Background
Walter Bagehot was born on 23 February 1826, at Langport, Somerset, came of well-to-do, middle-class banking stock with literary leanings.
(Book by Bagehot, Walter)
Book by Bagehot, Walter
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(Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873) ...)
Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873) is an influential book by Walter Bagehot. Bagehot was one of the first writers to describe and explain the world of international and corporate finance, banking, and money in understandable language.
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(This ULTIMATE collection of Walter Bagehot's works contai...)
This ULTIMATE collection of Walter Bagehot's works contains the following books: Early Essays, Lombard Street, The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration, Monsieur Guizot, Professor Cairnes, The Public Worship Regulation Bill, The English Constitution, THE DEPRECIATION OF SILVER, THE CURRENCY, MONOPOLY, PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, Political, & Literary, Essays, PHYSICS AND POLITICS, MEMOIR, Historical & Literary Essays, Historical & Financial Essays ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bagehot was called to the bar by Lincoln's Inn, but preferred to join his father in 1852 in his family's shipping and banking business. He wrote for various periodicals, and in 1855 founded the National Review with his friend Richard Holt Hutton. Later becoming editor-in-chief of The Economist, which had been founded by his father-in-law, James Wilson, in 1860, Bagehot expanded The Economist's reporting on the United States and on politics and is considered to have increased its influence among policymakers over the seventeen years he served as editor. In honour of his contributions, the paper's weekly commentary on current affairs in the UK is entitled "Bagehot," just as its "Lexington" column addresses the United States, "Charlemagne" addresses Europe, "Banyan" addresses Asia, "Schumpeter" addresses business, and "Buttonwood" addresses financial markets. In 1867, he wrote The English Constitution, a book that explored the nature of the constitution of the United Kingdom, specifically the functioning of Parliament and the British monarchy and the contrasts between British and American government. The book appeared at the same time that Parliament enacted the Reform Act of 1867, requiring Bagehot to write an extended introduction to the second edition, which appeared in 1872. The book became an instant classic, has been translated into many languages, and is still available in scholarly editions from Oxford University Press (in its "World's Classics" series) and Cambridge University Press. Bagehot also wrote Physics and Politics (1872), in which he coined the still-current expression, "the cake of custom," to describe the tension between social institutions and innovations. In his contributions to sociological theory within historical studies, Bagehot may be compared to his contemporary, Henry James Sumner Maine. Lombard Street (1873), explains the world of finance and banking and focuses particularly on issues in the management of financial crises. Bagehots observations on finance remain relevant and cited by central bankers, most recently in the wake of the global financial crisis that began in 2007. Collections of Bagehot's literary, political, and economic essays were published after his death. Their subjects ranged from Shakespeare and Disraeli to the price of silver.
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(Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) is the b...)
Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) is the best account of the history and workings of the British political system ever written. As arguments raged in mid-Victorian Britain about giving the working man the vote, and democracies overseas were pitched into despotism and civil war, Bagehot took a long, cool look at the "dignified" and "efficient" elements which made the English system the envy of the world. His analysis of the monarchy, the role of the prime minister and cabinet, and comparisons with the American presidential system are astute and timeless, pertinent to current discussions surrounding devolution and electoral reform. Combining the wit and panache of a journalist with the wisdom of a man of letters steeped in evolutionary ideas and historical knowledge, Bagehot produced a book which is always thoughtful, often funny, and surprisingly entertaining.This edition reproduces Bagehot's original 1867 work in full, and introduces the reader to the dramatic political events that surrounded its publication. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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(Drawing on Bagehot's essays, pamphlets, books and article...)
Drawing on Bagehot's essays, pamphlets, books and articles from "The Economist", this is a collection of his best writing. There are pieces on Shakespeare, entrepreneurs, the stupidity of the English, the monarchy and the foolishness of bankers, as well as portraits of Lincoln, Gladstone and Disraeli. This book is to be published simultaneously with Ruth Dudley Edwards's "The Pursuit of Reason: 'The Economist' 1843-1993".
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(The world was changing at a blistering speed in Bagehot's...)
The world was changing at a blistering speed in Bagehot's day. New scientific ideas were reshaping the world, and every field of human inquiry was affected by this new interest in giving a full explanation for the history of everything in existence. In this work, first published in 1872, Bagehot applies scientific ideas, like survival of the fittest, to the development of nations and government. He further discusses the effect of scientific and technological advancements, like the invention of stronger and more deadly weapons, on politics. British journalist WALTER BAGEHOT (1826-1877) was an early editor of The Economist and was among the first economists to discuss the concept of the business cycle. He is also the author of The English Constitution (1873) and The Postulates of English Political Economy (1885).
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(The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot. The English C...)
The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot. The English Constitution is a book by Walter Bagehot. First serialised in The Fortnightly Review between 15 May 1865 and 1 January 1867, and later published in book form in the latter year. It explores the constitution of the United Kingdom, specifically the functioning of Parliament and the British monarchy, and the contrasts between British and American government. The book became a standard work which was translated into several languages. There is a great difficulty in the way of a writer who attempts to sketch a living Constitutiona Constitution that is in actual work and power. The difficulty is that the object is in constant change. An historical writer does not feel this difficulty: he deals only with the past; he can say definitely, the Constitution worked in such and such a manner in the year at which he begins, and in a manner in such and such respects different in the year at which he ends; he begins with a definite point of time and ends with one also. But a contemporary writer who tries to paint what is before him is puzzled and a perplexed: what he sees is changing daily. He must paint it as it stood at some one time, or else he will be putting side by side in his representations things which never were contemporaneous in reality. The difficulty is the greater because a writer who deals with a living Government naturally compares it with the most important other living Governments, and these are changing too; what he illustrates are altered in one way, and his sources of illustration are altered probably in a different way.
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Walter Bagehot was born on 23 February 1826, at Langport, Somerset, came of well-to-do, middle-class banking stock with literary leanings.
Walter Bagehot studied at Bristol College. There he was deeply influenced by studying anthropology with J. C. Prichard. Later he then spent 4 years at University College, London, where he and some friends formed a debating society. They also wandered about London in search of the great free-trade and Chartist orators. Even more crucial was his year of reading for a master's degree, especially in moral philosophy and political economy and in the early-19th-century English poets.
Walter Bagehot's first published essays were literary and economic in a Unitarian journal, the Prospective Review. Yet he fumbled in finding his vocation, spending several wretched years reading for the bar at Lincoln's Inn before he decided against law as a career.
Bagehot sent letters back from a holiday trip in Paris which were published in seven installments as "Letters on the French Coup d'Etat of 1851". He was absorbed with the problem of national character and saw the convergence between culture, social structure, and personality structure.
Victorian England was neither the time nor the place for a free-wheeling writer's career, except perhaps in fiction.
Bagehot was too closely in touch with the reality principle to forsake a day-to-day base for a career as a man of letters. He decided upon a life as a banker.
In 1857, his life changed. He met James Wilson, founder and editor of the Economist, a political, literary, and financial weekly.
Bagehot married Wilson's daughter, and when Wilson died suddenly, Bagehot became managing director and then editor, a post he held until his death. Every week he wrote several leaders, or editorials, on the money market and political trends.
The new direction of his writings bore fruit in the three great books of his career.
The first, The English Constitution (1867), is the one for which he is best known. It described and analyzed not how the Constitution was supposed to work but how it did actually work, especially in its fusion of powers rather than formal separation of powers, with stress on the Cabinet as "a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens" the legislative and executive parts of the state.
His second book, Physics and Politics (1872), made less of a splash but dug deeper. From his reading in the evolutionists and anthropologists Bagehot asked what the new sciences could show about the source of political societies and their development from primitive human life. He used as an evolutionary frame a scheme of three stages: the preliminary age, when the problem was to get any sort of government started; the fighting age, when cohesion was sought through enlarging loyalties and through custom and law, and the age of discussion, when innovation broke the "cake of custom" and offered freer choices to the members of society.
His third book, Lombard Street (1873), a classic in financial writing, was an exposition of how the money market actually works.
In the last decade of his life Bagehot became immersed not only in the normal functioning of the money market but also in its neuroses, pathology, and therapy, so that his suggestions for getting greater liquidity by enlarging the central gold reserves and his invention of the treasury bill as a means of government borrowing were taken seriously.
Bagehot died at Langport on March 24, 1877.
Walter Bagehot was virtually the founder in England of political psychology and political sociology.
In honour of his contributions, The Economist's weekly commentary on current affairs in the UK is entitled "Bagehot". Every year, the British Political Studies Association awards the Walter Bagehot Prize for the best dissertation in the field of government and public administration.
(This ULTIMATE collection of Walter Bagehot's works contai...)
(Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) is the b...)
(Drawing on Bagehot's essays, pamphlets, books and article...)
(Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873) ...)
(The world was changing at a blistering speed in Bagehot's...)
(The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot. The English C...)
(Book by Bagehot, Walter)
The only unfulfilled part of Walter Bagehot's life lay in the frustration of his ambition to be a member of Parliament. His pamphlet "Parliamentary Reform" clearly shows that, while he was formally a liberal, his deeper instincts were those of a Burkean conservative, that he had little enchantment with the liberal and radical cult of the common man and that membership in the polity was for him not a "leaves-of-grass" abstraction but an operational fact which depended on political education and intelligence. His viability rests with his profound understanding of political psychology.
Walter Bagehot a man of ironic detachment and biting wit, he lacked any warmth of relation to an audience and the needed "common touch".
In 1858 Bagehot married Elizabeth Wilson, whose father. The couple were happily married until Bagehot's untimely death at age 51. They had no children. A collection of their love-letters was published in 1933.
Her father was James Wilson, the founder and owner of The Economist.
