals’; in them ‘it is seen to produce attractive results, and then the habits creating those results are copied far and wide’ (Bagehot 1965–86, VII:80; cf. ibid. 121).