Walter Bagehot (/ˈbædʒət/ BAJ-ət; 3 February 1826 – 24 March 1877) was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race.

[2] Bagehot was called to the bar by Lincoln's Inn, but preferred to join his father in 1852 in his family's shipping and banking business.

He equally applied such reasoning to develop a form of pseudoscientific racism, whereby those of mixed race lacked any "inherited creed" or "fixed traditional sentiments" upon which, he considered, human nature depended.

He attempted to provide empirical support for his views by citing John Lubbock and Edward Tylor although, in their writings on human evolution, neither of them accepted arguments for innate hereditary differences, as opposed to cultural inheritance.

More specifically, there was particular popularity "Bagehot's Dictum" that in times of crisis of the financial system, central banks should lend freely to solvent depository institutions, yet only against sound collateral and at interest rates high enough to dissuade those borrowers that are not genuinely in need.

Every year, the British Political Studies Association awards the Walter Bagehot Prize for the best dissertation in the field of government and public administration.