Walter Bagehot Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) was an economist and political journalist and one of the most influential writers on the British constitution until recent times. Bagehot is so important that other commentators have treated his doctrines, published in 1867, as if they were part of the unwritten constitution itself.

Bagehot was born into a banking family in Somerset in southwestern England. Bored by banking, he turned to journalism and edited The Economist from 1861 until his death. His main legacy is a pair of books: The English Constitution (1865) and Lombard Street (1873), a study of the role of the central bank. Bagehot’s writing is clear and persuasive, and his influence is still apparent today: the United Kingdom’s politics correspondent for the modern Economist writes under the penname “Bagehot” (pronounced badgeot).

In The English Constitution, Bagehot’s target is political philosopher Charles-Louis Montesquieu’s claim that the United Kingdom’s liberty is due to a separation of powers. He argues that Montesquieu (and perhaps the American Federalists) got England completely wrong. (Like many Victorians, Bagehot failed to distinguish between England and the United Kingdom and was thus insensitive to Scotland and Ireland.) The “efficient secret” of the English constitution was the cabinet, a “buckle” that joined the “dignified” (the formal institutions of governance: church, Parliament, and above all the monarchy) to the “efficient” part of the constitution. According to Montesquieu and the Federalists, the key to liberty lies with the separation of powers. According to Bagehot, it lies with concealing the efficient part of government (the cabinet operating through its control of the House of Commons) behind the dignified façade of crown and establishment. Power was fused, not separated. The executive ran the country through its control of both the permanent officials and (normally) the majority of seats in the House of Commons. Because of the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, whereby statutes trump all other forms of law, the judiciary also occupied a subordinate role. There was no judicial review of either legislation or executive acts in Bagehot’s constitution.

Bagehot was contemptuous of the monarch and her heir, calling them “a retired widow and an unemployed youth.” But he thought that having an ordinary family at the head of state was advantageous to social order. People would, he believed, follow the lives of the retired widow and the unemployed youth with interest, and not concern themselves with the efficient part of government, which could be left to competent statesmen.

Curiously, successive British monarchs have learned their constitution from Bagehot, despite his evident contempt for the royal family’s intelligence. Even more curiously, so have most subsequent constitutional commentators. Though a liberal free trader, Bagehot was a profound anti-democrat. His constitutional doctrine may be summarized as this: The royalty and the aristocracy are too stupid to rule—“It is as great a difficulty to learn business in a palace as it is to learn agriculture in a park”(Bagehot 2008, 107)—as are the working and lower-middle class. Government should therefore remain in the hands of educated people who are well-informed on current events and politics.

Bibliography:

Bagehot,Walter. 1873. Lombard Street. Indianapolis: Library of Economics and Liberty, 2001, econlib.org/library/Bagehot/bagLom.html.
The English Constitution. Glenside, N.Z.: Forgotten Books, 2008