English Constitution Reprinted from the "Fortnightly Review.

London: Chapman and Hall, 1867. Full Description:

BAGEHOT, Walter. The English Constitution. Reprinted from the "Fortnightly Review." London: Chapman and Hall, 1867.

First edition. Octavo (7 3/4 x 5 inches; 197 x 125 mm). viii, 348 pp. With half-title and publisher's advertisement. This book was first serialised in The Fortnightly Review between 15 May 1865 and 1 January 1867, and then published in book form as the present copy in 1867. We could only find one copy at auction on Rare Book Hub in the past 30 years.

Publisher's original purple cloth. Boards stamped and ruled in blind. Spine stamped and lettered in gilt. Yellow (truncated) coated endpapers. All edges uncut. Spine lightly sunned. Head and tail of spine with some minor flaking. Boards with some mild rubbing. Some light toning to endpapers. Previous owner's signature on top margin of title-page. Binders ticket on rear pastedown. Overall a very clean copy, seemingly almost unread.

"This classic account of that most elusive and least codified of entities, the Constitution of England, has never lost its popularity, and shows signs of being elevated from the rank of first-class handbook to a place with De Tocqueville as one of the most important texts in political literature... It was perhaps originally due to his early association with The Economist (he married the first editor's daughter in 1858, and was editor himself from 1860 to his death) that Bagehot owed his introduction to the sources of power, and it was from this deep experience of the real working of political machinery in this country that he wrote. He showed how the close co-operation between executive government and legislature established by the cabinet system is the effective part of the English Constitution and the real centre of power— or was so at least until quite recently. Some measure of the importance of what might seem at first sight an insular topic the practical working of one nation's constitution— can be gained from the number of times it has been translated. Bagchor's work is of more than English importance: it is the great defence of empirical as against theoretical politics." (PMM 358).

"Great Defence of Empirical as Against Theoretical Politics" (PMM).

"Walter Bagehot was one of the great political journalists of his—or indeed of any—age. Woodrow Wilson called his approach a 'fresh and original method which has made the British system much ore intelligible to ordinary men than it was before." For anyone who wants to understand the workings of British politics, this book, written in 1867, is still the best introduction available. It is a study of the classical period of Cabinet government before the extension of the suffrage, the creation of the party machines, and the emergence of an independent Civil Service administering a vast welfare state." (Cornell University Press).

"Walter Bagehot, editor of the Economist and author of The English Constitution, wrote nearly forty articles on the United States in the 1860s, in which he touched on a variety of themes, including the Constitution, the Civil War, slavery, comparative government, the Presidency, elective monarchy, Abraham Lincoln, and reconstruction. Although a Liberal in British politics, he had misgivings about American democracy, which he thought vulgar, and criticized the US Constitution as dated and inflexible." (Oxford Academic).

PMM 358

HBS 69359.

$10,000. (Inventory #: 69359)