The idea of political deference has a quaint, very British air to it: invoking images of doffing hats to passing royals or the celebrated comedy sketch of John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbett, where the middle classes look up to the upper classes and down on the lower classes, and the lower classes know their place. In an increasingly egalitarian and democratic age, deference seems to be from another time. At some point, it became a pejorative, something passé.

In Catherine Marshall’s new study, we find many good reasons to think twice about this. Marshall draws on Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867) and his ideas on the constitutional role of deference to suggest that it is a productive conceptual tool for understanding the peculiarities of the British state from 1688 onwards. Her argument is that a misunderstanding of the nature of deference meant that the idea was too quickly abandoned when it still had explanatory power. Marshall demonstrates how deference helps to explain the story of the British shift towards democracy.

In pursuit of this goal, she examines the empirical decline in deference through the events of the past 200 years of British politics. The focus of the study is deference as it is manifested in the political sphere. This is not a study of the British class system, but rather an examination of British deference to the established institutions and practices of the constitution. The result is a thought-provoking account of how recent political events can be understood through a much longer story of the nature of deference to authority in the British constitutional tradition.

Deference helps to explain the long-term process of the Anglo-British constitution’s move towards democracy because it helps us to understand how that change took place without revolutionary violence. As Marshall points out “British history is littered with moments which were revolutionary in all but name—and names matter.” The Anglo-British Constitution has changed radically over the last two centuries, but the horror of revolution born of the 1640s still helps to explain its politics and the management of crises from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Abdication of 1936. British elites managed to manage upheaval where others fell to revolution, regime change, and reactionary backlash. This is part of the familiar vision of the British constitutional order as gradualist, whiggish, pragmatic, and sensible—like the common law that is so central to it, a clever and calming way of managing change in social beliefs by gradually integrating them into the common body of the law. Like Oakeshott’s conservatism, deference is an English disposition. And this is the story of the Anglo-British constitution and its dependence on various notions of deference.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is an intellectual history of the development of the idea of deference with Bagehot at its center, but ranging across Hume, Smith, Burke, the contemporary historiography of the 18th century, and Bagehot’s successors in practice and thought, Disraeli, contemporary historiography of the Reform Acts, and Dicey. This history rounds off with the beginning of the 20th century and the thinking of Harold Laski’s Fabian phase and the writings of Sir Ivor Jennings. The second part is a study of the decline of deference through the political events of the 20th century, noting the deference sapping experiences of 1911 Parliament Act; Lloyd George’s selling of peerages; Irish Home Rule and partition; the modernization of the monarchy under George V and the subsequent Abdication crisis; the financial crises of the interwar years; the wars themselves; the retreat from Empire; the rise of the Labour party and the welfare state; and the irreverence of the 1960s satire boom of Private Eye and the aforementioned comedy sketch.

Conventions and Hierarchy

Throughout the book, Marshall makes use of a careful typology of different senses of deference. She begins by noting the difference between voluntary and involuntary deference, between that which is freely chosen and that which comes from fear. She then distinguishes the egalitarian deference of the American colonies from the more hierarchical society of Great Britain, and further notes that deference can be both rational (chosen as conducive to some set of values) and irrational (accepted without thought through habit and custom). We thus reach the two principal concepts that run through the British experience from the 18th century onward: what she calls “rational voluntary deference” and “irrational voluntary deference.”

Deference is what supports a constitutional order based on convention. It is accepting a way of doing things and the distinct roles that different people have in that way of doing things. Such deference is not the source of hierarchy, rather it is a consequence of it. Deference here is an opinion that one ought to defer to certain ways of doing things and that certain people have a duty to do them. In the case of America, a more egalitarian society created egalitarian voluntary deference focused on the document of the Constitution and the institutions it created. In Britain this was not an option as the social hierarchy already existed and dealing with this fact became part of the management of social change.

Marshall traces the precursor of the theory of deference proper to the Scottish Enlightenment where Hume and Smith “theorised a non-republican, non-egalitarian form of political deference.” The answer to Hume’s question of “how do the few rule the many?”, was “opinion” and Smith enriched this answer with his subtle account of deference to the rich arising from sympathy and social interactions. Hume and Smith then become the progenitors of hierarchical voluntary rational deference, while their friend Edmund Burke becomes the spokesman for hierarchical irrational voluntary deference in his attack on the French Revolution.

What the Scottish Enlightenment and Burke give us is a sense that stability is a political good and that deference, while not the same as stability, is one of the main causes of stability and a source of legitimacy in the lived experience of politics. Working within existing ways of doing things rather than revolutionary reform requires a deference to the established order and a notion of progress that is evolutionary and gradualist. Without deference, attempts at progress are liable to end up in “revolutionary anarchy or reactionary tyranny.”

Bagehot’s belief that politics grows and cannot be suddenly made helps him to see that hierarchical rational and irrational voluntary deference allowed England to muddle through adjustments without revolutionary disturbances. For Bagehot, the 19th century constitution saw the operation of irrational voluntary deference to the mystical parts of the constitution (chiefly the monarchy) and rational voluntary deference to the working parts of the constitution (parliament and cabinet government). Deference acts as the glue that holds the political order together in the face of quite radical changes such as the Reform Acts. For Marshall, deference is the key conceptual innovation made by Bagehot, and one whose significance his successors, such as Dicey and his followers, failed to grasp. These two different notions of deference were central to the skillful management of the British constitutional order until the advent of the democratic age in the 20th century.

The Decline of Deference

In the second part of the book Marshall turns to examine deference in a democratic age and shows how ideological thinkers such as Laski, whose class-based analysis led him to see all deference as archaic and servile, misidentified deference at precisely the point where, despite its declining influence in the political order, it would have been a powerful explanatory tool. The events of the Suez Crisis, with its revelation of incompetence and lying at the heart of the political elite, and the sleaze and scandal of the Profumo affair dented public faith in the political class. All of this led to a situation where irrational voluntary deference to the social hierarchy all but disappeared and voluntary rational deference to the hierarchy was severely reduced, leaving Queen Elizabeth II as its final figurehead. The political and economic crises of the 1970s, and the social tensions of the 1980s, left the concept of deference looking like something from another age. When the events surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales shook the remaining deference to the monarchy, it seemed that deference had had its day.

There do seem to be some odd omissions from Marshall’s account of the role of deference in 20th century Britain. One wonders why the absence of radical fascist or communist movements in Britain isn’t a ready-made case study for the lingering explanatory power of deference and its power to de-fang revolutionaries. Or whether the iconic status of the National Health Service in the British Psyche isn’t explicable in terms of deference to the welfare state. Moreover, there is little mention of the role of the established Church of England as a conduit for deference for most of the period under consideration, or of other key elements of the constitutional order such as British thinking about the nature of representation in Parliament and the role of parties, or the notion of a loyal opposition, all of which seem central to co-opting and managing political disagreement of the sort discussed here.

Perhaps the most frustrating omission is the absence of a detailed account of the relationship of deference to other key concepts for understanding the Anglo-British political experience and those who have attempted to understand it. Despite a valuable engagement with the work of the sociologist Edward Shils and his work on deference, there is no discussion of his notion of civility and its connection to the success in managing social change. Similarly, we might have usefully explored the connection between deference and trust, authority, duty, loyalty, habit, custom, and tradition. There was also space for further discussion of the notions of opinion and consent generated by the discussion of the Scottish Enlightenment. What, for example, differentiates voluntary rational deference from other types of consent?

One of the most interesting features of the book is how the deliberate attempts at constitutional change since the 1990s display what happens when an uncodified liberal political constitution based on deference and convention encounters a codified system of international human rights law, a supreme court, and submission to the supremacy of EU law. The result was not a happy one, and this is at least one way of understanding the events surrounding Brexit. Marshall suggests that the way to understand Brexit is constitutional—the problem of an aristocratic political structure still trying to map itself onto a democratic society. As alien to the political tradition of the Anglo-British Constitution as the European way of doing things is, can we really see that as the driver of Brexit rather than the more workaday political and economic factors that drove people to regard the EU as a problem? Was the problem rather a government and a political elite detached from the experience of the people, a people unwilling to defer to an elite who had failed to earn deference by failing to steer the ship in the interest of all.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be trying to understand Brexit as the annihilation of deference through populism, but rather see it as just another English revolution that will be written into the story of a gradually evolving constitutional order. Marshall’s ultimate assessment is that “the English have been remarkably good at concealing their revolutions or transforming great upheavals into moments of evolution and well-thought-out progression, remaining rationally deferential to their history.” Doesn’t whatever seems revolutionary at the time always come to make sense as part of a longer story once we get out of the fuss of living through it?

Having lived through the referendum of 2016 and the subsequent constitutional crisis in Parliament, we might wonder whether all that seemed febrile in the conflict between the old elite and the new elite, seems in hindsight to have been an inevitable and gradual step in the long evolution of the constitution that continues to earn our deference.