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Walter Bagehot (3 February 1826 \u2013 24 March 1877) in both Physics and Politics<\/a> <\/em>(1872) and in The English Constitution <\/em><\/a>(1867) combined a historical and functional analysis of political institutions with an anthropological account of their primeval origins and the forces behind their growth.\u00a0 These writings on political theory combine the sociological account of the utility of institutions found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America<\/em> with the economic and material anthropology of Henry Maine’s Ancient Law<\/em>.<\/p>\n Bagehot’s Physics and Politics<\/em> was also an extension of the work of Henry Maine, which like that of John Lubbock, Lewis Henry Morgan, John Ferguson McLennan, and Edward B. Tylor, was part of the late nineteenth century effort to ground the most primeval age of man in scientific fact, using a variety of evidences from linguistics, archeology, contemporary traveler and missionary accounts, and biblical hermeneutics. Bagehot, like his Enlightenment predecessors\u00a0 Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and William Robertson,\u00a0 was most concerned to discern what factors accounted for the progress which appeared to separate refined Europe from the underdeveloped rest of the globe.\u00a0 Such an inquiry was given new life by what appeared to social theorists to be a satisfying account of the mechanism behind social, political, and intellectual development, that of “natural selection.”\u00a0 Bagehot grafted archeological, linguistic, and legal researches onto this biological causality.\u00a0 For Bagehot, this biological narrative was superior to the merely conjectural account of the Enlightenment due to its ability to ground a working hypothesis in natural laws, whereby the development of human civilization mirrored that of the rest of nature.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Henry Maine’s Ancient Law <\/em>was, for its part, a critique of the historical theory of Montesquieu and of Jeremy Bentham, and of the “social\u00a0 compact” tradition of John Locke and the Swiss jurist Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui.\u00a0 Locke’s notion of a “social compact” and Thomas Hobbes’ account of the state of nature “resemble each other strictly in their non-historic, unverifiable condition of the race” (Ancient Law<\/em>, 1906, p.124.)\u00a0 Hobbes and Locke agreed that a “great chasm” separated man from the state of nature to that of society (1bid<\/em>.)<\/p>\n Montesquieu was to be faulted for his assumption that “laws are the creatures of climate, local situation, accident, or imposture,” with Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws<\/em> viewing the nature of man as entirely “plastic” (126.) \u00a0 Montesquieu, however, “greatly underrates the stability of human nature,” paying “little or no regard to the inherited qualities of the race, those qualities which each generation receives from its predecessors, and transmits but slightly altered to the generation which follows it” (ibid.)\u00a0 Bentham, on the other hand, suggested that “societies modify, and have always modified, their laws according to modifications of their views of general expediency” which while not “false” is “certainly unfruitful” (127.)<\/p>\n The mistake of all these political theorists\u00a0 was analogous to one who “in investigating the laws of the material universe, should commence by contemplating the existing physical world as a whole, instead of beginning with the particles which are its simplest ingredients” (128.) \u00a0 The simplest ingredients, according to Maine, were primitive societies, known through three kinds of evidence: anthropological accounts, ancient records, and “ancient law.”\u00a0 The evidence gathered through the observation of primitive tribes was “the best we could have expected” since primitive cultures were nothing but “mankind in its infancy.” \u00a0 (129.)<\/p>\n Maine, like Fustel de Coulanges, described the transition of archaic civilization from savagery to urbanity as an “ascending series of groups out of which the State was first constituted” of which the “elementary group” is the family, all connected “by common subjection to the highest male descendant.”\u00a0 The aggregation of families forms the gens<\/em> or “House,” which in turn forms the tribe, which in turn, forms the “commonwealth”\u00a0 (136.)\u00a0 All political theory, moreover, held that “kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions”\u00a0 (137) and that ancient law and society placed an individual under the iron yoke of obedience to the community.<\/p>\n In the English Constitution<\/em>, Bagehot would envision a primitive society worked out in much greater detail in Physics and Politics<\/em>. \u00a0\u00a0 All “rude nations” achieved the same kind of “polity,” or political configuration.\u00a0 Every “rude” polity had a sacred office of kingship.\u00a0 The king “was essentially a man apart.” The modern notion of law as a “rule imposed by human authority” altered at will by that authority, was unknown to primeval cultures.\u00a0 Instead, laws were unalterable, divine, and from the ruler of the polity.\u00a0 A “Divine limit” to the law was “impossible,” “as there was no other source of law.”\u00a0 There was a “practical limit” to the degree of subjugation as the “pagan part of human nature” would regard every pronouncement with “inseparable obstinacy” (The English Constitution<\/em>, 2nd edition, 1902, 272-3)<\/p>\n This ancient polity suffered from a fatal defect.\u00a0 As authority was hereditary, it soon came to pass that a child or “idiot” ascended the throne.\u00a0 When this occurred, the “listening assembly,” those brought together initially to advice the king, “begins not only to murmur, but to speak” (274.) Using George Grote’s \u00a0 History of Greece<\/em>, Bagehot contended that ancient civilization had developed into modern urbanity due to the “tentacula” of agricultural, commercial, and technological progress.\u00a0 The development of English civilization had followed a pattern much like that of ancient Greece and Rome.<\/p>\n However, England, unlike Greece, began “as a kingdom of considerable size, inhabited by distinct races, none of them fit for prosaic criticism, and all subject to the superstition of royalty.”\u00a0 Thus, unlike in Greece, where the kings were of short duration, in England, “royalty was much more than a superstition,” as it was necessary to control a country which was rife with divisions, “armed,” and “impatient” (275.)\u00a0 The different social orders of England, particularly the peasantry and the nobility, have progressed at differing rates, with “the lower,” having varied “little” (276.)<\/p>\n The English Civil War and the execution of King Charles was the result of the long growth of the English middle class and the “animation” of that class “under the influence of Protestantism” (282.)\u00a0 It was the development of these two factors which made the English polity less attached to royalty and more accustomed to criticism of government.\u00a0 In this way, the English became less attached to their kings and became more like the ancient Greeks.\u00a0 From this point forward, English government was defined by a twin tendency towards revolution and “the solid clay of the English apathetic nature” (283.)\u00a0 Those who wished for revolution were always a minority in England, much like the French Jacobins.<\/p>\n Even the “minimum of revolution” with the abdication of James II and the beginnings of constitutional government, the “mass” comprehended only the “sovereign.”\u00a0 With the advent of the rule of Parliament, the “appendages of a monarchy have been converted into an essence of a republic” and have, in this way, mirrored the development of the Greek cities away from hereditary monarchy.\u00a0 Unlike the Greek city states, such was the obstinacy and heterogeneity of English society, that while the machinery of government was that of a republic, the government’s outward countenance was still that of a monarchy (286.)<\/p>\n Bagehot’s Physics and Politics<\/em> was an extension of his earlier investigation of the primitive polity. \u00a0 In Physics and Politics<\/em>, Bagehot wished to extend the sciences of anthropology and jurisprudence into the furthest reaches of human history through the imposition of a general law of “natural selection” upon all of human history. \u00a0 While admitting that the “special laws of inheritance are indeed as yet unknown,”\u00a0 it was clear that there was “a probability” that the “descendants of cultivated parents will have,” by “nervous organization” a “greater aptitude for cultivation” than others. \u00a0 \u00a0 This “transmitted nerve element” was the “continuous force which binds age to age” and which allows each age to improve over the last.\u00a0 By giving a biological basis to history, Bagehot thought it possible to create a science of history (Physics and Politics, <\/em>1906, 12ff.)<\/p>\n The virtues of Maine’s theory of the absolute supremacy of the “eldest ascendant” (13) was that it forcefully against the degradation or degeneration of a once civilized race or people (15.)\u00a0 The primitive man, Bagehot argued, possessing the simplest tools, had no modern notion of time or space, nor of the regular laws which the civilized English looked for in either politics or nature (19.) Consequently, Bagehot, like Maine, concluded that “rigid law” was what was originally needed for primitive human beings. \u00a0 The principle of “natural selection,” for Bagehot, defined the governance of the primitive polity. \u00a0\u00a0 In early times the “quantity” of a government was of far greater importance than its “quality” (25.)\u00a0 The task of the institutions of the primitive polity was to create a “cake of custom,” through which the actions of the citizens of a polity were to be directed towards a singular object.\u00a0 This direction towards a singular object created the “hereditary drill” necessary for the initial advancement into civilization (27.)<\/p>\n Bagehot not only wished to address how society began but was as concerned with understanding how cultures advanced from a primitive to a refined state.\u00a0\u00a0 His narrative of the causes behind the progress of civilization belonged had its roots in the Scottish and English Enlightenments.\u00a0 The content of this narrative very much reflected the scientific and literary commonplaces of the later nineteenth century, especially his concern with progress, degeneration, the applicability of Greek and Roman models for the growth of modern civilization, and the interconnection between natural and social laws.<\/p>\n His understanding of physics was not that of a separate, professional discipline with its own modes of analysis and experimentation.\u00a0 By “physics,”\u00a0 Bagehot meant a law-governed nature that was perceivable to the human mind through a knowledge of history and current affairs. \u00a0\u00a0 This genteel, literary, nearly subconscious,\u00a0 notion of physics and of science more generally as the orderliness of nature also visible in history and society, persisted into the mid-twentieth century in the writings of sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and historians.<\/p>\n For Bagehot, the principle question posed by human history and the existence of both savage and civil beings was what factors enabled some civilizations to progress into refinement while the majority remained stationary.\u00a0 “Savages,” Bagehot noted, “do not improve,” while only those nations in Europe seem to advance (42.)\u00a0 In order to explain the different levels of progress in the world’s civilizations, Bagehot proposed three laws.\u00a0 The two most important were that first, the strongest and the best tend to prevail over weaker nations., and second, within every particular nation the best traits tend to prevail over the lesser.\u00a0\u00a0 These laws illustrate the workings of the principle of “natural selection” in “physical science”\u00a0 (43-44.)<\/p>\n Due to the continual combat of tribe against tribe and nation against nation, there has been persistent progress in the art of warfare.\u00a0\u00a0 The causes behind this growth and the gulf between the savage and the civilized was explicable since the “stronger nation has always been conquering the weaker” (49.)\u00a0 Every nation’s advancement was tied to war.\u00a0\u00a0 Those nations who had the greatest technological advancements and the most characteristics suitable to war and conflict advanced over their neighbors.<\/p>\n Each nation, “tried constantly to be the stronger, and so made or copied the best weapons” which each successful nation subsequently imitated (ibid.) All of European history demonstrated the “superposition” of the greater military power over the lesser military power.\u00a0 War, Bagehot concluded, fostered those “preliminary virtues”, such as valor and honor.\u00a0 Since war has “ceased to be a moving force in the world,” men were now more “tender” to one another (78.)<\/p>\n The greatest distinction, then, between savage and civilized nations was that civilized nations at some point in their history began to progress rather than remain stationary.\u00a0 Civilized nations were animated by the spirit of improvement (156.)\u00a0 How then did savage nations become “unfixed?”\u00a0 Extending Maine’s account of the development of nations from “status” or patriarchy to “contract” or the notion of individual rights, Bagehot believed that the most important transition of a nation was one from “status” to “choice.”\u00a0 This entailed government by discussion rather than by force, where the problems of government became greater and greater degree those concerning abstract principles.\u00a0 Most important was the ability of nations to break the ties of customary practices, the ability to transcend the weight of tradition and settled practices.\u00a0 The fixity and uniformity which had previously enabled war-like civilizations to survive, the “hereditary drill,” was now an impediment to progress (158.)<\/p>\n “In early society,” Bagehot details, “originality in life was forbidden and repressed by the fixed rule of life.”\u00a0 The source of progress, the desire of individuals to better their condition was “then not permitted to work” (160.)\u00a0 A government which functioned by deliberation was the surest way to “break down the yoke of fixed custom” (161.)\u00a0 A government by deliberation presupposes that there was no fixed or sacred authority that the community was absolutely bound to obey. Discussion too “gives premium to intelligence” (162-3.)\u00a0 The decisions which confronted the primitive polity gave rise to a better quality of discussion and a toleration of a greater variety of ideas.\u00a0 One of the most painful things in human experience was a “new idea.”<\/p>\n Novelty and discussion both allow for savage nations to attain civility.\u00a0 The transition from contract to choice was, however, for the few, having their historical origins in the ancient polities of Greece and Rome and in the localities of the Mediterranean basin. The arts, sciences, and humane sentiments essential to the progress of civilization developed above all due to freedom of discussion.\u00a0 “Athens, Rome, the Italian republics of the Middle Ages…have all had a special and peculiar quickening influence, which they owed to their freedom”\u00a0 (166.)\u00a0 The seminal events of history, the French Revolution, the Reformation, the Peloponnesian War, have all been the result of freedom of expression.\u00a0 These events together demonstrated the advances of civilized races into a more refined culture.\u00a0 All of these events were produced by discussions of principles and abstract reasoning. \u00a0 It was this lack of abstract thinking which doomed the “North American Indian,” who talked only of “undertakings” to stasis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Walter Bagehot (3 February 1826 \u2013 24 March 1877) in both Physics and Politics (1872) and in The English Constitution (1867) combined a historical and functional analysis of political institutions with an anthropological account of their primeval origins and the forces behind their growth.\u00a0 These writings on political theory combine the sociological account of the<\/p>\n