The English Utilitarians, Volume 1 (of 3)

Bentham's position is in one respect unique. There have been many greater thinkers; but there has been hardly any one whose abstract theory has become in the same degree the pla...

Jeremy Bentham,[201] the patriarch of the English Utilitarians, sprang from the class imbued most thoroughly with the typical English prejudices. His first recorded ancestor, Br...

Perhaps the gravest of all the problems which were to occupy the coming generation was the problem of pauperism. The view taken by the Utilitarians was highly characteristic and...

The English Utilitarians represent one outcome of the speculations current in England during the later part of the eighteenth century. For the reasons just assigned I shall begi...

I have so far dwelt upon the social and political environment of the early Utilitarian movement; and have tried also to point out some of the speculative tendencies fostered by...

The history of England during the eighteenth century shows a curious contrast between the political stagnancy and the great industrial activity. The great constitutional questio...

The English Utilitarians of whom I am about to give some account were a group of men who for three generations had a conspicuous influence upon English thought and political act...