Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)

WALTER BAGEHOT (1826–1877) was a Victorian political analyst and social theorist who served as editor of The Economist, which still offers its readers a column in each issue designated in his honor. Born into a banking family in Langport, Somerset, he was educated at Bristol College, where he distinguished himself in the study of classics and mathematics, as well as German and Hebrew; since his background was Unitarian, he did not pursue his university studies at Oxford or Cambridge, which were distinctly Anglican, and chose instead University College, London, where he formed a lively debating society. His health was problematic, but in 1846 he was awarded a first-class degree in classics, and he remained at the university to further his studies in moral philosophy and political economy, securing an MA degree. His subsequent training qualified him to practice law, but he decided on a career in the family bank because it would allow him more freedom to become an author. His writing career effectively began when, in Paris in late 1851, he witnessed the coup d’état by Louis Napoleon and published a reasoned defense of it in a Unitarian journal called The Inquirer. What he wrote was consciously provocative, challenging the assumptions of many of his friends and contending that situations of extreme disorder might require measures that would not be defensible in more settled circumstances. Over the next decades, Bagehot’s writings would continue to be characterized by a persistent critical independence. Not long after his return from Paris, he became a co-founder (along with his university friend Richard Holt Hutton) of the National Review, and in addition to essays in political analysis his publications in that journal would include literary assessments of authors like Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickens, Gibbon, Scott, and Macaulay.

Seeking to place some of his work in The Economist, in 1857 Bagehot established a connection with its owner, James Wilson, who asked him to produce a series of articles on banking. Later that year, after a passionate courtship, he and Wilson’s eldest daughter were engaged to be married; they took up residence in the Somerset area, where Bagehot’s employment in the family bank continued and he continued to publish. Appointed to an important financial position in India, Wilson gave his son-in-law oversight over The Economist, and Bagehot went on make his friend Hutton the editor. After Wilson’s death in 1860 and Hutton’s resignation in 1861, Bagehot himself assumed the editorship, which he held until his own death in 1877. During these last years he wrote regularly on a variety of topics. His study of the workings of government entitled The English Constitution came out in 1867. Physics and Politics, which took account of work in anthropology and evolutionary theory to probe the origins of political communities, appeared in 1872, and was followed the next year by Lombard Street, a highly influential work centered on the operations of the Bank of England and the organization of the larger economy.

The pages presented here are taken from “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration,” which is included in Volume III of Bagehot’s Literary Studies, published in 1903 by Longmans, Green, and Co., London, New York, and Bombay.

—SD