Thomas Hare (political scientist)
| Thomas Hare | |
|---|---|
Sir Thomas Hare
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| Born |
28 March 1806 England, UK |
| Died | 6 May 1891 (aged 85) |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Lawyer, political reformer |
Sir Thomas Hare (28 March 1806 in England – 6 May 1891) was a British proponent of electoral reform.
He was born on 28 March 1806, was the only son of A Hare of Leigh, Dorset. On 14 November 1828 he was admitted a student of the Inner Temple, and was called to the bar on 22 November 1833. He practised in the chancery courts and from 1841 reported in Vice-chancellor Wigram's court.
He studied law, and was called to the Bar in November 1833 and published several works on judges' decisions. In 1853 he became Inspector of Charities and was later Assistant Commissioner on the Royal City Charities Commission, about which he published several books. He was a Conservative Party member who resigned from public life in 1846.
He married, first, in Dorsetshire on 7 Aug. 1837, Mary, daughter of Thomas Samson of Kingston Russell. She died on 21 Oct. 1855, and was buried in the churchyard of Brompton church. They had eight children. The eldest daughter, Marian, wife of the Rev. W. R. Andrews of Eastbourne, has written under the pseudonym of 'Christopher Hare;' the second daughter, Alice, married Professor Westlake. Hare married, secondly, on 4 April 1872, Eleanor Bowes Benson (1833-1890), second sister of Edward White Benson, archbishop of Canterbury [q. v. Suppl.], by whom he had issue Mary Eleanor (1874-1883).
Hare was said to have been 'conspicuous for great industry – to have wide interests in life and clearness of intellectual vision'. He was a member of the London-based Political Economy Club and the British Dictionary of National Biography says of him:
His original electoral system ideas included making The United Kingdom one huge electorate [Hare (1854) set the divisor as 654 the number of seats in the UK Parliament] one huge electorate (later he changed this to seven or eight hundred electorates) and that each voter would sign and check his vote. By 1873, however, he had adapted his ideas to take account of the secret vote. Under Hare's method, simply dividing the vote by the number of seats constituted the quota and then the surplus was expected to be distributed 'at random'.
Hare's famous original work Machinery of Representation appeared in 1857 (in two editions) and many editions of his equally famous Treatise on the Election of Representatives: Parliamentary and Municipal appeared between 1859 and 1873. In the preface to the fourth edition he stated his belief that proportional representation would '... end the evils of corruption, violent discontent and restricted power of selection or voter choice'. A great deal of writing on this theory developed and several societies were formed worldwide for its adoption, although Hare pointed out that his scheme was not meant to bear the title 'representation for minorities'. Moreover, he noted in the preface to his third edition a point that was to become a feature of Tasmanian politics:
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