Walter Bagehot's science of politics
Authors:   , Hansen Farreol Lee 
Published: June 2024

The purpose of this thesis is to clarify Walter Bagehot's position in political science. One of middle Victorian England's most perceptive political analysts, Bagehot adopted a modern perspective which encouraged a realistic investigation of political processes, political psychologies, and forms of government. Bagehot's analysis of the propensities and actions of men in government led him to point out the discrepancy between the "paper description" and the "living reality" of the English Constitution. He corrected John Stuart Mill's assumption that the English executive was inherently weak under a parliamentary form of government. Bagehot's de-emphasis of legalistic analysis was brought to the study of American politics by Woodrow Wilson, whose Congressional Government closely parallel led Bagehot's The English Constitution. Bagehot shifted from Mill's emphasis on the rationalistic basis of individual participation and placed much greater emphasis on the electoral system as a process best understood in terms of the representation of legitimate groups and interests within the community. Thus Bagehot provided a foundation for the group study of politics. A special characteristic of Bagehot's contribution is that he sought to establish a new balance between classes and interests, recognizing the decline of aristocratic power, the changing character of the monarchy, the full emergence of the middle class, and the new claims of the artisan class for a significant voice in English political life. His adherence to the deferential principle should be seen in this light. Anticipating such latter-day mass society critics as Le Bon and Ortega, Bagehot predicted that the absence of this balance would lead to the worst manifestations of political irresponsibility. Bagehot developed a psychological classification of leadership. First, he submitted that the contrast between administrators' and agitators' styles of leadership corresponded to contrasting personalities. Second, Bagehot's psychology accommodated the unconscious influences on behavior, such as the agitator's inner compulsion to act and the need to have a cause. However, such considerations did not obliterate the conscious and normative factors, such as a sense of justice and contributions to the common good in Bagehot's evaluation of leadership. Here are important differences between Bagehot's and Lasswell's attempts at psychological classification, wherein the latter stressed the pathological aspect of leadership and tended to obscure the element of public spiritedness. Bagehot's justification for Louis Napoleon's dictatorship appears to contradict his primary attachment to a polity based on free discussion. Actually, the hostility with which his views were greeted in England is a measure of the extent to which ideological factors guided political discussion. Bagehot identified national character as the most important circumstance affecting forms of government. He judged the French character as having a tendency to excessive intellectualizing of abstract ideas, to the neglect of concrete considerations. Bagehot's discussion of the origins of national character produced a social psychology which departed from the nineteenth century "intellectualist" psychology, for this new psychology stressed habituated forms of social behavior. However, Bagehot had not anticipated the instinct psychology that McDougall developed in the twentieth century. Like Graham Wallas, Bagehot showed that it was possible to discss unconscious sources of social behavior (habit and imitation) without belittling the role of intelligence. Thus Bagehot's ideal polity - the polity of discussion - is founded on a habit of discussion with in the framework of balanced interests.