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Individualism Versus Collectivism in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A False Antithesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Harold Perkin
Harold Perkin*
Affiliation:
University of Lancaster
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Extract

The critical transition in social policy in nineteenth-century Britain, it is still generally believed, was the change from individualism to collectivism. Yet since Dicey came under fire in the late 1950s, there has been no accepted consensus about how and when this transition came about. Dicey himself, who was not strictly a historian but a theorist of jurisprudence, held a naive view of how things happen, how policy changes and is translated into law: a great thinker thinks, and converts disciples, who in turn contrive to turn the master's thoughts into the dominant wisdom or accepted common sense of the age, which then finds its way on to the Statute Book. In this way he arrived at his famous tripartite division of the nineteenth century into three periods of public opinion, government policy, and legislation: the first, up to 1825 or 1830, the period of Old Toryism, legislative quiescence, or Blackstonian optimism, dominated by Sir William Blackstone; the second, from about 1830 to 1865 or 1870, the period of Benthamism or Individualism, dominated by Jeremy Bentham and his disciples; and the last, from 1865 or 1870 to the time of his lectures on Law and Opinion published in 1905, the period of Collectivism, dominated, it seems, by no great thinker of powerful mind and principle, but merely by the pragmatic need to propitiate the emerging and increasingly powerful working-class voter. It is surprising that Dicey could not find a great thinker on whom to serve an affiliation order for fathering collectivism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , Fall 1977 , pp. 105 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1977

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References

1. Dicey, A. V., Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (London, 1905), passimGoogle Scholar. (Hereafter, Law and Public Opinion.)

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8. Ibid., 42.

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10. See Perkin, H., The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (London, 1969), pp. 241–52Google Scholar.

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15. The concept of positive freedom used here is not at all that criticized by Isaiah Berlin in his Inaugural Lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford, 1958)Google Scholar, which embraces the notion of self-mastery by a ‘true’ or higher self and paves the way therefore for authoritarian philosophers or regimes, like certain Benthamites and Hegelians or Fascist and Stalinist governments, to claim that they are liberating the higher self of the individual by enchaining the lower. It simply contrasts the positive freedom to fulfill one's self, whether labelled higher or lower, with the merely negative absence of constraint which was the core of the naive version of laissez-faire liberalism.

16. See Roach, John, “Liberalism and the Victorian Intelligentsia,” Cambridge Historical Journal, XIII (1957)Google Scholar.

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19. See Perkin, H. J., “Land Reform and Class Conflict in Victorian Britain,” in Butt, J. and Clarke, I. F. (eds.), The Victorians and Social Protest (Newton Abbot, 1973)Google Scholar.

20. Garvin, J. L., Life of Joseph Chamberlain (London, 1932), I, 462Google Scholar.

21. See Perkin, , “Land Reform and Class Conflict,” pp. 207–17Google Scholar.

22. Ibid.