Using the essays of John Stuart Mill and other classical utilitarians as touchstones, this essay tracks some of the most politically charged shifts in the Victorian political essay, underscoring the significance of issues of racism and imperialism for coming to terms with the genre. The first two sections provide introductory historical background on the cultural and literary significance of the utilitarians, and detail some important ethical and political dimensions of Mill’s philosophical framework. The remaining sections analyse two singularly revealing essayistic encounters: Mill’s exchanges with Thomas Carlyle over the so-called ‘Negro’ question, and Henry Sidgwick’s assessment of the work of Charles Henry Pearson on national life and character. The striking difference between the political essaying of Mill and that of his utilitarian disciple Sidgwick on matters of imperialistic racism is indicative of some of the evasive literary tactics that have been all too influential, from their era to ours.

The chapter discusses the influence of utilitarianism on education. It begins by introducing the core principles of utilitarianism. The chapter then argues that it is possible to distinguish between two major strands within the utilitarian view of education: one that focuses on promoting the happiness of each individual, and the other on enhancing the happiness of the greatest number by creating facilitating social conditions for it. Each of these two strands is separately examined. The chapter also maintains that the second strand had a lasting impact on education that finds its clearest current expression in the emphasis on education’s role in economic development. Finally, the chapter suggests that reviving certain traditional forms of utilitarianism has significant potential to improve education.

The major fault-line in Victorian engagement with the Bible and antiquity lay between believers and unbelievers, across a wide array of perspectives. Something of this is traced here, from the rationalistic legacy of Bentham to Pusey’s consciously reactionary repudiation of his own early immersion in German scholarship.Consequently, literature about the Bible and antiquity could be polemical, but solvents could be found, not least ones that were associational and personal. Most importantly, friendship could provide such a bond: this chapter traces that which began at Charterhouse School between George Grote and Connop Thirlwall and which ended only with their deaths. Grote is now much better remembered than Thirlwall, but both wrote important histories of ancient Greece that would be translated into German, a great tribute given their own indebtedness to German scholarship. In a review of Curtius’s history of ancient Greece, Arnold criticised both Grote and Thirlwall for failing to reach the new standards set by more recent German scholarship. Within a year of the death of Thirlwall, Anglo-German classical scholarship was being written in an altogether new key.

The penal colonies were modern experiments that attempted to resolve surplus British populations, achieve strategic and naval ambitions, and form new imperial markets. Metropolitan reformers were keenly interested in prison systems, writing speculative accounts and plans in response to early evidence from New South Wales. This chapter analyses major theories about the penal colonies and ‘systematic colonization’ by Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, examining how evidence was drawn from colonial texts and repurposed for metropolitan interests. Alternative forms of information from the colonies were fed into metropolitan inquiries by the Quaker travellers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker. Quasi-official colonial experiments with convicts and prison reform trialled through the first half of the nineteenth century in many cases anticipated the prison reform underway in Britain. This chapter analyses the network of texts that brought metropolitan attention to bear on controversial aspects of convict transportation and colonial reform that reshaped ideas about society, crime, and punishment, with distinctive religious overtones, and how new models for reform emerged from colonial experiments.

Today three forces threaten to limit speech. The first pits guns against words, creating a showdown between the Second Amendment and the First. The second sees powerful speakers invoking their right to speak in order to silence other people’s speech. Third, and perhaps the most subtle, the monitoring of our digital speech by government and business chills our ability to say what we want online. Free speech will survive provided we remain vigilant in defending the speech rights of the minority against what has been called the tyranny of the majority.

This chapter ties together all the threads of the book to construct a general Acceptance Test for fictions. I begin by discussing the nature of the desired Acceptance Test in terms of the width of the discretion it should contain, and of the fundamental policy it should reflect. I then discuss the motives for fictions, concluding that the Acceptance Test should not take motive into account. There follows an analysis of previous findings as to specific fictions, in light of the Effect and Nature Classifications. The Classifications are used to separate desirable from undesirable fictions. The roles of justice and conservatism are considered. I argue that existing fictions should be treated more leniently than new fictions. This distinction finds expression in two sub-tests of the Acceptance Test: the Retention Test and Creation Test. Finally, the Acceptance Test is presented as the combination of the Retention Test and Creation Test in one flowchart.

Barrell concludes by arguing that the utilitarians’ conscription into an ahistorical Enlightenment is doubly misconceived, first, because they opposed only the crudest forms of historical enquiry, and, second, because the eighteenth-century Enlightenments were neither systematically ahistorical nor neatly superseded by Romantic, organic, and historicist ideas. If, therefore, these new historical perspectives were both products and unruly offshoots of Enlightenment, then the utilitarians’ intellectual history assumes a more fluid shape. This new shape, Barrell suggests, may force us to rethink the utilitarians’ place within the intellectual history of the nineteenth century; the history of historical writing; and the history of philosophy.

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This chapter examines contemporary responses to utilitarianism as a political tradition, and, contrary to accepted wisdom, argues that Bentham’s theory of utility was circumstantially and thus historically relative. It asks why Bentham has been perceived as both an ahistorical and an antihistorical thinker, despite his engagement with the ‘Enlightened’ historicisms of the eighteenth century: with Montesquieu, Barrington, Kames, and others. While he denied that history possessed an independent value that could determine or even effectively structure politics, we should not mistake these arguments for an unwillingness to contemplate politics historically, or to make occasionally significant concessions to time and place. Bentham’s point, rather, was that historical truths were categorically distinct from philosophical ones, and that sciences historiques observed the past while sciences philosophiques appraised it. The chapter also addresses Bentham’s overlooked work as a ‘historiographer’ who performed recognisably historical tasks, including the examination of evidence and the passing of historical judgements

Postema argues that – contrary to the received opinion – we may view contemporary, post-Hartian British legal positivism or, more broadly, post-Hartian British jurisprudence, as having developed naturally from the legal philosophies put forward by Matthew Hale and Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, which in turn were part of an earlier and philosophically more ambitious, pre-positivist tradition, the thetic tradition, dating back to Jean Bodin, Marsilius of Padua and, ultimately, to Thomas Aquinas. Postema explains that if we do, we will see that instead of being a quirky ancestor of the British positivist tradition, Bentham appears as the high point of the thetic tradition, which came to an end when Austin decisively disengaged British jurisprudence from Bentham’s legal philosophy. We see, then, Postema continues, that Austin’s jurisprudence changed the direction of British jurisprudence decisively from the thetic tradition to a positivist approach to the study of jurisprudence, one that continues to this day and sees jurisprudence as separable from moral philosophy and metaphysics, as well as history, social theory and comparative studies.

Schofield explains that Bentham made a fundamental distinction between expository jurisprudence, which concerns the law as it is, and censorial jurisprudence, which concerns the law as it ought to be, and between local and universal expository jurisprudence, and that he took the subject matter of universal expository jurisprudence to be terms (or concepts) such as ‘obligation’, ‘right’ and ‘validity’ that are common to all legal systems. He points out that Bentham introduced a method for analysing or clarifying such terms, namely, the method of paraphrasis, and argues, contrary to Hart, that Bentham was neither a substantive nor a methodological legal positivist. Bentham’s utilitarianism, characterised by its naturalistic basis and its claim to govern every aspect of human action, led him to conceive of value judgements as a form of empirical statement; hence the idea of a conceptual separation of fact and value, as required by substantive legal positivism, would have made no sense to him. Moreover, Bentham would not have accepted the methodological view that expository jurisprudence is a value-neutral enterprise, since it was undertaken just for its utility-promoting value.

The relationship between language(s) and economics is a complex one. While it has been commonly held that linguistic homogeneity favors economic prosperity, a counter-argument suggests that multilingual capabilities may remove impediments to such prosperity: economic advantages may flow from bridging linguistic divides. Languages in contact are rarely of equal status, however, and some “small” varieties are particularly threatened today – most often, of course, by English. In a renewed and ecologically based attention to at-risk languages, the matter of rights has become central. After all, sustained and broadly accepted arguments for inherent language rights could put both speakers and their interactions with other communities on a stronger footing. My thesis here is that any meaningful support for language rights must be firmly grounded in law. Currently, this is very rarely the case and, therefore, much of the discussion about rights is really about claims to rights.