Dicey's historical and comparative analytical account of the rule of law, described in Chapter Seven, was central to English constitutional doctrine for much of the twentieth century. Whether as a starting point for reform or point of reference for reaction, it remained central to the constitution's further evolution even for those to whom it had lost much of its appeal. What had evolved from Coke's controlling common law, described in Chapter Six, and what had been made an accessible and appealing object of constitutional analysis was Dicey's rule of law beneath the sway of a sovereign Parliament. It was taken for granted during a period of considerable ‘constitutional quiescence’ between the liberal legal reforms of the first part of the twentieth century and the renewed focus upon constitutional law reform in recent decades. Its appeal began to wane with that of the whig comparative history from which its historical and comparative references derived their force. On the one hand, whig assumptions of historical progress were undermined, in law, by the administrative legal problems that accompanied a developing and increasingly complex administration and, in general, by the decline of Empire, belated recognition of its fundamental failures, the devastations of two world wars and, beginning in the 1960s and increasing in the 1970s, a sense that Britain was failing economically to keep up with her Continental and other competitors.