Walter Bagehot and the High Tide of Victorian Political Economy

Best known for The English Constitution (1867), Walter Bagehot stands out among 19^th century political writers for both his expertise in financial affairs and the range of his other interests.  Bagehot had a major impact, but he left no immediate successors after his untimely death in 1977?  What does Bagehot’s career say about the trajectory of political economy in the nineteenth century and British intellectual culture more generally?  My paper will discuss Bagehot’s career to highlight these changes. Bagehot started his professional life in banking, but collaborated with his friend Richard Hutton to found National Review in 1852and later gained fame as editor of the Economist.  His books include Lombard Street (1873), which John Maynard Keynes considered a classic work, and Postulates of Political Economy, along with the posthumous released Economic Studies (1880).  Lombard Street reflected his preference of empiricism over theory, and his economic writings eschewed abstraction to show how existing arrangements worked to serve various objectives.  Despite his achievements, Bagehot was very much a figure of a mid-Victorian world rapidly fading by the 1870s.  Liberal arguments that had addressed the questions of Bagehot’s youth and maturity no longer engaged concerns of a new generation.  Mass democracy brought by parliamentary reforms left him uneasy about politics.  The academic discipline of economics began to eclipse political economy.  Print culture also changed as the great nineteenth century reviews aimed at a general, educated readership gradually declined.  Academic journals increasingly became the dominant outlet for writings on economic and historical themes, while other periodicals changed to reach a mass readership.  Together these factors made Bagehot’s work the high point of a Victorian political economy that waned from the 1870s.