Boobquakes and other matters of sex

29 April 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

The last 200 years have seen a rise in societies based on happiness rather than on virtue. The virtuous society needs a single authority to declare an appropriate morality. That authority might be a pope, a council of elders, a king, an aristocracy, or something of the sort. This kind of society has been in decline in the west, though the Catholic Church has been notable in its efforts to uphold the morality of small children, bringing them closer, much closer, to god.

The replacement for the virtuous society is a society based on happiness, with, putting it simply, the ballot box used as the means of gauging the needs and wants of the population. In such an environment, as it turns out, science can flourish, as it is (relatively) protected from whimsical moral declarations from on high, and associated declarations of fact. Both the happiness society and science have a materialist bent too. The association between materialism and the happiness society goes back to Epicurus.

Iran is a virtue based society. It has a group known as the Guardian Council that has substantial power. How reminiscent this is of Plato’s Republic! It also has clerics. Cleric Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi  provided the following explanation for earthquakes. The quotes are taken from this BBC article.

“Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes.”

“What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”

“Now if a natural earthquake hits Tehran, no one will be able to confront such a calamity but God’s power, only God’s power. So lets not disappoint God.”

Well, you can’t argue with god, and I imagine it is not advisable to argue too loudly with the good Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi either.

So enters Jen McCreight. She self-describes with the noble qualities of ’liberal, geeky, nerdy, scientific, perverted atheist feminist trapped in Indiana.’ She runs a blog called Blag Hag.

Jen responded to Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi’s declaration by proposing an experiment. Dress down, dress dirty, and produce an earthquake, or not. An article she wrote about her challenge appears in The Daily Beast here. On her blog, here, she discusses the aftershocks from her article.

She sells t-shirts on the theme, modelled here by the surprisingly limber.

As far as I am aware no causation between dressing down and earthquakes was found, but we are awaiting computer modelling from available data by scholars at the University of East Anglia, a commentary by Al Gore, and a declaration by the IPCC.

Postscript: Discussing erotic pictures at Pompeii an article in The Independent on Sunday dated [Saturday] 15 May 2010 states:

And it’s unlikely Pope Benedict will be paying a visit to the bath paintings, which climax graphically in a spot of man-on-man-on-woman-on-woman action. Just this week the pontiff told crowds in Portugal that gay marriage was a bigger threat to the human race than disease, famine, terrorism or natural disasters – including, presumably, volcanoes.

So don’t worry, even if  Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi is wrong about causation, we can still rest assured that pretty much nothing could be worse than a democratically approved sexual code if it remains unapproved by the various gods’ messengers.

For Bentham on homosexuality see this commentary at glbtq and Bentham’s writing on the subject.

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Online Texts, Benthamism, Chartism

1 April 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

A couple of years ago a colleague introduced me to a website with Australian federation resources. The search page for the site can be found at:

http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/fed/fedsearch.html

Try keywords such as ‘Bentham’ and ’Dicey’.

Another point of entry is via the author index. Try ‘D’, scroll down for Charles Gavan Duffy, and go to My Life in Two Hemispheres Book IV  for a fascinating snapshot of, well, his 19C life in two hemispheres.

In this book I came upon the following little Bentham gem at p138. Duffy has just arrived in Australia, in 1856:

 I had been cordially received by the leaders of the Liberal Party, and their programme included the measures that seemed most urgent. Opening the public lands to the people, enlarging the basis of political freedom, and the proclamation of complete religious equality. Among the men who had been the most prompt to welcome me were a small sprinkling of squatters who insisted that I who had fought the battle of the tenants in Ireland must necessarily sympathise with the Crown tenants who were menaced in their rights by a new population who had come for gold, and would abandon the country when they had got it. But I retained one guiding axiom of Jeremy Bentham, then and always “the greatest good of the greatest number,” and I [139] found myself imperatively drawn to the other side. But I desired to be fair.

The fight between squatters and the ‘greatest number’ ran for some 30 years in Victoria as the parameters of the new democracy were thrashed out. Duffy was a key member of the side that favoured a democracy that reflected the principles of the 1838 Charter. 

Soon after, Duffy visits Sydney. He observes at p141:

In Sydney I found two parties, one devoted to unrestricted popular liberty, the other Conservative Liberals; but an Australian Conservative, as some one has said, is a man who accepts only four of the six points of the People’s Charter.

I have not really discussed the Charter much on this site, but some relevant posts include one on the Westgate Bridge, another about a website which canvasses the implementation of the points of the Charter in Australia, and one on Henry Chapman. Suffice it to say at this point that the Charter was written by three men, William Lovett, John Roebuck and Francis Place. Place and Roebuck were dyed-in-the-wool Benthamites and Lovett was significantly influenced by Benthamism. Most importantly, all were strongly opposed to the use of violence as a means of implementing the Charter or political reform generally. They were all moral-force Chartists.

Most 20C scholarship elevates the role of the physical-force Chartists, who, along with electoral reform, also proposed the implementation of some form of socialism. This perspective is essentially a Marxist one. Those who elevate the place of physical-force Chartism seem generally to regret that a revolution did not take place, displacing capitalism. Thus, they generally construct Chartism as having failed. It is certainly true that physical-force Chartism became strong from around 1840 and lost its impetus around 1850. But the principles of the Charter itself were not lost when the socialist campaign petered out.

The points of the Charter were largely implemented in Australia by the mid-1850s and in Britain by the early 20C. The crowning achievement was the implementation of the women’s vote. While this was not one of the points of the Charter, according the William Lovett in his autobiography, it was only dropped for pragmatic purposes.1

Bentham’s Radical Reform Bill (The Google Books copy can be accessed from the sidebar too) outlines the issues that later informed the 1832 Reform Bill and the Charter. Bentham was only one of many seeking such change.

The Autobiography of Francis Place, ed by Mary Thale, Cambridge University Press, 1972.

The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, New York, Knopf, 1920. (Volume 1 only) See p100 onwards for material especially related to the London Working Men’s Association, and 168ff for material on the Charter.

or the book (not online)

Lovett, William. The life and struggles of William Lovett, New York, Garland Pub, 1984, originally published by Trubner, 1876 (full text (ie has vols 1 and 2))

  1.  For Bentham’s assessment that delay in a campaign for political reform can be strategically appropriate see Jeremy Bentham, First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code, ed. Philip Schofield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 100 [↩]

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Bentham, Foucault, and 1792

28 February 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

The French revolution produced revulsion amongst many observers. While many initially supported its aims, as time went on and the revolutionaries became bloodier, admiration faded.

Bentham became famous for his critique of the ostensibly liberating idea of natural rights as stated in the Declaration of Rights published by the French National Assembly in 1791. He took the declaration sentence by sentence, and subjected it to a withering attack. Thus his critique of the sentence ‘The end in view of every political association, is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man’ asserts:1

More confusion — more nonsense, — and the nonsense, as usual, dangerous nonsense. The words can scarcely be said to have a meaning: but if they have, … these would be the propositions either asserted or implied: –

1. That there are such things as rights anterior to the establishment of governments: for natural, as applied to rights, if it mean anything, is meant to stand in opposition to legal — to such rights as are acknowledged to owe their existence to government….  

Bentham acknowledges rights given in law, but not rights preceding government – natural rights. Thus he makes his famous declaration:2

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, — nonsense upon stilts.  

Bentham continues:3

But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense: for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle.

So much for terrorist language.

So, Bentham argues:4

Remember the ides of September [1792] is a momento I always conceive of as given when I hear of natural rights: where this is the imagery displayed in front, I always see in the background a cluster of daggers or of pikes introduced in the National Assembly with the applause of the President Condorcet for the avowed purpose of exterminating the King’s friends. Of late these pikes and daggers have been exhibited in broad day, and pointed out to reasonable and reasoning men, as gibbets used to be to murderers and thieves. But though till lately kept behind the curtain, they were always at hand, and but too close to the elbow of many a well-meaning man who hardly suspected how near he was to use them, or how void of all meaning his discourse, his politics, his fancied philosophy was, except in so far as he meant to use them.  

Thus J. H.. Burns suggests that ‘In a real sense, then, the French Revolution made possible the creation of Benthamism’.5

 

The Contrast, Thomas Rowlandson, 1792

Published on behalf of the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, 1792. Hand-coloured etching. British Museum, London.

There remains a strong element of bloodiness in the ambitions of some French philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault spring to mind. Jacques Rancière’s call for actions which ‘can provoke fear, and so hatred’ is not far behind.6 Foucault declared:7

When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this.  

This last sentence in particular is especially chilling, coming from one supposedly used to thinking things through. For Foucault, in relation to justice, the role of the state is to:8

educate the masses and the will of the masses in such a way that it is the masses themselves who come to say, ‘In fact we cannot kill this man’ or ‘In fact we must kill him’.  

Actually, Foucualt did change his mind somewhat when he discovered that the proletariat might well consider putting homosexuals on the hit-list given that, according to La Cause du Peuple, homosexuality was a product of bourgeois corruption.9 Whoops.

Foucault, who was pretty keen to associate himself with slaughter,10 celebrated the events of September 1792 in his discussion with Pierre Victor in 1972. An appropriate response to a particular problem, he thinks. 11

 What is interesting is that this schism has been around for 200 years, and, so long as some intellectuals continue to glorify violence and to support and elevate their fellows who do likewise, that schism is unlikely to go away. Mao was trained in Paris, Pol Pot and his unfortunate comrades were trained in Paris. Many intellectuals look to to Paris for their inspiration.12 The French revolution marches on in direct oppostion to the ambitions of Benthamism.

Next will be a discussion of the methods of peaceful protest developed by Francis Place and others, exemplified in the Charter and put into practice with moral-force Chartism.

  1. 1. Jeremy Bentham, “Anarchical Fallacies; Being an Examination of the Declarations of Rights Issued During the French Revolution – an Examination of the Rights of Man and the Citizen Decreed by the Constituent Assembly in France,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring 1. (Edinburgh: William Tate, 1843). Vol 2, 500 [↩]
  2. 2. Ibid. 501 [↩]
  3. 3. Ibid. 501 [↩]
  4. 4. Jeremy Bentham, in Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, ed. Stark (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952-1954.). i, p. 336.) [↩]
  5. 5. J. H. Burns, “Bentham and the French Revolution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (1966). 114 [↩]
  6. 6. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, (trans Steve Corcoran), Verso, London, 2006, p97. For context see also pp  73, 85, 93, 96, 97. Especially 96 re wresting power. [↩]
  7. 7. “Interview with Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky” in Fons Elders, Reflexive Water – The Basic Concerns of Mankind, London: Condor, 1974 182. See also “Interview with Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky.” 183. In Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault. 201 Chomsky describes Foucault as ‘completely amoral’. [↩]
  8. 8. Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980). 13. [↩]
  9. 9. See in  David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993) 304  [↩]
  10. 10. See quotes above. Note also the the paper La Cause du Peuple was put out by La Gauche Proletarienne, a Maoist organisation with an armed wing. Foucualt had close connections with the organisation. In addition, Ranciere associated with the group, and Foucualt’s lover was a member. For Ranciere’s association see ‘Introduction’  in The Nights of Labor, xvii. [↩]
  11. 11. Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists” in Power/Knowledge,  1-2. See also page 6 for Foucault’s support for the revival of customs such as extra-judicial decapitation, again employing the pike as a method of display. See also pages 12, 13, 28, 33, 36 in all of which Foucault discusses the merit and implementation of extra-judicial killing. See also David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993). 299 and James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 205. Note at Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault. 184 mention of Foucault’s obsession with his media presentations and insistence on editorial control. These are not accidental declarations. [↩]
  12. 12. See re Pol Pot and Sartre in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988, and this article from the Wall Street Journal [↩]

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Len Hume

24 February 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

In respose to a comment by Stephen yesterday on the Welcome page, I thought I would sneak in a few bits and pieces about Len Hume for  later use, and for the interest of  anyone else wanting to find out a little bit about him.

His keynote book:

Hume, L. J. (Leonard John), Bentham and bureaucracy, Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1981.

You will find a short and useful bio plus an article at this page:

L.J. Hume, ‘Another Look at the Cultural Cringe’, Occasional Paper, St Leonards, N.S.W.: Centre for Independent Studies, 1993.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/Another_look_at_the_Cultural_Cringe.htm

This front page of an article gives a little further flavour of Hume’s interests:

Michael Lee, ‘The Public Realm and Political Ideas’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, Volume 40 Issue 2, Pages 214 – 217
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119262104/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

The Bentham Newsletter provides a reference to a review of his edition of Bentham’s Consitutional Code:

The Bentham Newsletter, The Bentham Committee, UCL, MAY 1982 refers to:
Work in Progress:
Volumes II and III of The Constitutional Code, L.J. Hume
BOOK REVIEWS
L.J. Hume, Bentham and Bureaucracy, S.E. Finer
and, just as a matter of interest:
Charles F. Bahmueller, The National Charity Company.Jeremy Bentham’s Silent Revolution, J.R. Poynter
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:srS3VDeGIecJ:ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/journal/newsletter/Newsletter%252006%2520May%252082.pdf+len+hume+bentham&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au

For a reference to (possible) unpublished papers see:

John Rowland Dinwiddy, William L. Twining, Bentham: selected writings of John Dinwiddy, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004 (Originally pub: OUP, 1989)
http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8_L13JxfTvgC&oi=fnd&pg=PP14&dq=Len+Hume+bentham&ots=yrTEuycBVn&sig=T_fY5BA7PdDPwF0Ha1ZOBeohZaA#v=onepage&q=Len%20Hume&f=false
at ‘Acknowledgements’ for Dinwiddy’s reference to unpublished paper/s by Hume (and others). Of course these may have been published since.

And a tiny review by Hume at:

L.J. Hume, ‘Charles Davenant on financial administration’, History of Political Economy, 1974 6(4):463-477
http://hope.dukejournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/6/4/463

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Bentham in Columbia

12 January 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

Here is a link to a blog post by lureamicorum discussing the influence of JB in Columbia. It also provides links to resource material for further investigation:

Bentham in Columbia.

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Novelists

3 June 2009 in Uncategorized | No comments

This is a continuation of the theme begun at my recent post on female utilitarian authors. I will just add to this post as I stumble across novelists who deal with utilitarianism in a direct fashion. Of course there are the female novelists listed at the earlier post, but that post also includes authors of non-fiction.

The depth of literature available, and the often stellar names associated with utilitarian themes (either for or against), gives an indication of the impact of Benthamite ideas on nineteenth century British society, and its offshoots.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The English constitutional lawyer, Albert Venn Dicey wrote this to James Bryce (Bryce Papers, Bodleian Library,3-41 (18/8/05)):

‘Bulwer whose whole aim was to represent the predominant sentiment of every time in wh. he wrote gives in his earlier writings great consideration to benthamism.’ [sic]

Go to the Bulwer-Lytton contest!

When Arthur Hardy sailed to South Australia from England as an immigrant, he wrote the following on 3 Feb 1839 about Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Ernest Maltravers:

‘I think it the best work of the kind I ever read, it has more of the Philosophy of real life than any book I know of…’

Arthur Hardy was the brother of Harriet Taylor. Taylor is listed in the female utilitarian authors post. Taylor married John Stuart Mill in 1851, but she had known him since 1830. Hardy lived at Glen Osmond, now a suburb of Adelaide.

Thomas Carlyle

Sartor Resartus -  click on ‘Read this Book’ tab, then search for ‘utilitarian’.

Charles Dickens

Hard Times

Benjamin Disraeli

Click on Disraeli’s name to go to my previous post on his novel, The Young Duke.

John Frederick Denison Maurice

Excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on James Mill

Virtually everything that James Mill ever wrote had a pedagogical purpose. He was a relentlessly didactic writer whose most important essays — Government, in particular — take the form of clipped, concise, deductive arguments. It is a style which his contemporaries either admired or detested, as can be seen for instance in F. D. Maurice’s novel Eustace Conway. When the Benthamite Morton discovers Eustace reading Mill’s Essay on Government, he asks his opinion of Mill. Eustace replies:

“I think him nearly the most wonderful prose-writer in our language.” “That do not I,” says Morton. “I approve the matter of his treatises exceedingly, but the style seems to me detestable.”

“Oh!,” says Eustace, “I cannot separate matter and style … My reason for delighting in this book is, that it gives such a fixedness and reality to all that was most vaguely brilliant in my speculations — it converts dreams into demonstrations” (quoted in Thomas 1969, 255-56).

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Albert Venn Dicey

15 May 2009 in Uncategorized | No comments

A. V. Dicey was a constitutional theorist. He was one of the key writers looked to by the authors of the Australian constitution. Lewans suggests that ‘Dicey revered Bentham’s utilitarian principle – that legislation should promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number’.1 Dicey himself stated that:

The history of modern English law is the history of a gigantic revolution produced by the ideas of one man. Under the influence of Bentham, half a century or more of stagnation has been followed by half a century of innovation…. Hardly a single portion of English law has, since George the Fourth came to the throne, escaped the influence of reform. The constitution of Parliament has been changed. … For half a century the thoughts of Bentham have been working in the minds of men, many of whom have forgotten or have never known the name of the great jurist. The fruit of his ideas has been a movement of which the last generation saw the beginning and of which the present generation will not see the end.2

The book by Dicey most referred to by the Australians was Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. In that book Dicey looks (more or less) approvingly to John Austin’s distinction between political and legal sovereignty, and the real limits placed upon the capacity for a sovereign to make laws – be that sovereign a despotic individual or an elected parliament.3. Despite this political reality, parliament knows no legal limit to its law-making capacity. It thus has (legal) sovereignty. This is a single sovereignty. For some constitutional theorists this idea of a single sovereignty that can be readily identified is important.

There is another work that is also of use to illustrate Dicey’s interest in the Benthamite influence on British law and society.  That is Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century. This book deals extensively with Benthamism, though, according to Lewans, Dicey casts that influence exclusively as a philosophy of individualism.4 As can be found in these posts, even Engels agrees that Benthamism lay behind more collective endeavours.5

What was the effect of Dicey’s work? Well, because it conceptualised the federal structure as a single sovereignty divided between the federal sphere and the states, and because, accordingly, it looked to the Australian people as a single mass as well as being citizens of individual states, Dicey’s theories allowed for a national Australian identity as well as a state identity, rather than an identity that remained fixed in the states. One could be as much an Australian as, for example, a Tasmanian or a South Australian. For further discussion of this see Nicholas Aroney, Imagining a Federal Commonwealth: Australian Conceptions of Federalism, 1890-1901, Federal Law Review [2002] 10.

It is arguable, therefore, that the very idea of an Australian identity can be traced, at least in part, to Benthamite sources and their conception of sovereignty. But remember, similar ideas can be found in Madison’s Federalist No 39. The USA, after all, is not short of a national identity. Anyhow, this collective identity that unites sovereign units might well be traced back to the battle of Thermopylae – or at least, to Greek federalism. For a discussion of Greek federal identity, see Freeman’s History of federal government in Greece and Italy. This book, too, was influential amongst the authors of the Australian federal constitution. Freeman was clear in his book about the debt he owed Grote and his History of Greece. Grote was a key utilitarian whose history helped make democracy acceptable to his British audience.

1. Matthew Lewans , Rethinking The Diceyan Dialectic, University of Toronto Law Journal, Volume 58, Number 1, 2008, p97 [↩]

2. A. V. Dicey, ‘Modern English Law’, The Nation (2 Nov. 1876), xxiii, 273, p273 [↩]

3. A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, London, MacMillan & Co Ltd, 1961, 72ff [↩]

4. Lewans, Diceyan Dialectic, pp98-99 [↩]

5. See also, for example Axel Kirk Davies – The Utilitarian Foundations Of Collectivism, No. 15 in Series Libertarian Heritage, London: Libertarian Alliance, 1995, Mary Peter Mack, The Fabians and Utilitarianism, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 16, No. 1. (Jan., 1955), pp. 76-88. There are relevant links to Engels’ work in these posts. [↩]

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Female utilitarian authors

10 May 2009 in Uncategorized | No comments

I thought it would be useful to compile a list of female utilitarian authors. Here is the beginning of such a list. There may be disagreement over the political orientation of those in the list. That’s fair enough. It is only supposed to be a starting point, not an end point.

Another interesting list, which would cross over with this list, would be that of utilitarian novelists, or those novelists who specifically referred to utilitarianism in their works. (See here for the new post.) Apart from some of the novelists listed below, there are Dickens and Disraeli, both critical, and Bulwer-Lyttton. These three authors make an appearance elsewhere on this site.

If you know the names of any authors that you can contribute to either of these lists please add a comment below.

Lucie Duff-Gordon – Letters from Egypt. I don’t know if Duff-Gordon wrote as a utilitarian or as a social observer without any particular political perspective. However she and her family were intimately acquainted with the utilitarians. Her father was John Austin, who developed analytical jurisprudence. This is a small excerpt from the introduction to the 2007 edition of Letters from Egypt:

In 1819 [John Austin] married Sarah, the youngest daughter of John Taylor of Norwich, when they took a house in Queen Square, Westminster, close to James Mill, the historian of British India, and next door to Jeremy Bentham, whose pupil Mr. Austin was. Here, it may be said, the Utilitarian philosophy of the nineteenth century was born. Jeremy Bentham’s garden became the playground of the young Mills and of Lucie Austin; his coach-house was converted into a gymnasium, and his flower-beds were intersected by tapes and threads to represent the passages of a panopticon prison.

See also Three Generations of Englishwomen by Janet Ross (1888).

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Eliot might or might not be classed as utilitarian. Jennifer Mary Bradshaw’s 1990 PhD thesis Concepts of happiness: The influence of Ludwig Feuerbach on the fiction of George Eliot, completed at the University of Ottowa is a useful source for the relationship between Eliot’s views and happiness. The precis for the thesis begins:

 The search for happiness is a vital theme in George Eliot’s fiction. Eliot’s treatment of this theme owes much to nineteenth-century utilitarianism, which stemmed from Jeremy Bentham’s “greatest happiness principle,” and the religious demythologization of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who interpreted Christianity in terms of human consciousness. In 1854, Eliot translated Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthums, in which Feuerbach describes the components of man’s being as feeling, thinking, and willing. George Eliot saw an opposition between utilitarianism and Feuerbach’s humanism. This fact is fundamental for our understanding of the rhetorical structure of Eliot’s moral universe. In her fiction, utilitarianism as utility, the pursuit of pleasure, utility, avoidance of pain, and calculation of pleasure over pain (the “felicific calculus”) is shown by her, paradoxically, often to lead to wrongdoing, suffering, and even crime. For some of her protagonists, however, it contributes to a primary stage of their development…

See Felix Holt.

Millicent Fawcett.  Fawcett was a key agitator for the women’s vote. She was inspired by J.S. Mill. In her biography of Molesworth she displays a strong appreciation for the efforts of the utilitarians. Whether she herself can be identified as utilitarian, I am unsure.

Jane Marcet. Again, I am not sure whether Marcet can strictly be identified as utilitiarian, but she certainly promulgated the idea of political economy, and thus fits within the general milieu. One of her works on science inspired Faraday. Her didactic approach inspired Martineau. Her easy dismissal of the uneven distribution of land in Fairytale in Essays: Glamorgan Pamphlets is a bit of a worry!

Harriet Martineau – In Robert Lee Wolff’s introduction to Ireland by Harriet Martineau (New York : Garland Pub., 1979), Wolff observes at p.vii that Martineau’s novels in the series ‘Illustrations of Political Economy’ sold tens of thousands of copies each. Each title dealt with a separate aspect of political economy, and Martineau produced one title per month. The series was written 1832-4. For biographical material see for example Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian; Wheatley, The life and work of Harriet Martineau. Martineau’s readership included Princess Victoria.

Henry Handel Richardson - Click on the name to go to my post on a small excerpt from Richardson’s book, Australia Felix. Richardson might not be a utilitarian author exactly, but I’m pretty sure that this adaption of a page of two from the Aeneid is, at a minimum, a critique of utlitarianism.

Harriet Taylor. Taylor is famous for her authorship of works promoting the political and social empowerment of women, including The Enfranchisement of Women, originally attributed to J.S. Mill.  See Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1994).

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Word cloud

22 February 2009 in Uncategorized | No comments

Brett Holman at Airminded  has introduced a brilliant way of summarising a thesis. Here is mine so far:

Generated at

http://www.wordle.net/

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Chartism and Australia

24 January 2009 in Uncategorized | No comments

Australia was fundamentally influenced by moral-force Chartism. Henry Parkes, for example, was a Birmingham Chartist prior to his emigration to Australia in 1839. At that time Birmingham Chartism advocated class unity. In fact, the ‘Union’ in Birmingham Political Union referred to the union of classes. Similarly Henry Chapman, who played an important role in the implementation of the secret ballot in Victoria in 1856, was a friend and political ally of the authors of the Charter, William Lovett, John Roebuck and Francis Place. All of these were moral-force Chartists.

This post is really just a link to a resource I found yesterday showing the dates of implementation in Australia of the points of the Charter.  Here is a screen shot of the index page and the address:

 

 http://www.parliament.curriculum.edu.au/srch_browse.php3

Go to the buttons under the heading ‘Parliaments at a glance’ (highlighted in blue in the screenshot) and click on your desired jurisdiction. You will find the relevant table at the bottom of the page you are taken to.

These dates represent some substantial achievements. Many represent world firsts.

Should the link die, please let me know. A Google search for phrases on the screen shot might find the page.

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