Charles Dickens, Albert Venn Dicey, and Openness in the Anglosphere

Abstract As the twentieth century neared its end, commentators (including Robert Conquest and James C. Bennett) began to write on the “Anglosphere”. They used this term to denote an “association” of “English-speaking nations” (Conquest) and a “network civilisation” (Bennett). While discussion continues concerning the question of how best to characterise the Anglosphere, it is clearly a social formation with cultural, historical, and geopolitical significance. This essay seeks to deepen understanding of the Anglosphere by focusing on a feature of life in this context that lends it practical appeal. This is its openness (readiness to reconsider, in the light of experience, how things stand on matters of practical concern). With the aim of bringing openness in this sense into focus, this essay analyses the writings of the novelist Charles Dickens and the constitutional lawyer Albert Venn Dicey. Dickens’ commitment to openness is apparent in the emphasis he places on “strong powers of observation”. Dicey points up the practical significance of openness in his account of the role played by “public opinion” in the political and legal life of the United Kingdom. This essay also identifies Dickens and Dicey as bearers of a culture in which the English language, the common law, and the free market give expression to and sustain a commitment to openness. More particularly, it argues that openness is apparent in a distinct model of democracy (“data-stream democracy”) and in constitutional arrangements that facilitate responsiveness to the contingencies that all societies confront. The openness on which this essay focuses is also relevant to a disposition that legal, political, and other institutions in the Anglosphere work to foster. Oliver Wendell Holmes throws light on this disposition when he declares that “[t]he life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience”. Both this disposition, and the openness (institutional and cultural) that fosters it, yield support for the conclusion that the Anglosphere is a distinctive social formation.