Ever since J. H. Plumb published his Ford Lectures, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1679-1725 (1966), the topic of political stability has gripped the attention of England’s early modern historians. In particular Plumb’s characterization of the politics of 1679-1722 as “The Rage of Party” was refined by Geoffrey Holmes, whose British Politics in the Age of Anne ushered in a variety of studies of political warfare in what has come to be known as The First Age of Party. These and succeeding works have elaborated and confirmed the existence of deep and severe differences between Whig and Tory partisans, differences renewing animosities extending back to the Civil Wars and generating a self-perpetuating struggle for power. The consequences of this “rage of party” for the formation and execution of policy were daunting. In particular party rage placed three important restrictions on the executive’s room for maneuver. By rendering all political alliances unstable, partisanship limited the ability of the governments of William and Anne to operate as combinations of the parties. Partisanship also put all government servants under the constant threat of defending their conduct from year to year. And partisanship dictated certain policy options while frustrating others.

For his first review of someone else’s economic treatise following the publication of his own Principles of Political Economy in 1848, John Stuart Mill chose to examine Francis Newman’s Lectures on Political Economy (1851). One might expect that Mill’s review would be sympathetic. Both Mill and Newman were zealous reformers, much berated for pursuing endless “crotchets.” They were both great advocates of the two campaigns that, for Mill, eventually emerged as pre-eminent: land reform and the emancipation of women. It would be reasonable to assume that the political economy of each helped determine the scope and focus of his respective involvement in social reform, and there would be much commonality. Newman, moreover, had only the year before outraged orthodox opinion by his highly critical analysis of the New Testament in Phases of Faith. While Mill downplayed his own secularism, he would likely have felt more than a spark of kinship with someone who had managed to scandalize even liberal Unitarians.