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Modification in Economic and Social Beliefs - Albert Venn Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (LF ed.) [1917]

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Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, edited and with an Introduction by Richard VandeWetering (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008).

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Modification in Economic and Social Beliefs

From somewhere about the middle of the nineteenth century (1840–1854) the unsystematic socialism of the artisans began, though it must be admitted in the most indirect way, to mingle with, and to influence and be influenced by, the opinions of thinkers or writers who adhered to very different schools, and though they were mostly opposed to utilitarianism, belonged in some instances to the Benthamite school. It is no accident that Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets (1849–1850), filled with denunciations of laissez faire, the Tracts on Christian Socialism (1850), which turned men’s hearts towards the duties of Christians as the members of society, Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), which to many contemporaries seemed to preach rank socialism, Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), which painted sympathetically the position of workmen conducting a strike, and thereby earned the bitter censure of W. R. Greg, the representative of economists and mill-owners—all belonged to the years 1848–1850. It is no accident that at about the same time,37 Comtism, with its distrust of political economy,38 began to exert authority in England, and obtained disciples among men who interested themselves deeply in the welfare of the working classes. If Alton Locke, with its feeble and uninteresting tailor poet, and the Latter Day Pamphlets, with their bluster and bombast, redeemed here and there by flashes of insight, are in 1905 less readable than a volume of old sermons, the welcome which these books received is of deep import, for it displays a widespread distrust in the dominant liberalism of the day, and was a sure sign of a then approaching revolution in public opinion. Most significant of all was the publication in 1848 of Mill’s Political Economy; the very title of this celebrated book—Principles of Political Economy, with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy—has a special meaning. The treatise is an attempt by the intellectual leader of the Benthamite school to bring accepted economic doctrines into harmony with the aspirations of the best men among the working classes.39 It is to-day, at any rate, perfectly clear that from 1848 onwards an alteration becomes perceptible in the intellectual and moral atmosphere of England. A change we can now see was taking place in the current of opinion, and a change which was the more important, because it influenced mainly the then rising generation, and therefore was certain to tell upon the opinion of twenty or thirty years later—that is, of 1870 or 1880. Nor can we now doubt that this revolution of thought tended in the direction of socialism.

[37. ]Publication of Miss Martineau’s translation of Comte’s Philosophie Positive, 1853.

[38. ]Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive, iv. 264–280.

[39. ]See on Mill’s position, Lecture XII. post.