Where is Bagehot now that we need him?

Walter Bagehot wrote the following in 1876. Despite a slight patina of grammatical distance between the Victorian age and our own, his fundamental insights remain as clearly stated as anything that might have been written in today’s New York Times. Bagehot was distinct from many of his contemporaries, as he would be distinct from many of those who would be his natural community today, in that he had a firm grounding in both the humanities and the sciences, a true renaissance man in ways difficult to appreciate or understand in our era of hyper-specialization.

The Bagehot shape of mind is precisely what is missing in all too much of what passes for public thought. The question is, where is Bagehot now that we need him?

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“Years ago I heard Mr. Cobden say at an Anti-Corn Law League meeting that ‘political economy was the highest study of the human mind, for that the other physical sciences required by no means so hard an effort’. An orator cannot be expected to be exactly precise, and of course political economy is in no sense the highest study of the mind – there are other things which are much higher, for they are concerned with things much nobler than wealth or money; nor is it true that the effort of mind which the political economy requires is nearly as great as that required for the abstruser theories of physical science, for the theory of gravitation, or the theory of natural selection; but nevertheless, what Mr. Cobden meant had – as usual with his first hand mind – a great fund of truth.

He meant that political economy – effectual political economy, political economy which in complex problems succeeds – is a very difficult thing; something altogether more abstruse and difficult, as well as more conclusive, than that which many of those who rush in upon it have a notion of. It is an abstract science which labors under a special hardship.

Those who are conversant with its abstractions are usually without a true contact with its facts; those who are in contact with its facts usually have little sympathy with and little cognizance of its abstractions. Literary men who write about it are constantly using what a great teacher calls ‘unreal words’ – that is, they are using expressions with which they have no complete vivid picture to correspond.

They are like physiologists who have never dissected; like astronomers who have never seen the stars; and in consequence, just when they seem to be reasoning at their best, their knowledge of the facts falls short. Their primitive picture fails them, and their deduction altogether misses the mark – sometimes, indeed, goes so far astray, that those who live among the facts, boldly say that they cannot comprehend ‘how anyone can talk such nonsense’.

While, on the other hand, these people who live and move among the facts often, or mostly, cannot of themselves put together any precise reasonings about them. Men of business have a solid judgment – a wonderful guessing power of what is going to happen – each in his own trade; but they have never practiced themselves in reasoning out their judgments and in supporting their guesses by argument; probably if they did some of the finer and correcter parts of their anticipations would vanish.

They are like the sensible lady to whom Coleridge said, ‘Madam, I accept your conclusion, but you must let me find the logic for it.’ Men of business can no more put into words much of what guides their life than they could tell another person how to speak their language. And so the ‘theory of business’ leads a life of obstruction, because theorists do not see the business, and men of business will not reason out the theories.

Far from wondering that such a science is not completely perfect, we should rather wonder that it exists at all.”

[from The Postulates of The English Political Economy, 1876]

Tags: political economy, The Postulates of the English Political Economy, Walter Bagehot

This entry was posted on January 5, 2010 at January 5, 2010 and is filed under Economy, Featured, Politics & Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.