The British Prohibitionists 1853–1872

In his famous study of attitudes to the state in nineteenth-century England, Dicey described the period 1825–70 as “the period of Benthamism or Individualism”. Evangelicalism and Benthamism, he argued later, “represented the development in widely different spheres of the same fundamental principle, namely, the principle of individualism”. Only later did laissez faire fall into eclipse: “somewhere between 1868 and 1900 … changes took place which brought into prominence the authoritative side of Benthamite liberalism.” Dicey's interpretation has come under sustained attack during the last twenty years, and historians now pay more attention to the continuing momentum of state intervention from the 1830s, and to the collectivist aspect of Bentham's teaching. Yet Dicey's critics have ignored a movement which in some ways lends more support to their case than any other mid-Victorian development, and which draws attention to hitherto unappreciated virtues and defects of Dicey's account.