https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/intellectualhistory/files/original/c96f3e37d7abd34a355a398209eb80d3.pdf 8c390a04ec4d569cfafbdddc6164d866 PDF Text Text Donald Winch Deductive Individualism: Utilitarianism and Political Economy 1. In this lecture I want to focus on another important strand of Enlightenment social science that survived the French Revolution and proved enormously influential as an intellectual force, especially in this country, where it also had considerable impact on a wide range of institutional reforms and changes in economic policy adopted in the period that runs from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the 1860s and 70s. It was known either as Benthamism or Utilitarianism, and its adherents also described themselves as Philosophic Radicals. Three of the major figures in this movement were also political economists, David Ricardo, James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, so the movement can be considered as a kind of hybrid. Its legal, political, and philosophical ideas derive largely from Jeremy Bentham; and its economic ideas are a development, largely due to innovations by Thomas Robert Malthus and Ricardo, of theories first propounded by Adam Smith. 2. Perhaps one of the best ways of introducing the subject is to contrast it with themes dealt with in my previous two lectures. Thus in dealing with the Enlightenment sciences of man in society I concentrated on a dimension, best illustrated by Montesquieu, Hume, Smith and Ferguson, which was historical, evolutionistic, comparative, inductive, and "sociological" in its emphases. By contrast, Utilitarianism developed another strand within Enlightenment thinking that concentrated on individual psychology, and was more mechanical than organic in its treatment of society. In terms of method it was also universalist rather than comparative and historical, and deductive rather than inductive. 3. Utilitarianism can also be contrasted with some of the ideas which emerged from the debate on the French Revolution. Thus in contrast to Burke's and later conservative theorists' emphases on the organic growth of society -- an emphasis that gave a prescriptive role to the history of institutions (i.e. there is a presumption that what has survived in the process of social and political evolution has positive values attached to it) -- Benthamite Utilitarianism treated such history as more likely to contain a record of human folly, superstition and 1 �corruption. It followed that arguments based on historical evidence were either likely to be apologetic or only of value in establishing how we arrived at our present situation. They were of no use in indicating how the present state of affairs ought to be improved. Instead of looking backwards for an understanding of the development of social and political institutions, they proposed to subject all existing and proposed policies and institutions to a future-minded test -- a test which they regarded as objective and value-free: Do they serve the greatest happiness of the greatest number in society? 4. By subjecting the law and its procedures to this test, and then by extending their ideas to cover the reform of Parliament as well as prisons, workhouses, and many other branches of legislation, the Philosophic Radicals, as their name suggests, acted as a radical reforming impulse, employing a unified body of practical and constructive reason to society. However, the Benthamites differed from other radicals such as those I described as opposing Burke last week. The emphasis on reason was similar, as was the emphasis on individuals. But the Benthamites rejected a cardinal tenet of such radicals as Paine, namely the idea that individuals should be considered as the locus of certain pre-social natural rights of the kind embodied in the American constitution and the French Declaration of Rights. Bentham regarded natural rights and natural law doctrines generally as "nonsense on stilts", as yet another example of the way in which confusing metaphysical doctrines had plagued discussion of law and government in the past, attributing law to God's purpose, to the wisdom of the ages, or to some idea of rights that existed outside any given form of government or society. According to the Benthamites, the only rights that existed were legal rights, those which emanated from a sovereign with the power to impose duties and enforce obligations under the law. Reform programmes had to be practical; they had to begin from the hereand-now, paying little attention to customary practices (except in so far as they embodied legitimate expectations, those that could be defended according to utilitarian criteria) and avoiding utopian dreams of a perfect future. The individual person or citizen was to be the basis of all legal and political thinking, as the natural rights radicals had argued as well; but the individual was prized rather as psychological datum than as a moral entity, and the 2 �external criteria that were brought to bear on the critique and reform of institutions was meant to be an objective standard embodied in the principle of utility. 5. Let us begin to unpack and illustrate these statements by taking a closer a look at the individualistic qualities of Benthamite utilitarianism. It derives from Lockean sensationalist psychology and develops it in what would be known today as a behaviouralist direction: the individual is an aggregate of his or her direct sense-experience of the world. The individual personality is built up through a chain of associations, happiness being attached to pleasant sensations and pain being attached to unpleasant sensations: hence the term associationist psychology which the Utilitarians took over from Hartley, and which provided the basis for their views on education -- a process of ensuring that the right sensations were reinforced. By analogy, society was an aggregation of individuals, each acting as rational hedonists; i.e. as pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding animals. 6. Much of the robustness of Utilitarianism derives from this reduction of diverse human motivation into a simple calculus of the pleasures and pains felt by individuals in their pursuit of happiness. It gave the principle of self-interest enhanced significance, and when this self-interest was directed towards material satisfactions it produced the standard model of "economic man". Adam Smith did not employ this simplifying assumption in the Wealth of Nations: self-interest might be a dominant motive in economic dealings, but it was not the only motive at work. His successors as political economists increasingly came to believe that rational economic man was the only psychological basis on which a science of political economy could be constructed, and in the process political economy became a narrower and more deductive form of inquiry. 7. The self-interest assumption could also be employed, as it was by James Mill, in putting forward a model of political behaviour designed to prove that wherever the governing Few were not constrained by representative institutions, they would pursue their interests at the expense of the subject Many. It could be employed, in other words, as a kind of conspiracy theory of government with Hobbesian overtones. Benthamites employed the conspiracy version of the self-interest axiom to expose the shortcomings of all unreformed corporate 3 �bodies, including the legal and other professions, the Church, the civil service, such dominant class groupings as landowners, and existing political parties such as the Tories and Whigs. These were all "sinister" interest groupings organised by the governing Few and operating against the interests of the Many. As we know from modern uses of the same reductionist, conspiracy notions of the interest principle, they can present what appear to be penetrating, deflating exposés of public and private life. The Philosophic Radicals relied a good deal on these shock tactics in their attempts to unmask the forces that underpinned Britain's system of aristocratic government and the class bias of parliamentary legislation. And in so doing they aroused furious debate about the precise status of the self-interest axiom when applied to all aspects of public and political life. This is well-illustrated by the two extracts on the circulated sheet, one by James Mill, the other by his Whig opponent, the historian Thomas Macaulay, charging that the axiom was either a truism or false; and that in consequence it could not serve, as the Utilitarians believed it could, as the psychological foundation for a "science of government and legislation". Notice, however, that use of the same axiom or assumption when dealing with economic behaviour was not subject to the same criticism -at least, not until much later. You might like to ask yourself why this was the case, bearing in mind that similar assumptions about economic man were also employed, albeit for different purposes, by Karl Marx in his attempt to build on Smithian and Ricardian political economoy. 7. Benthamism and the whole school of utilitarian thinking to which it has given rise has frequently been criticized as a selfish and materialistic set of moral doctrines. And this charge gains extra credence from Bentham's unwillingness to distinguish between qualities of pleasure as opposed to more quantitative dimensions such as intensity and duration of pain and pleasure. But the charge is misleading in several respects. First, non-materialistic pleasures have to be included within the utilitarian calculus as sources of happiness alongside others. Secondly, the pursuit of happiness by individuals does not have to be a purely selfish activity in the pejorative sense. Utilitarianism does not rule out altruism by denying that we may enhance our own happiness by seeking that of others. Indeed, what the utilitarians were attempting to discover was institutional structures offering rewards and punishments that 4 �would produce a net harmony between individuals at the aggregate level. Rewards would be offered to encourage activities that produced happiness for others as well as the main agent, and punishments would be used to deter or minimize the infliction of pain on others. This is the behaviourist side of utilitarianism, and it is best studied by examining some of the many Benthamite schemes, such as his Panopticon prison or his proposals for dealing with pauperism, indigence and the Poor Law. Thirdly, one must bear in mind that Utilitarianism was not primarily a moral doctrine concerned to give guidance to individual conduct. It was a practical public philosophy designed to furnish objective criteria for judging the puhlic consequences or aggregate impact of policies. Thus a somewhat different light is shed on one of Bentham's more notorious statements by this consideration. Bentham once said that "pushpin (pinball) was as good as poetry, if it generated the same amount of pleasure". This sounds like a rather phillistine remark, and it may well have been. But if it is a statement about the relative importance that the state should attach to these activities, rather than a comment on how a private person should rank these activities, it becomes an egalitarian assumption that the pleasures of some people should not be ranked above that of others. 5. It is this egalitarian quality that I want to stress by means of another Benthamite slogan: "Everyone to count as one, nobody to count as more than one". The public interest is to be arrived at by an aggregation of the pleasures and pains produced by any measure, treating each person's pains and pleasures as equal to everybody else's. Notice that the underlying assumption is that there is likely to be a conflict of interests, with some suffering pain while others achieve pleasure. This is obviously the case with measures which redistribute income from one group to another, and one of the best known generalisations of utility theory is embodied in the law of diminishing utility, which can be used, as it was by Bentham, to show that the gain in pleasure by a poor person from redistributive measures was likely to be larger than the loss of pleasure by the rich man. Economic equality was indeed one of the subordinate goals of legislation for utilitarians, but they placed security above equality, which entailed that the feasible legislative goal was a reduction of inequality rather than equality of outcome. 5 �8. Utilitarianism also has a built-in bias in favour of majoritarian solutions to the problem of conflict -- the greatest happiness of the greatest number -- and this goes along with an antagonism to paternalism. Utilitarians do not always assume that everybody always knows their interest -- the balance between pain and pleasure. Children, for example, have to be treated as being included in their parents'interests. But the utilitarian does tend to believe that education via schooling and a free press can easily make people aware of their interests. (This, incidentally, is one of the ways in which their use of conspiracy theories differ from those of Marxists: any element of false consciousness cannot long survive education and public exposure.) And once I am apprised of my interests, nobody can be assumed to know what will serve them better than I do -- which is one of the underpinnings of paternalist measures, and why the utilitarians prided themselves on taking an unsentimental attitude to reform. By keeping their eye firmly on the consequences of public measures judged in terms of the utility principle, rather than on good-hearted motives and intentions, sentiment need not enter into the matter. It would all be a matter of consequences objectively weighed. Hence the similarity with modern methods of cost-benefit analysis as a guide to public policy decisions, and the concentration on practical details fully worked out in advance that is the prime characteristic of a Benthamite proposal. Hence too the influence which followers of Bentham were able to exert on legislative measures, sometimes in collaboration with self-styled humanitarian reformers, sometimes in opposition. 8. I hope it will be clear from what I have said so far why Bentham could regard himself as in a direct line with earlier attempts to found a science of legislation and good government along Newtonian lines. In some respects, however, Bentham resembles more a different kind of natural scientist, namely the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, the scientist responsible for the creating the system of classification we still use for plants. Bentham certainly devoted a good deal of his effort to taxonomic activities, showing how rights, powers, duties, crimes, and administrative functions could be classified according to rational principles. Bentham's other claim to be operating naturalistically lay in his belief that he had shown a way of avoiding normative statements of what ought to be based on metaphysics and such fictions as natural 6 �rights. On the other hand, unlike some of his eighteenth-century predecessors, such as Smith, he had gone beyond the process of establishing how things worked and had come to be as they are. He was able to proceed more directly from what is to what ought to be. It was not simply a matter of explaining underlying order in society, but of giving detailed practical guidance as to what governments should or should not do to achieve harmony through a system of rewards and punishments and other legal and administrative constraints. Bentham's approach is therefore far more dirigiste, more actively directive or interventionist, than you will find in writers like Montesquieu and Smith, and this has led commentators to contrast the Smithian idea of natural harmony with Bentham's stress on artificial harmonization. It could be a useful initial distinction, but it quickly breaks down when one examines just how many exceptions Smith requires to the general principle of laissez-faire. 9. Bentham's early work was directed at legal and penal reform, and is best represented by his attempt to replace the English system of judge-made law based on custom and precedent with one based on a rational code of laws and punishments which would make the law more clear and certain to the public and reduce the element of discretion allowed to judges and lawyers. His ideas on prisons and punishment are best represented by his famous Panopticon proposals for a modern penitentiary, and the similar schemes he put forward for dealing with poverty and indigence. 10. Another fruitful way of looking at Benthamism is to see it as leading to a view of government, and indeed of modern social life generally, as essentially concerned with problems of legislation, leading to the setting up of self-regulating administrative structures of a bureaucratic kind. Put in terms of a story of progress, Benthamism is a forerunner of what Weber described as "legal-rational" forms of bureaucratic organisation, and a forerunner of other reformist movements which proceeded along bureaucratic lines, such as those led by the Webbs and other Fabians at the turn of the twentieth century. The prime characteristics of Benthamite administration are efficiency, economy, certainty, clarity of command and responsibility, and accountability. 7 �11. Although considerable controversy surrounds the precise influence exerted by Benthamites on British legislation in the nineteenth century, a list of the major reforms which they advocated will illustrate the nature and coverage of their vision. Law reform, prison reform, campaigns for free speech, the legalisation of combinations or trade unions, parliamentary reform along democratic lines, including the secret ballot and female suffrage, the appointment of civil servants according to merit and competitive examinations, reform of the poor law, safety codes, public health measures, birth control, taxation of inheritance, the donation of one's corpse for medical research, etc. etc. For these reasons you will understand why discussion of what has become known as the Victorian administrative state, indeed of the origins of the welfare state, has to take account of the Benthamite contribution. And I will add as an enormous footnote that you should bear in mind that two of Bentham's followers, James and J.S.Mill spent most of their lives as civil servants at India House and were responsible for the direction taken by British policy in India for over 40 years. 12. Having illustrated the fact that utilitarianism was by no means an armchair or closet form of social science, but was in fact a major effort to unite theory and practice, I should like to return to consider some of the methodological characteristics of the theory. I have probably said enough to justify the label "individualist", and the deductive quality will be apparent to readers of James Mill's Essay on Government. The use of the deductive method was also a characteristic of political economy, as shown in the Malthusian principle that "if unchecked by other influences, the potential for population increase is greater than the capacity to increase food production; or by the Malthus-Ricardo theory of rent which shows that under certain assumed conditions the law of diminishing returns in agriculture will result in a rise in a rise in the share of national income going to rent payments. Political economy, as I have hinted earlier, became a far more rigidly deductive science than it had been in Smith's hands; and it has retained this characteristic to the present day. 14. But I do not think you should be misled by the terms of the Mill-Macaulay dispute into believing that the distinction between deductive and inductive methods of inquiry convey a clear idea of what was at stake. In some respects the contrast between deduction and 8 �induction is a false one, chiefly because there are few simple-minded believers in the idea that knowledge can be acquired solely by deductive or inductive methods. Clearly a mixture of both methods is involved in all scientific thinking. Thus even those Benthamites, like James Mill or Ricardo, who made great use of rational deductive methods would have claimed that the assumptions which formed the basis for their deductions were meant to be approximations based upon wide historical experience and empirical knowledge of human behaviour. They would also have claimed that observation and empirical evidence was essential as a means of testing the conclusions of theories based on hypothetical deductive reasoning. Similarly with professed inductivists like Macaulay, it would not be difficult to show that he makes full use of deductions in forming his conclusions. Nevertheless, the distinction between deduction and induction does help to show how the disputants saw themselves and their opponents. Thus when James Mill and other political economists attacked those who were, as they put it, "all for fact and nothing for theory", those who thought that one or two exceptions to a general rule based on probabilistic evidence constituted grounds for rejection of all theory, they thought of themselves as defenders of science against mere practice-based knowledge -the kind of thing that businessmen and everyday politicians prided themselves in possessing. 15. Such defences of theory as a way of working out "If, then" propositions, of spelling out assumptions and working out their implications, have always been characteristic of the social sciences operating in a world where experiments are difficult to conduct and the participants in the economic, social and political game have developed a down-to-earth ordinary-language way of talking about what they do and how the system works. Thus we are all familiar with charges made against social science to the effect that it is "mere theory", or that it is simply commonsense in fancy or jargon-ridden dress. Sometimes it may indeed be just what its critics say, but it does not follow that all theory, all attempts to use a hypothetical method of arguing from assumed cases in order to spell out possible implications, is misguided when applied to social affairs. Rejecting a theory is, of course, quite different from rejecting all theory. 9 �16. But if we are not rejecting all theory and any use of deductive methods, it is still possible to criticize the more extreme uses we find, above all, in James Mill. And this is what his son John Stuart Mill did after Macaulay's attack. He set about the problem of defining the type of deductive method that should be used in the moral or social sciences, and showing the proper relationship that should exist between deduction and induction in order to stress the limits of a priori or hypothetical propositions as a stepping stone towards policy recommendations, where the conclusions of other social sciences may be needed to deal with modifying or disturbing influences. For this reason, Mill's treatment of these methodological questions in Book VI of his book on Logic became a nineteenth-century classic. 17. But Mill did a good deal more than give a balanced statement of the methodology of the social sciences as they existed in the 1840s. In order to understand his position we have to bear in mind the other criticisms that were ranged against the older style of utilitarian theorising, namely its a-historical and universalistic features, and the consequential neglect of what I shall loosely call a "sociological" dimension -- something that had been present in the work of earlier writers in the Enlightenment tradition, but which had disappeared under Bentham's influence. By a-historical and universalistic I mean simply that utilitarianism and political economy in their Benthamite and Ricardian forms seemed to take little or no account of the influence of time and place on political and economic arrangements. Moreover, apart from some highly optimistic programmatic statements about the benefits of education and the general enlightenment that would result from a free press and the establishment of good government along utilitarian lines, they seemed to suggest that in future society would take the form of a more efficiently operating economic system along existing capitalistic lines, and a more efficient type of democratic and bureaucratic government operating according to individualistic utilitarian principles. This confidence led to a kind of impatience or intolerance towards other types of society, especially those based on custom rather than market rationality. The laws of political economy seemed to be presented as universal propositions, applicable to all societies, past, present, and future. For an economist of Mill's generation, however, it was necessary to come to terms with various non-Marxist socialistic 10 �criticisms of political economy and various socialistic alternatives to capitalism. This is what he attempted to do in his restatement of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy in 1848, a work which survived into the 1870s as a guide to radical progressive thinking in Britain. Mill was even more troubled by the over-simplicity of the utilitarian science of government, which suggested that democratic forms of government could be prescribed as a universal panacea applicable to all European societies, regardless of historical and social circumstances. In this matter, as I pointed out last week, he found it necessary to reconsider some of the questions raised by the conservative opponents of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Bearing in mind what I said about the historical dimension of Scottish thinking, what we can say is that Mill found it necessary to return or revive the historical approach by formulating, with the help of ideas drawn from St.Simon and Comte, a theory of social progress, a theory designed to shed light on the likely future state of society. Mill also became dissatisfied with the narrow and somewhat fixed view of human capacities adopted by his mentors. Was it not possible to envisage the emergence of a different kind of human nature in which cooperative rather than competitive characteristics predominated? Finally, Mill became worried about the deadening effect of a society composed of individuals enjoying substantial equality and becoming, under the influence of majoritarian pressures, ever more conformist. Was individualism becoming a substitute for individuality and diversity? If so, was this the new problem for modern societies, one that would pose a barrier to future progress long after the solution of existing economic problems? 19. This bare outline of later nineteenth-century attempts to broaden the base of a utilitarian approach to the social sciences by someone who was originally brought up to be a worthy successor to Bentham and his father, tells us something about the survival value of utilitarian ideas in Britain. Some earlier claims were relinquished, notably those connected with a science of government, where a more comparative and "sociological" approach had to be found. But Mill stuck to the idea that psychology was the fundamental science of man, without which statements about human behaviour in groups that could vary in size from the social class to a whole nation would remain purely empirical generalisations rather than laws. 11 �And he stuck to the idea of a separate science of political economy, thereby resisting the view of August Comte that all the special sciences of man in society would eventually be gathered under a single unified science called sociology -- the subject of John Burrow's next lecture on the French positivism. 12 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences Description An account of the resource Lectures by Donald Winch for the 'Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences' course at the University of Sussex. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Donald Winch Deductive Individualism: Utilitarianism and Political Economy 1. In this lecture I want to focus on another important strand of Enlightenment social science that survived the French Revolution and proved enormously influential as an intellectual force, especially in this country, where it also had considerable impact on a wide range of institutional reforms and changes in economic policy adopted in the period that runs from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the 1860s and 70s. It was known either as Benthamism or Utilitarianism, and its adherents also described themselves as Philosophic Radicals. Three of the major figures in this movement were also political economists, David Ricardo, James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, so the movement can be considered as a kind of hybrid. Its legal, political, and philosophical ideas derive largely from Jeremy Bentham; and its economic ideas are a development, largely due to innovations by Thomas Robert Malthus and Ricardo, of theories first propounded by Adam Smith. 2. Perhaps one of the best ways of introducing the subject is to contrast it with themes dealt with in my previous two lectures. Thus in dealing with the Enlightenment sciences of man in society I concentrated on a dimension, best illustrated by Montesquieu, Hume, Smith and Ferguson, which was historical, evolutionistic, comparative, inductive, and "sociological" in its emphases. By contrast, Utilitarianism developed another strand within Enlightenment thinking that concentrated on individual psychology, and was more mechanical than organic in its treatment of society. In terms of method it was also universalist rather than comparative and historical, and deductive rather than inductive. 3. Utilitarianism can also be contrasted with some of the ideas which emerged from the debate on the French Revolution. Thus in contrast to Burke's and later conservative theorists' emphases on the organic growth of society -- an emphasis that gave a prescriptive role to the history of institutions (i.e. there is a presumption that what has survived in the process of social and political evolution has positive values attached to it) -- Benthamite Utilitarianism treated such history as more likely to contain a record of human folly, superstition and 1 corruption. It followed that arguments based on historical evidence were either likely to be apologetic or only of value in establishing how we arrived at our present situation. They were of no use in indicating how the present state of affairs ought to be improved. Instead of looking backwards for an understanding of the development of social and political institutions, they proposed to subject all existing and proposed policies and institutions to a future-minded test -- a test which they regarded as objective and value-free: Do they serve the greatest happiness of the greatest number in society? 4. By subjecting the law and its procedures to this test, and then by extending their ideas to cover the reform of Parliament as well as prisons, workhouses, and many other branches of legislation, the Philosophic Radicals, as their name suggests, acted as a radical reforming impulse, employing a unified body of practical and constructive reason to society. However, the Benthamites differed from other radicals such as those I described as opposing Burke last week. The emphasis on reason was similar, as was the emphasis on individuals. But the Benthamites rejected a cardinal tenet of such radicals as Paine, namely the idea that individuals should be considered as the locus of certain pre-social natural rights of the kind embodied in the American constitution and the French Declaration of Rights. Bentham regarded natural rights and natural law doctrines generally as "nonsense on stilts", as yet another example of the way in which confusing metaphysical doctrines had plagued discussion of law and government in the past, attributing law to God's purpose, to the wisdom of the ages, or to some idea of rights that existed outside any given form of government or society. According to the Benthamites, the only rights that existed were legal rights, those which emanated from a sovereign with the power to impose duties and enforce obligations under the law. Reform programmes had to be practical; they had to begin from the hereand-now, paying little attention to customary practices (except in so far as they embodied legitimate expectations, those that could be defended according to utilitarian criteria) and avoiding utopian dreams of a perfect future. The individual person or citizen was to be the basis of all legal and political thinking, as the natural rights radicals had argued as well; but the individual was prized rather as psychological datum than as a moral entity, and the 2 external criteria that were brought to bear on the critique and reform of institutions was meant to be an objective standard embodied in the principle of utility. 5. Let us begin to unpack and illustrate these statements by taking a closer a look at the individualistic qualities of Benthamite utilitarianism. It derives from Lockean sensationalist psychology and develops it in what would be known today as a behaviouralist direction: the individual is an aggregate of his or her direct sense-experience of the world. The individual personality is built up through a chain of associations, happiness being attached to pleasant sensations and pain being attached to unpleasant sensations: hence the term associationist psychology which the Utilitarians took over from Hartley, and which provided the basis for their views on education -- a process of ensuring that the right sensations were reinforced. By analogy, society was an aggregation of individuals, each acting as rational hedonists; i.e. as pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding animals. 6. Much of the robustness of Utilitarianism derives from this reduction of diverse human motivation into a simple calculus of the pleasures and pains felt by individuals in their pursuit of happiness. It gave the principle of self-interest enhanced significance, and when this self-interest was directed towards material satisfactions it produced the standard model of "economic man". Adam Smith did not employ this simplifying assumption in the Wealth of Nations: self-interest might be a dominant motive in economic dealings, but it was not the only motive at work. His successors as political economists increasingly came to believe that rational economic man was the only psychological basis on which a science of political economy could be constructed, and in the process political economy became a narrower and more deductive form of inquiry. 7. The self-interest assumption could also be employed, as it was by James Mill, in putting forward a model of political behaviour designed to prove that wherever the governing Few were not constrained by representative institutions, they would pursue their interests at the expense of the subject Many. It could be employed, in other words, as a kind of conspiracy theory of government with Hobbesian overtones. Benthamites employed the conspiracy version of the self-interest axiom to expose the shortcomings of all unreformed corporate 3 bodies, including the legal and other professions, the Church, the civil service, such dominant class groupings as landowners, and existing political parties such as the Tories and Whigs. These were all "sinister" interest groupings organised by the governing Few and operating against the interests of the Many. As we know from modern uses of the same reductionist, conspiracy notions of the interest principle, they can present what appear to be penetrating, deflating exposés of public and private life. The Philosophic Radicals relied a good deal on these shock tactics in their attempts to unmask the forces that underpinned Britain's system of aristocratic government and the class bias of parliamentary legislation. And in so doing they aroused furious debate about the precise status of the self-interest axiom when applied to all aspects of public and political life. This is well-illustrated by the two extracts on the circulated sheet, one by James Mill, the other by his Whig opponent, the historian Thomas Macaulay, charging that the axiom was either a truism or false; and that in consequence it could not serve, as the Utilitarians believed it could, as the psychological foundation for a "science of government and legislation". Notice, however, that use of the same axiom or assumption when dealing with economic behaviour was not subject to the same criticism -at least, not until much later. You might like to ask yourself why this was the case, bearing in mind that similar assumptions about economic man were also employed, albeit for different purposes, by Karl Marx in his attempt to build on Smithian and Ricardian political economoy. 7. Benthamism and the whole school of utilitarian thinking to which it has given rise has frequently been criticized as a selfish and materialistic set of moral doctrines. And this charge gains extra credence from Bentham's unwillingness to distinguish between qualities of pleasure as opposed to more quantitative dimensions such as intensity and duration of pain and pleasure. But the charge is misleading in several respects. First, non-materialistic pleasures have to be included within the utilitarian calculus as sources of happiness alongside others. Secondly, the pursuit of happiness by individuals does not have to be a purely selfish activity in the pejorative sense. Utilitarianism does not rule out altruism by denying that we may enhance our own happiness by seeking that of others. Indeed, what the utilitarians were attempting to discover was institutional structures offering rewards and punishments that 4 would produce a net harmony between individuals at the aggregate level. Rewards would be offered to encourage activities that produced happiness for others as well as the main agent, and punishments would be used to deter or minimize the infliction of pain on others. This is the behaviourist side of utilitarianism, and it is best studied by examining some of the many Benthamite schemes, such as his Panopticon prison or his proposals for dealing with pauperism, indigence and the Poor Law. Thirdly, one must bear in mind that Utilitarianism was not primarily a moral doctrine concerned to give guidance to individual conduct. It was a practical public philosophy designed to furnish objective criteria for judging the puhlic consequences or aggregate impact of policies. Thus a somewhat different light is shed on one of Bentham's more notorious statements by this consideration. Bentham once said that "pushpin (pinball) was as good as poetry, if it generated the same amount of pleasure". This sounds like a rather phillistine remark, and it may well have been. But if it is a statement about the relative importance that the state should attach to these activities, rather than a comment on how a private person should rank these activities, it becomes an egalitarian assumption that the pleasures of some people should not be ranked above that of others. 5. It is this egalitarian quality that I want to stress by means of another Benthamite slogan: "Everyone to count as one, nobody to count as more than one". The public interest is to be arrived at by an aggregation of the pleasures and pains produced by any measure, treating each person's pains and pleasures as equal to everybody else's. Notice that the underlying assumption is that there is likely to be a conflict of interests, with some suffering pain while others achieve pleasure. This is obviously the case with measures which redistribute income from one group to another, and one of the best known generalisations of utility theory is embodied in the law of diminishing utility, which can be used, as it was by Bentham, to show that the gain in pleasure by a poor person from redistributive measures was likely to be larger than the loss of pleasure by the rich man. Economic equality was indeed one of the subordinate goals of legislation for utilitarians, but they placed security above equality, which entailed that the feasible legislative goal was a reduction of inequality rather than equality of outcome. 5 8. Utilitarianism also has a built-in bias in favour of majoritarian solutions to the problem of conflict -- the greatest happiness of the greatest number -- and this goes along with an antagonism to paternalism. Utilitarians do not always assume that everybody always knows their interest -- the balance between pain and pleasure. Children, for example, have to be treated as being included in their parents'interests. But the utilitarian does tend to believe that education via schooling and a free press can easily make people aware of their interests. (This, incidentally, is one of the ways in which their use of conspiracy theories differ from those of Marxists: any element of false consciousness cannot long survive education and public exposure.) And once I am apprised of my interests, nobody can be assumed to know what will serve them better than I do -- which is one of the underpinnings of paternalist measures, and why the utilitarians prided themselves on taking an unsentimental attitude to reform. By keeping their eye firmly on the consequences of public measures judged in terms of the utility principle, rather than on good-hearted motives and intentions, sentiment need not enter into the matter. It would all be a matter of consequences objectively weighed. Hence the similarity with modern methods of cost-benefit analysis as a guide to public policy decisions, and the concentration on practical details fully worked out in advance that is the prime characteristic of a Benthamite proposal. Hence too the influence which followers of Bentham were able to exert on legislative measures, sometimes in collaboration with self-styled humanitarian reformers, sometimes in opposition. 8. I hope it will be clear from what I have said so far why Bentham could regard himself as in a direct line with earlier attempts to found a science of legislation and good government along Newtonian lines. In some respects, however, Bentham resembles more a different kind of natural scientist, namely the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, the scientist responsible for the creating the system of classification we still use for plants. Bentham certainly devoted a good deal of his effort to taxonomic activities, showing how rights, powers, duties, crimes, and administrative functions could be classified according to rational principles. Bentham's other claim to be operating naturalistically lay in his belief that he had shown a way of avoiding normative statements of what ought to be based on metaphysics and such fictions as natural 6 rights. On the other hand, unlike some of his eighteenth-century predecessors, such as Smith, he had gone beyond the process of establishing how things worked and had come to be as they are. He was able to proceed more directly from what is to what ought to be. It was not simply a matter of explaining underlying order in society, but of giving detailed practical guidance as to what governments should or should not do to achieve harmony through a system of rewards and punishments and other legal and administrative constraints. Bentham's approach is therefore far more dirigiste, more actively directive or interventionist, than you will find in writers like Montesquieu and Smith, and this has led commentators to contrast the Smithian idea of natural harmony with Bentham's stress on artificial harmonization. It could be a useful initial distinction, but it quickly breaks down when one examines just how many exceptions Smith requires to the general principle of laissez-faire. 9. Bentham's early work was directed at legal and penal reform, and is best represented by his attempt to replace the English system of judge-made law based on custom and precedent with one based on a rational code of laws and punishments which would make the law more clear and certain to the public and reduce the element of discretion allowed to judges and lawyers. His ideas on prisons and punishment are best represented by his famous Panopticon proposals for a modern penitentiary, and the similar schemes he put forward for dealing with poverty and indigence. 10. Another fruitful way of looking at Benthamism is to see it as leading to a view of government, and indeed of modern social life generally, as essentially concerned with problems of legislation, leading to the setting up of self-regulating administrative structures of a bureaucratic kind. Put in terms of a story of progress, Benthamism is a forerunner of what Weber described as "legal-rational" forms of bureaucratic organisation, and a forerunner of other reformist movements which proceeded along bureaucratic lines, such as those led by the Webbs and other Fabians at the turn of the twentieth century. The prime characteristics of Benthamite administration are efficiency, economy, certainty, clarity of command and responsibility, and accountability. 7 11. Although considerable controversy surrounds the precise influence exerted by Benthamites on British legislation in the nineteenth century, a list of the major reforms which they advocated will illustrate the nature and coverage of their vision. Law reform, prison reform, campaigns for free speech, the legalisation of combinations or trade unions, parliamentary reform along democratic lines, including the secret ballot and female suffrage, the appointment of civil servants according to merit and competitive examinations, reform of the poor law, safety codes, public health measures, birth control, taxation of inheritance, the donation of one's corpse for medical research, etc. etc. For these reasons you will understand why discussion of what has become known as the Victorian administrative state, indeed of the origins of the welfare state, has to take account of the Benthamite contribution. And I will add as an enormous footnote that you should bear in mind that two of Bentham's followers, James and J.S.Mill spent most of their lives as civil servants at India House and were responsible for the direction taken by British policy in India for over 40 years. 12. Having illustrated the fact that utilitarianism was by no means an armchair or closet form of social science, but was in fact a major effort to unite theory and practice, I should like to return to consider some of the methodological characteristics of the theory. I have probably said enough to justify the label "individualist", and the deductive quality will be apparent to readers of James Mill's Essay on Government. The use of the deductive method was also a characteristic of political economy, as shown in the Malthusian principle that "if unchecked by other influences, the potential for population increase is greater than the capacity to increase food production; or by the Malthus-Ricardo theory of rent which shows that under certain assumed conditions the law of diminishing returns in agriculture will result in a rise in a rise in the share of national income going to rent payments. Political economy, as I have hinted earlier, became a far more rigidly deductive science than it had been in Smith's hands; and it has retained this characteristic to the present day. 14. But I do not think you should be misled by the terms of the Mill-Macaulay dispute into believing that the distinction between deductive and inductive methods of inquiry convey a clear idea of what was at stake. In some respects the contrast between deduction and 8 induction is a false one, chiefly because there are few simple-minded believers in the idea that knowledge can be acquired solely by deductive or inductive methods. Clearly a mixture of both methods is involved in all scientific thinking. Thus even those Benthamites, like James Mill or Ricardo, who made great use of rational deductive methods would have claimed that the assumptions which formed the basis for their deductions were meant to be approximations based upon wide historical experience and empirical knowledge of human behaviour. They would also have claimed that observation and empirical evidence was essential as a means of testing the conclusions of theories based on hypothetical deductive reasoning. Similarly with professed inductivists like Macaulay, it would not be difficult to show that he makes full use of deductions in forming his conclusions. Nevertheless, the distinction between deduction and induction does help to show how the disputants saw themselves and their opponents. Thus when James Mill and other political economists attacked those who were, as they put it, "all for fact and nothing for theory", those who thought that one or two exceptions to a general rule based on probabilistic evidence constituted grounds for rejection of all theory, they thought of themselves as defenders of science against mere practice-based knowledge -the kind of thing that businessmen and everyday politicians prided themselves in possessing. 15. Such defences of theory as a way of working out "If, then" propositions, of spelling out assumptions and working out their implications, have always been characteristic of the social sciences operating in a world where experiments are difficult to conduct and the participants in the economic, social and political game have developed a down-to-earth ordinary-language way of talking about what they do and how the system works. Thus we are all familiar with charges made against social science to the effect that it is "mere theory", or that it is simply commonsense in fancy or jargon-ridden dress. Sometimes it may indeed be just what its critics say, but it does not follow that all theory, all attempts to use a hypothetical method of arguing from assumed cases in order to spell out possible implications, is misguided when applied to social affairs. Rejecting a theory is, of course, quite different from rejecting all theory. 9 16. But if we are not rejecting all theory and any use of deductive methods, it is still possible to criticize the more extreme uses we find, above all, in James Mill. And this is what his son John Stuart Mill did after Macaulay's attack. He set about the problem of defining the type of deductive method that should be used in the moral or social sciences, and showing the proper relationship that should exist between deduction and induction in order to stress the limits of a priori or hypothetical propositions as a stepping stone towards policy recommendations, where the conclusions of other social sciences may be needed to deal with modifying or disturbing influences. For this reason, Mill's treatment of these methodological questions in Book VI of his book on Logic became a nineteenth-century classic. 17. But Mill did a good deal more than give a balanced statement of the methodology of the social sciences as they existed in the 1840s. In order to understand his position we have to bear in mind the other criticisms that were ranged against the older style of utilitarian theorising, namely its a-historical and universalistic features, and the consequential neglect of what I shall loosely call a "sociological" dimension -- something that had been present in the work of earlier writers in the Enlightenment tradition, but which had disappeared under Bentham's influence. By a-historical and universalistic I mean simply that utilitarianism and political economy in their Benthamite and Ricardian forms seemed to take little or no account of the influence of time and place on political and economic arrangements. Moreover, apart from some highly optimistic programmatic statements about the benefits of education and the general enlightenment that would result from a free press and the establishment of good government along utilitarian lines, they seemed to suggest that in future society would take the form of a more efficiently operating economic system along existing capitalistic lines, and a more efficient type of democratic and bureaucratic government operating according to individualistic utilitarian principles. This confidence led to a kind of impatience or intolerance towards other types of society, especially those based on custom rather than market rationality. The laws of political economy seemed to be presented as universal propositions, applicable to all societies, past, present, and future. For an economist of Mill's generation, however, it was necessary to come to terms with various non-Marxist socialistic 10 criticisms of political economy and various socialistic alternatives to capitalism. This is what he attempted to do in his restatement of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy in 1848, a work which survived into the 1870s as a guide to radical progressive thinking in Britain. Mill was even more troubled by the over-simplicity of the utilitarian science of government, which suggested that democratic forms of government could be prescribed as a universal panacea applicable to all European societies, regardless of historical and social circumstances. In this matter, as I pointed out last week, he found it necessary to reconsider some of the questions raised by the conservative opponents of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Bearing in mind what I said about the historical dimension of Scottish thinking, what we can say is that Mill found it necessary to return or revive the historical approach by formulating, with the help of ideas drawn from St.Simon and Comte, a theory of social progress, a theory designed to shed light on the likely future state of society. Mill also became dissatisfied with the narrow and somewhat fixed view of human capacities adopted by his mentors. Was it not possible to envisage the emergence of a different kind of human nature in which cooperative rather than competitive characteristics predominated? Finally, Mill became worried about the deadening effect of a society composed of individuals enjoying substantial equality and becoming, under the influence of majoritarian pressures, ever more conformist. Was individualism becoming a substitute for individuality and diversity? If so, was this the new problem for modern societies, one that would pose a barrier to future progress long after the solution of existing economic problems? 19. This bare outline of later nineteenth-century attempts to broaden the base of a utilitarian approach to the social sciences by someone who was originally brought up to be a worthy successor to Bentham and his father, tells us something about the survival value of utilitarian ideas in Britain. Some earlier claims were relinquished, notably those connected with a science of government, where a more comparative and "sociological" approach had to be found. But Mill stuck to the idea that psychology was the fundamental science of man, without which statements about human behaviour in groups that could vary in size from the social class to a whole nation would remain purely empirical generalisations rather than laws. 11 And he stuck to the idea of a separate science of political economy, thereby resisting the view of August Comte that all the special sciences of man in society would eventually be gathered under a single unified science called sociology -- the subject of John Burrow's next lecture on the French positivism. 12  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Deductive Individualism: Utilitarianism and Political Economy Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Donald Winch Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Undated. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context IHA/Winch/67 Adam Ferguson Adam Smith Comte David Hume David Ricardo Fabianism James Mill Jeremy Bentham John Stuart Mill Macaulay St Simon Utilitarianism