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‘Marcel, the dancing-master’: A Note on the Closing Lines of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2013

EMMANUELLE DE CHAMPS
EMMANUELLE DE CHAMPS*
Affiliation:
Université Paris 8/Centre Bentham, [email protected]
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Extract

In the ‘Concluding note’ to An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (IPML), added in January 1789 to the original 1780 text, Bentham addresses highly theoretical questions in jurisprudence: ‘What is a law? What are the different parts of a law?’ He then demonstrates that only an imperative theory of legislation can provide adequate answers and provide the means to establish a precise nomenclature of legal phenomena. These broad questions sum up the work conducted in the manuscripts Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence, which remained at that time unpublished. After such abstract matter, Bentham concludes on a much lighter note:

Leaning on his elbow, in an attitude of profound and solemn meditation, ‘What a multitude of things there are’, (exclaimed the dancing-master Marcel), ‘in a minuet?’ – May we now add? – and in a law.

Type
Debate
Information
Utilitas , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 120 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 See the editorial introduction to Bentham, J., Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence, ed. Schofield, P. (Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar, pp. xi–xv.

2 Bentham, J., An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. Burns, J. H., Hart, H. L. A. and Rosen, F. (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar, p. 311.

3 Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, par une société de gens de lettres, 52 vols. (Paris, 1820), vol. 26, pp. 588–90.

4 For a list of Marcel's ballets, see Schwartz, J. L. and Schlundt, C. L., French Court Dance and Dance Music: A Guide to Primary Source Writings 1643–1789 (Stuyvesant, NY, 1987)Google Scholar.

5 J.-J. Rousseau, Emile, Or On Education, trans. and ed. Kelly, C. and Bloom, A., The Collected Writings of Rousseau (Lebanon, NH, 2009), pp. 280–1Google Scholar.

6 Correspondance complète de Rousseau, 15 janvier–mars 1763, ed. R. Leigh, 52 vols. (Oxford, 1972), vol. 15, l. 2519 [my translation].

7 Helvétius, C.-A., De l'Esprit, Or Essays on the Mind, and its Several Faculties (London, 1759), p. 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Smith, D., ‘Helvétius and the Problems of Utilitarianism’, Utilitas 5 (1993), pp. 275–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosen, F., ‘Helvétius, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Bentham's Idea of Utility’, Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill (London, 2003), pp. 82–96Google Scholar.

9 Bentham, IPML, p. 102.