Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century

The Lectures argues that nineteenth-century English legislation followed three main currents of law-making opinion: Old Toryism, Benthamite Individualism, and Collectivism. Dicey's constitutional work treats sovereignty as a legal fact; here he asks what drives legislative change. His answer is that 'law and speculation, action and thought react upon one another,' with 'circumstances' or 'obvious facts' often mattering more than abstract theory . The famous formulation is that legislation is both the 'creature' and the 'parent' of public opinion: enacted law shapes the beliefs that later demand more law .

Dicey divides the century into three periods. The first, Old Toryism or legislative quiescence (1800–1830), was marked by optimism and stagnation, with Blackstone and Burke as guiding figures. The second, Benthamism or Individualism (1825–1870), applied utilitarian principles to law reform, expanding contract and treating each person as the best judge of their own happiness . The third, Collectivism (1865–1900), retained Benthamite legislative activity but with an antithetic socialist ideal, trusting state intervention where individualists trusted laissez faire .

Dicey argues that Bentham's principle of utility could justify collectivism because the majority were the poor, and society should be organized for their benefit . The same legislative machinery and faith in systematic law reform that Benthamites used for individualist ends was turned to collectivist ones. Dicey devotes a lecture to 'The Debt of Collectivism to Benthamism' . This argument is central to his elegiac tone: the very methods of rational law reform he admired had produced a state he viewed with alarm, threatening what he called 'the gravest danger to the country' .

Dicey did not think new ideas were simply conceived by great thinkers and then adopted . He argued that political arguments rarely generate changes in public opinion by themselves; 'obvious facts told for more than argument.' England's changing social conditions — industrialization, the growth of wealth in the North — created an incongruity with static legal frameworks that forced reform. The dominance of Benthamism was a consequence not of Bentham's genius but of the harmony between his philosophy and the political dominance of the middle class. Theory had no inherent persuasive power without 'authorising external circumstances' .

A major criticism is that Dicey's 'public opinion' was really what his cousin Leslie Stephen called 'thought' — the opinion of the educated and politically active, not the 'man on the Clapham omnibus' . The railways, penny post, and popular education that made mass opinion possible came only later. He also forced strands of opinion artificially into his individualist/collectivist order or ignored them entirely. Dr. Kitson Clark called it a 'good first attempt' . Milton Friedman, however, praised it as a 'profound, elegantly written discussion' that illuminates our own long trend toward collectivism .

The Lectures was published in 1905, after Dicey's canonical Law of the Constitution (1885) and before the constitutional crisis over Home Rule. It reflects a Whig and 'unrepentant Benthamite' perspective that opposed Home Rule while defending individualist liberty . By 1914, Dicey added an introduction claiming collectivism threatened 'the gravest danger to the country' . The book's elegiac undertone — telling a story of 'a civilization progressing and then regressing' — reveals Dicey's growing pessimism about the direction of English law and his sense that his own generation was 'already part of the past' .