Unheeding both Romantic nostalgia and Romantic despair, the European bourgeoisie went ahead building up the economic surplus essen
tial to a restoration of civilized progress after the devastation of revolution and war. By 1830, they were everywhere the dominant in fluence in economic and social recovery, in America and Australia as well as in Europe. They enlisted the depressed classes in their
cause, even to the extent of encouraging violence, but
4. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York, 1933). pp.326-7* 5* F. de Zulueta, ’’The Science of Law” , C. Bailey (ed.), The Legacy
of Rome (Oxford, 1928).
6. William H. Marnell, Man-Made Morals: Four Philosophies That Shaped America. (New York, 19667» Anchor ed., 1968. p. xii. 7. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, p. 328.
Decade 69
once they had secured a transfer or a substantial share of power they clamped down tightly on popular demands* Philosophically, the spokesmen for the English bourgeoisie were the Utilitarians, whose political and moral precepts derived from John Locke (1 6 3 2 - 1 7 0 4) through Jeremy Bentham (174Ö -1832J and whose most persuasive contemporary spokesmen were James Mill (1 7 7 3 -1 8 3 6) and John Stuart Mill (1 8 0 6 -1 8 7 3 J* The Utilitarians opposed Romanticism and mysti cism of any kind and based their arguments on an appeal to reason as they understood it. They trenchantly criticised both the medi eval concept of the ius naturale and the revolutionary concept of the Rights of Man. Bentham declared the Rights of Man to be non sense and the doctrine of imprescriptable rights to be "nonsense on stilts".15
John Stuart Mill defined Utilitarianism as, "The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and 'privation of plea sure." The Utilitarian concept of pleasure was hardly Epicure,an. Happiness, Mill was quick to point out, "is not the agent's own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogeth-
c
er". In other words, the Greatest Happiness Principle involved individual sacrifice in the interest of the general good. The un derlying assumption throughout was that men are actuated solely by
self-interest but that, actuated by reason, each man was the best judge of his own and the public interest.
Thus, the greatest happiness of the greatest number could best be assured by non-interference with the freedom of individuals to do as they liked provided what they liked doing did not inter- 8. Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (London, 1967).
Third Impression, 1971» p. 234.
9. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy (8 Vols. London, 19539» Doubleday Image ed., 1967. Vol. 8. Part 1. p. 45:
fere with the happiness of others. Whereas medieval and most Roman tic thinkers regarded society as an "organic" whole, a product of slow growth, for the Utilitarian society had no meaning "except as the arithmetical sum of the individuals composing it". The State, in this view, instead of being an organic growth in the Burkean sense "...a partnership not only between those who are living but
living, those who are tl
between those who are/dead,and those who are to be born ..." be came a machine with power to impose the pleasure-pain calculus.
Naturally enough, most men and women, bourgeois or not, did not swallow the bleak Utilitarian ethos whole. Although many doubted the traditional Christian dogmas and were pulled this way and that by what Alfred North Whitehead has called the conflicting claims of incompatible doctrines, almost everybody clung to the traditional morality. They had no doubt that good was good and evil evil and an intense moral purpose dominated the lives of men and women in all walks of life, • from rich evangelicals to poor Methodists, from cultivated eventual Catholic convert John Henry Newman to the provincial blue-stocking agnostic Mary Ann Evans who
became George Eliot. John Stuart Mill even found inspiration in Utilitarianism itself. "...when I first read Bentham ... I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world"/2.
Mill and other earnest agnostic Victorians eventually found relief from scepticism in a Religion of Humanity: man took
the place of God as the proper object of devoted love and service. Most people, however, were content to follow or pay lip service to customary and conventional notions and did not worry their heads about fundamentals. Meanwhile, the Utilitarian concept of self- interest found general acceptance in the new Political Economy. I became the conventional wisdom that the chief function of the state 10. W. T. Jones (ed.) Masters of Political Thought (3 vols., Lon
don, 1959), Vol. 3. p. H O *
11. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution (1st pub. 1790. Pelican Classic, 1968), pp. 194“5*
12. J. S. Mill, Autobiograph.y (1st pub. 1873). World's Classics, London, 1924)• pp. 112-119«
Beend© 71
was to remove restrictions — especially institutional restrictions — on the freedom of individuals to pursue their own interests un
less these restrictions served the utilitarian purpose of insuring like freedom for others. Notions of utility — lending ultimately to the marginal utility theory of value — pervaded the thought of the Classical School of Economists who formulated what Carlyle call ed a "dismal science" with tools of analysis forged by Adam Smith
(3