Collected Works

Walter Bagehot (1826-77), the notable Victorian journalist, economist, and historian, was a prolific author of both books and magazine articles. Along with Matthew Arnold he was one of the most lucid and discerning critics of that time. He contributed many journal articles, notably to the Prospective and National Reviews , and The Economist , with a lively and witty style. He had a firm and exact knowledge of political economy, but he viewed it as a science of tendencies, "a convenient series of deductions from assumed axioms which are never quite true, which in many times and in many countries would be utterly untrue, but which are sufficiently near to the principal conditions of the modern world to make it useful to consider them by themselves". Widely considered to be a great authority on banking and finance, Bagehot was consulted by Chancellors of the Exchequer of both parliamentary parties. His outlook, although never hostile to the working classes or trade unions, was openly sympathetic to the capitialist employers - the people who "spend their minds on little else than on thinking whether other people will pay their debts" - a group that had never before such a brilliant spokesman. Bagehot was one of the first economists in Britain to recognise the importance of the idea of development for social and economic theories, but the majority of his work dwells on the insight gained through examining the contrast between the old and the new. Bagehot held that an over-eagerness to act and progress without discussion and criticism was far too common and that the time had come for nations to deliberate and review their direction. Bagehot's two most enduring publications The English Constitution and Lombard Street are both republished here, as are his Letters on the French Coup D'Etat, Literary Studies and Physics and Politics . This edition of the Works was first published in 1889.