ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes one aspect of the history of the ministerial department: the debate about notions of responsibility and organization from J. Bentham to W. Bagehot which went along with actual developments in central government practice. The ministerial department came to have certain specific features. It was to be headed by a single political person, at once exclusively responsible, the most powerful and yet the most temporary element in the organization. The ministerial offices of the years before 1832 were themselves specifically free from some of the later conditions of the ministerial norm: Lord Palmerston, for example, regarded a permanent civil service as a danger to ministerial responsibility. Bentham contributed a very great deal to the theory of the normal ministerial department of the later nineteenth century. J. S. Mill had, long before the 1860s, edited, augmented and completed Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence. By the 1860s there was a wide acceptance of responsibility and the ministerial department.
