The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Eric Foner, Radical Individualism In America: Revolution to Civil War
• I: Methodology
• Scientific Paradigms and History
• Kuhn's Paradigm
• Paradigm Choice, Art, and Reason
• Do Concepts Mold Percepts?
• Paradigms Vs. Research Programmes
• Kuhn and Historical Truth
• Paradigms and Determinism
• A Historian Between Paradigms
• Survival of the Fittest Paradigms?
• Fumbling Toward Truth
• Necessary Truths and Reality
• Economic Laws
• “pure” Vs. “grubby” Knowledge
• Paradigms and Social Change
• II: Consensus, Obedience, and Dissent
• State and Society
• Consensus and Authority
• Civil Disobedience
• Dissent and Virtue
• Underdevelopment Vs. Consensus
• Democracy Vs. Elitism
• Majority Tyranny
• Majority Frustration
• Consensus Vs. Politics
• Consensus and Rights
• Consensus Vs. Majority Rule
• III: Consent and Coercion
• The Right Against Coercion
• Private Property and Coercion
• Consent, Coercion, and Property
• Threats Vs. Offers
• A Clockwork Orange, Freedom, and Coercion
• Weak Will Vs. Compulsion
• Freedom and Using Others
• Equality and Social Coercion
• Human Action Vs. Behavior
• IV: Regulation
• The Regulating Class
• Regulation and Revolution
• Land Expropriation
• State Planning
• Hoover As Regulator
• State Science Research
• The Costs of Research
• Anti-trust
• Sec Regulation
• Sunset Laws
• V: Social Control
• Power and Servility
• State Vs. Education
• Public Vs. Private Education
• Public Schools Vs. Privacy
• Truant Officers As Scapegoats
• Were Professionals Technocrats?
• The Courts and Social Control
• The Army and Social Control
• Land Use and Control
• VI: The Liberal Tradition
• The History of Liberalism
• Freedom and Progress
• Reason and Progress
• Individualism, Property, and Revolt
• Liberal Class Analysis
• Nature and Liberty
• Free Trade and Development
• Liberalism In Transition
• “positive” Liberalism
• Utilitarian Illiberalism
• Spencer and Laissez-faire
• Mill: Liberal Or Socialist?
• Research Fields
• Economics
• Education
• History
• Law
• Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Political Philosophy
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation (act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code)

Liberalism in Transition

Trowbridge H. Ford

• College of the Holy Cross Worcester, Massachusetts

“The Law of the Constitution: Dicey's Polemic against Parnell.” Studies (Fall 1976): 210–224.

A. V. Dicey (1835–1922) provided late Victorian conservatism with a rallying standard in his Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885). This work was a puzzling about-face in Dicey's political thought and requires explanation. Authored by a previous Radical Whig or Liberal, Dicey's The Law of the Constitution voiced a collectivist aim with a bias for Irish Unionism.

Dicey endorsed liberal John Bright's goal of replacing class representation in Parliament with personal representation to maintain a pluralist society. Dicey applied this to Irish and Scotch representation. He felt that Parliament's ignoring Irish economic and social ills turned patriots into victims of English despotism. This secret British executive government which emerged in Tudor times he saw expanding from Ireland to England's ‘New Imperialism’ in the last third of the nineteenth century (cf. Dicey's The Privy Council.)

During a visit to America with James Bryce, Dicey became a contributor to E.L. Godkin's The Nation, and in 1873 replaced Leslie Stephen as its London correspondent.

He reported critically on England's new imperial role which the historian J.A. Froude sought to justify. Dicey was appalled by Liberal acquiescence in this new imperialism. The ‘Russian menace’ against the Ottoman Empire was the pretext for British executive interventionism in the Balkans, Egypt, and Sudan as well as in Afghanistan. Dicey opposed aggression against the Boer Republics in South Africa. To break the hold of bureaucracy on the people, he was an advocate of Indian nationalism.

Dicey strongly supported the Irish Nationalists led by Charles Stewart Parnell, the advocate both of extending Home Rule (i.e., the Irish Parliament, which was abolished in the Union of 1801) and of terminating feudal landholdings. Supporting Parnell's resistance campaign, Dicey interpreted the Phoenix Park assassinations (1882) in principled terms. The deaths of British Chief Secretary Lord Cavendish and Under-Secretary Burke were provoked as the necessary consequence of the jailings of Parnell and leaders of the Irish Land League.

Henry Villard, American owner of The Nation, arranged for Dicey to organize a party of English liberals in 1883, to show that the Irish Americans had demonstrated themselves adept at self-government. The Nation's editor, Godkin, brought Dicey together with Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish World, who republished Dicey's pro-Irish writings.

However, mounting violence over Ireland disturbed Dicey, who had become Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford (1882–1909). And his lectures in 1884, from which he wrote his Law of the Constitution, reversed and revised his earlier liberalism. Praising monarchy, he attacked republicanism and federalism as inefficient; he especially criticized America for its course of laissez-faire. In England, he demanded that Parliament should reject Parnell's Home Rule Bill of 1886, and should restrict the right of public meeting. In case of unity between Liberals and Parnell's Nationalists, Dicey advocated use of executive authority to restrict the power of the Commons.

Instead of focusing on Irish affairs, Dicey called on Parliament to deal with housing for the poor, reform of charities and education, recognition of rights of mothers, and collectivist goals in general.