Word: bagehot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Gibbon swiftly arrived at a celebrity that allowed him to dine with Benjamin Franklin, converse with the Emperor of Austria-and aggravate his own gout. But he and his times were not really in tune. The French Revolution Gibbon dismissed as "popular madness." The 19th century social scientist Walter Bagehot was probably right in judging him to be the sort of man that revolutionary mobs like to hang...
...whisper. Between Johnson and Eliot lay the great age of the literary thunderheads, roughly dated between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the onset of World War I. Then boomed and flashed the resounding literary quarterlies, the influential journalists, the great prophet-critics like Coleridge, Carlyle, Walter Bagehot and Arnold. Such cloud-capped, towering judges of culture and anarchy have dissolved in today's bland intellectual climate. But in their heyday, English men of letters could claim, in Gross's phrase, to have "written a collective biography of the national mind...
...prestige is not, of course, a reflection of any real power. More than a century ago, Walter Bagehot noted that a constitutional monarch has only three rights: "The right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn." Those narrow royal prerogatives have further diminished in the years since. Such considerable aura as the British crown still has for Britons and the rest of the world is largely the residual glow from the past. It emanates from the legends and lives of England's kings, evoking images of silver trumpets raised on lofty battlements, the colored swirl...
...their colonial history. Physically, they are artifacts of 19th century imperialism's division of the spoils, confined within arbitrary frontiers contrived by colonial mapmakers. Psychologically, they are the heirs of Europe's own fierce nationalism, which fueled the race for empire. As 19th century British Philosopher Walter Bagehot observed, political man is a highly imitative animal. The subjugated peoples of the empires resented and rejected colonialism, but they assimilated and accepted much of its trappings, casting about for the same status symbols that their masters had. This deep psychological need to cut the figure of nationhood...
...controversy over whether Schlesinger should have published it has yet to subside. He was accused of "the height of historical irresponsibility," of cashing in on confidences from a dead man, of writing "peephole history," of endangering the national interest. In his defense, he quoted British Philosopher Walter Bagehot: "When a historian withholds important facts likely to influence the judgment of his readers, he commits a fraud." (But Schlesinger himself ignored that injunction when, according to a friend, he decided to omit a similar account of how Kennedy had been planning to dump FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover...