On Resisting the Pressure of Party in the service of Rule of Law. (An Episode in the history of liberal political activism.)

Today’s post is on the non-trivial ways in which the so-called ‘rule of law’ presupposes that the functionaries of the law carry themselves with integrity in the performance of their station and duties. But before we get there a bit of history. Because today’s post was prompted by a passage in George Macaulay Trevelyan (1913) The Life Of John Bright that I am reading as a distraction from the grant that I am drafting. Trevelyan’s biography is clearly inspired by Hobson’s work on Cobden. And like that work it is impossible to read without our awareness that the looming first world war will totally undermine the self-confidence of the liberal-progressive worldview being expressed in it.

One of the oddities of the self-understanding of liberalism today is a kind of willful amnesia about Cobden and John Bright. Unlike the utilitarian strain of radicalism — Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick and their lesser epigones —, which are actively taught and remembered, the ‘Manchester’ branch is quietly set aside. And if Cobden and Bright are mentioned at all by friends and foes they are represented as cold, calculating businessmen focused on free trade because of their naked self-interest. Cobden and Bright are, thus, usually treated as a way-ward branch of laissez-faire liberals who have nothing to teach once freedom of contract was rejected or overcome as a fundamental organizing principle of liberalism.+

This is all very odd because Cobden and Bright were at the head of a genuine mass movement, the successful Anti-Corn Law League, aimed at (as Wikipedia puts it) “abolishing the Corn Laws, which raised food prices and protected landowners' interests by levying taxes on imported wheat.” What’s especially notable about the Anti-Corn Law League is that it organized a massive shift in public opinion and also involved all the now usual forms of peaceful, mass political activism: mass events, speaker tours, fundraising, letter writing, public education campaigns, and even (despite the limited franchise) voter registration campaigns, etc. And that they succeeded to change the law despite fierce opposition from the then ruling class, and despite the absence of mass media or comfortable mass transportation. (In fact, Bright himself was later instrumental in making possible cheap mass newspapers by lobbying for the removal of taxes on paper.)

Cobden (1804 – 1865) and Bright were quite courageous. Because almost alone in the United Kingdom, they publicly opposed the (disastrous) Crimean war (and Bright was almost alone in his criticism of the Opium wars later in China). Bright was also instrumental in preventing the UK’s alliance with the American South. The Quaker Bright, especially, was fiercely antislavery—and I consider his speeches at Rochdale among the highpoints of 19th century liberalism.

And (as I learned from Chris Brooke and Hobson) while Cobden is central to future development of what we may call ‘technocratic liberalism’ especially when it comes to functional integration in the service of international cooperation and peace, Bright (1811 – 1889) was a true democrat. He turned liberalism into a public force for the advocacy for the so-called household franchise, which would allow workers to be represented in parliament. And while Bright’s views on empire are not abolitionist, he was known as a fierce critic of imperial expansion and his views are not marked by the kind of civilizational supremacy, we find in J.S. Mill toward Ireland and India. (About that some other more.)

Anyway, I hope I have whetted your appetite to learn more about Bright some other time, today’s digression is focused on an incident during Bright’s first campaign for parliament in Durham in 1843. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the event: “He was defeated, but his successful competitor was unseated on petition, and at the second contest Bright was returned.” It’s completely unclear why the election had to be re-run.

Luckily, George Macaulay Trevelyan’s version explains the details. We pick up the story just after Bright’s defeat in the ‘first contest.’

The decisive character of the majority was due in part to Lord Londonderry's influence, and in part to a custom of which the beaten candidate was at the time wholly ignorant. ' The election appeared to me,' Bright afterwards declared, 'to have been orderly and fair, but in this I was mistaken. There was an understanding which was not made public for a month afterwards, and then 300 men received a sovereign each for their vote. The practice was one which had existed for so many years in Durham that the electors thought that there was no harm in it,' indeed three-fifths of those who had voted in the majority took their pay. But the [anti-Corn] League was no respecter of local customs. A petition was brought, and was tried, after the practice of those days, before a committee of the House of Commons. The chairman was Lord Ashley, who hated corruption more than he loved his party…

The good Lord Ashley thus became instrumental in bringing into Parliament a man as zealous as himself for the welfare of the people, yet differing from him in his whole conception of society, and an opponent of those measures of factory legislation which were to Ashley what Free Trade and Franchise were to Bright. Fortunate was the election committee that could have such a chairman, and fortunate the land that could produce both Ashley and Bright, and take what was best in the advice of each. pp. 111-112.

Lord Ashley was Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury (1801 – 1885), a Tory politician (and quite an interesting character in his own right). So, Bright’s parliamentary career started because of a politician who found the then existing practices of corruption and clientelism, “a perilous, a wicked system” (p. 112, quoted from Lord Ashley’s diary) and who put the law above party.

I was reminded, of course, of Brad Raffensperger (the Georgia Secretary of State), who ended up resisting pressure by Senator Graham and then President Trump to change the election results of the Presidential election. Raffensperger’s behavior contrasts starkly with the incompetence of subsequent local prosecutors and the craven cowardice of the then senate majority leader so that there has been no effective accountability of these actions.

There is, I suspect, a tendency among ethicists to deny that it is praiseworthy when people just do their job and follow the rules. They prefer to reserve ‘virtue’ for exceptional behavior. But Lord Ashley and Secretary of State Raffensperger did display strength of character in resisting at minimum the temptations of factionalism (and party loyalty).* Within the pre-history of utilitarianism, Francis Hutcheson ((recall) already taught that performing one’s “office” or station is sufficient grounds to be a hero in virtue:

not only the Prince, the Statesman, the General, are capable of true Heroism, tho these are the chief Characters, whose Fame is diffus’d thro various Nations and Ages; but when we find in an honest Trader, the kind Friend, the faithful prudent Adviser, the charitable and hospitable Neighbour, the tender Husband and affectionate Parent, the sedate yet chearful Companion, the generous Assistant of Merit, the cautious Allayer of Contention and Debate, the Promoter of Love and good Understanding among Acquaintances; if we consider, that these were all the good Offices which his Station in the World gave him an Opportunity of performing to Mankind, we must judge this Character really as amiable, as those, whose external Splendor dazzles an injudicious World into an Opinion, “that they are the only Heroes in Virtue.” Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726, 2004). null, 1726, pp. 195-196.

---

+For a version of this historical narrative, see chapter 3 of Joseph Heath’s The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State (OUP, 2020).

*In Raffensperger’s case he may well have also worried about the consequences of resisting pressure from people who clearly demanded loyalty to themselves.