ИПИ Библиотека

"When democracy turns, as it often does, into a corrupt plutocracy, both national decadence and social revolution are being prepared." So wrote the Irish-born historian, W. E. H. Lecky (1838–1903) in this devastating assault on mass democracy.

Lecky spoke for the landed gentry and the upper middle classes of late Victorian England when he warned his countrymen that an unfettered democracy would destroy the balance of interests in the community and thereby undermine the Constitution.

"A tendency to democracy," said Lecky, "does not mean a tendency to parliamentary government, or even a tendency toward greater liberty." Indeed, the type of democracy emerging in Britain seemed to be the rudiment of socialism.

"Socialism

In any forecast that may be attempted of the probable influence of democracy in the world, a foremost place must be given to its relations to labour questions, and especially to those socialist theories which, during the last twenty years, have acquired a vastly extended influence on political speculation and political action. These theories, it is true, are by no means new. Few things are more curious to observe in the extreme Radical speculation of our times than the revival of beliefs which had been supposed to have been long since finally exploded—the aspirations to customs belonging to early and rudimentary stages of society.

The doctrine of common property in the soil, which, under the title of the nationalisation of land, has of late years obtained so much popularity, is avowedly based on the remote ages, when a few hunters or shepherds roved in common over an unappropriated land, and on the tribal and communal properties which existed in the barbarous or semi-barbarous stages of national development, and everywhere disappeared with increasing population, increasing industry, and increasing civilisation."

William Edward Hartpole Lecky

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903), an Anglo-Irish historian and essayist of classic Whig proclivities, was perhaps the greatest historical scholar Ireland ever produced.

Lecky was a Whig in the tradition of Edmund Burke, who remained his lifelong intellectual hero. Always suspicious of democracy, he deplored the evils of excess in religion or nationalism; at the same time he was acutely and somewhat pessimistically aware of the importance of mass social influences and ideas in history. Like his contemporary John Richard Green, he helped to reorient the purposes of 19th-century historical writing away from politics and diplomatics.