8 - The Parliament Act, 1911, and the Destruction of All Constitutional Safeguards (1912)

Summary

The constitutional lawyer and public intellectual Albert Venn Dicey remains a touchstone for scholars in constitutional/public law, who return to his classic definitions of the rule of law and of parliamentary sovereignty. Likewise, British and Irish historians have kept him in view, assessing his role in the conflict over Home Rule that dominated the politics of the period. Nevertheless, Dicey has been overlooked as a political theorist. This oversight impairs our understanding of the development of liberal and democratic thought, and deprives us of valuable insights at a time when the compatibility of democracy and liberalism has again been put in question both within academia and in broader public discourse. Specifically, it has been too little noted that Dicey was the earliest Anglophone thinker to put advocacy of the referendum at the heart of a sophisticated theory of democracy. He diagnosed modern Western parliamentary regimes as suffering from a crisis of representation, which he wished to remedy by implementing a specific form of constitutional referendum. This chapter is one of Dicey’s major explorations of the referendum and the trajectory of democracy.