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

Abstract

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.