• 1 “lorsque l’humanité se sera construit un habitat où soient unis, jusqu’à se confondre, l’intérêt in (...)
• 2 Mills, John, A Critical History of Economics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 74-76
• 3 Revelli, Barbara, “Presse périodique, intellectuels et opinion publique sous la Restauration : La R (...)
• 4 Bentham, Jeremy, Manual of Political Economy (1793-95), reprinted in Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writ (...)
• 5 Co-operative Magazine, I (1826)

1In 1904, Eugène Fournière defined socialism as a form of “sympathetic utilitarianism” whereby the quest for personal freedom is subsumed within an ideal of collective solidarity, itself conducive of social harmony. The latter would only be achieved when “humanity has built for itself a habitat where individual interest and social interest are united to the point that they become unrecognisable”.1 The argument might seem strange at first glance, paradoxical even, since Jeremy Bentham is usually acknowledged as one of the fathers of classical liberalism and political economy, alongside John Locke and Adam Smith. True, Bentham’s utilitarianism, and his calculus in particular, have historically been used to justify laissez-faire policies in the economic realm with the argument that minimal government intervention would benefit the greatest number of individuals.2 That outlook was particularly prominent in mid- and late-nineteenth century Britain under its various Liberal governments. Bentham and his disciples, such as John Stuart Mill, were also close to many liberals in the UK and abroad, like Jean-Baptiste Say and Marc-Antoine Jullien.3 Moreover, his near-universal defense of the free market and competition,4 and his advocacy of individual interests as driving forces of change and innovation put him firmly at odds with socialism’s emphasis on mutuality, cooperation and general defiance towards the forces of unchecked capitalism.5

• 6 Owen, Robert, A New View of Society, I (1813-1816) in A New View of Society and Other Writings, ed. (...)
• 7 Leroux, Pierre, “Bentham (Jérémie), célèbre publiciste anglais”, in Encyclopédie nouvelle (Genève, (...)
• 8 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, L’Industrie, ou Discussions politiques, morales et philosophiques, da (...)
• 9 Cléro, Jean-Pierre, and De Champs, Emmanuelle (eds.), Bentham et la France : fortune et infortunes (...)
• 10 Chartism was founded by a group of radical reformers that included breakaway Owenites like William (...)
• 11 Beecher, Jonathan, Charles Fourier. The Visionary and his World (Berkeley, University of California (...)
• 12 “Je n’ai vu qu’un écrivain civilisé qui ait un peu approché de la définition du vrai bonheur ; c’es (...)

2Yet Fournière’s argument is no mere interpretative freedom. Just like Bentham’s influence was prominent among nineteenth-century liberals, utilitarian principles were consistently claimed by a vast number of socialist movements throughout the same period. As Gregory Claeys has shown, the concepts of utility and the ideal of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” imbued much of Robert Owen’s social and economic thought, and were later taken up by prominent Owenite thinkers, most notably William Thompson and John Gray.6 In Continental Europe, references to Bentham abounded in the writings of Saint-Simon, while his utilitarian principles were praised by Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux and Giuseppe Mazzini, among others.7 Though the utility principle was “never a systematic function of his doctrine”, as Michel Bellet argues, Saint-Simon did see it as a universal standard fit to establish the good and evil of any attempt to legislate, manage, or reform.8 The Saint-Simonian Saint-Amand Bazard, who translated Bentham’s Defense of Usury (1788) in 1828, also became one of the chief commentators on utilitarianism outside the United Kingdom.9 More generally, many socialists admired Bentham’s activist zeal and his commitment to philosophical radicalism. His demands for the immediate reform of British parliamentary institutions and his Republicanism put him at odds with the Tories and the Whigs, and also alienated him from French liberals such as Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël. Conversely, some of Bentham’s most radical claims, like his defence of universal manhood suffrage, found favour amongst a growing number of British socialists, including the future Chartists, in the “reform age” of the 1830s.10 Though a direct utilitarian influence is harder to trace within Fourier’s works and his école sociétaire as a whole, he nevertheless shared Bentham’s hedonistic stance and his belief that “under the right conditions, the individual’s pursuit of self-interest would necessary lead to social harmony”.11 This led Fourier to formulate the following paean in his Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire (1829): “I have seen but one civilised writer who has come quite close to defining true happiness; it is Mr. Bentham, who demands realities, not illusions. All the others have such a long way to go that they are not worth the criticism”.12 In short, the socialists and utilitarians had much in common: they pursued the same quest for happiness, and shared the belief that substantial reform, geared towards the harmonisation of private and social interest, was the way forward to achieve that goal.

• 13 Chanial, Philippe, “Le socialisme, un (anti-) utilitarisme sympathique ?”, Revue du MAUSS, 16 (2000 (...)

3Extensive intellectual and personal networks confirm the ideological proximity between utilitarianism and socialism, and the somewhat blurred boundaries between them. Between 1813 and 1825, Bentham was Robert Owen’s business partner at the Scottish spinning mill of New Lanark. He also acted as a mentor for various prominent Owenites, including Frances Wright, William Thompson and Anna Doyle Wheeler. In France, one of his contacts, the liberal Marc-Antoine Jullien, was also a supporter of Owen’s and a friend of Wheeler’s. In the 1830s, John Stuart Mill, who had debated and often clashed with the Owenites on economic issues, was introduced to Bazard and Prosper Enfantin and became closely acquainted with Gustave d’Eichtal.13

• 14 Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London, T. Payne & So (...)

4Beyond modern-day political categories, this issue thus wishes to explore why and how utilitarianism was adopted and adapted by various early socialist movements throughout the nineteenth-century. To achieve this, it is first necessary to acknowledge the conceptual fluidity of Bentham’s calculus, whose constant interplay of individual and collective interests may be interpreted in a variety of sometimes contradictory ways. Just as it can be used to uphold minimal government, based on the alleged primacy of a self-regulating market over social arrangements, the principle of utility may also be interpreted as a moral code upon which to found public policies, following Bentham’s staunch commitment to parliamentary and judicial reform.14 It is worth recalling here that the liberals’ laisser-faire was not always universal: state intervention was accepted in some areas of public life, such as the regulation of child labour or the New Poor Law reform, as will be shown in Laurence Dubois’ contribution.

• 15 Gans, Jacques, “L’origine du mot ‘socialiste’ et ses emplois les plus anciens”, Revue d’histoire éc (...)
• 16 Hobsbawm, Eric, “Libéralisme et socialisme : le cas anglais”, Genèses. Science sociale et histoire, (...)

5This interpretative fluidity, however, does not mean that socialists simply copied from Bentham’s principle of utility or merely took a leaf from the liberal reformist handbook. To understand the originality of the socialist contribution to, and reimagining of, the utilitarian tradition, we must study it in context, from the viewpoint of a social history of ideas. Though the word “socialism” gained prominence from the 1830s onwards, it refers to a host of political movements that emerged in Europe at least a decade earlier. Beyond their respective conceptual differences, Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier and their disciples all wished to establish a “social science” (hence the “socialist” moniker) to make sense of the unprecedented social and economic upheavals that arose in the wake of modern industrialisation from the late 18th century onwards.15 More specifically, socialism emerged as a practical set of responses to the challenges of the new capitalist age and the threat of rising distress in the midst of unprecedented abundance. In contrast to classical liberalism and political economy, socialist thought denounced the economic status quo and refused to accept the depreciation of labour, as will be shown by Mark J. Kaswan’s paper on William Thompson’s theory of economic security. However, the socialist critique of the new industrial order was in no way tantamount to a rejection of progress and modernity. Rather, it submitted the latter to a series of ethical, not just economic, imperatives. For Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon and their followers, the aim was not to abandon machinery and state-of-the-art industry, but to humanise them, so that their potential would be harnessed for the greater good, thus ensuring that the wealth of nations no longer be reaped at the expense of the labouring masses.16

• 17 Siméon, Ophélie (ed.), Contemporary Thought on Nineteenth Century Socialism, I, “Owenism” (London, (...)
• 18 Ricoeur, Paul, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. and tr. by George H. Taylor (New York, Columbia (...)

6To achieve this, the early socialists were not content with the piecemeal nature of traditional relief methods, and sought to design universal reform schemes in a bid to provide a definitive answer to the “social question”. Far from being “utopian” in the negative, narrowest sense of the word, i.e. a mere flight of fancy, this vision leaned on Enlightenment-style rationalism and the subsequent belief in human perfectibility. The force of imagination was used to conjure up a better future, but the new world was to be built here and now, through practical experimentation in a variety of fields, including industrial relations, the wage system and factory reform.17 Early socialism may have been utopian, but only in a positive sense, insofar as it posited the quest for happiness - and especially for the labouring poor - as a condition of individual and collective progress.18

• 19 Bellet, M., “Utilitarian Roots”, pp. 44-45
• 20 Rodrigues, Olinde, “De Henri de Saint-Simon”, Le Producteur, 3 (1825), pp. 86-109; see also Bellet, (...)
• 21 Thompson, W., Inquiry, p. viii, quoted in Claeys, G., Machinery, p. 92.

7The search for happiness in the name of general interest, as well as the necessity to wed the modern economic order to moral considerations, naturally spurred the early socialists’ interest in utilitarian principles. The latter were adapted to build both their moral philosophies and activist programmes, thus establishing Bentham’s ideal of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” not only as the ultimate goal of human existence, but as the guide towards such an achievement.19 This, according to the Saint-Simonian Olinde Rodrigues, was combined with a belief in rationalism and Adam Smith’s insistence that labour is the source of all wealth to form the philosophical bedrock of early socialism. In that perspective, utility was measured by the ability of any political and economic system to secure the working masses with the full produce of their labour.20 In other words, the concept of utility helped socialism posit itself as a “social science”, which William Thompson defined as the “principles of morals, including legislation and education” designed to bring about a state of general harmony.21

• 22 Owen, R., A New View of Society, I, p. 10; De Champs, E., “Le ‘moment utilitaire’?”, p. 6.
• 23 London Co-operative Magazine, (November 2, 1827), 509 n ; Gans, Jacques, “Socialiste, socialisme”, (...)
• 24 According to the Saint-Simonians, a degree of hierarchy was necessary to foster innovation and equi (...)
• 25 Thompson, W., Inquiry, p. ix, quoted in Claeys, G., Machinery, p. 92.
• 26 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, La parabole, suivi de Sur la querelle des abeilles et des frelons (18 (...)
• 27 Bentham, J., Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. 2, “Of Principles Advers (...)

8The socialists’ take on utilitarianism also helped them formulate their own economic thought. A first bone of contention laid in the articulation of private and collective interest. Whereas Bentham supported Helvétius’s argument that legislators were meant to use individual interests to promote public utility, the socialists retorted that the individuals were fundamentally social beings - if not by essence, then through the power of external factors passed down from generation to generation.22 The primacy of collective interests over individual pursuits - or rather, the wish to unite them for the common good - also shaped the socialists’ almost unanimous rejection of economic competition in favour of a cooperative or associative organisation of labour. Significantly enough, the first printed occurrence of the word “socialist” in English was used precisely to make this point while clearly setting socialism apart from its intellectual contenders, Utilitarians included. According to the London Co-operative Magazine, one of the leading Owenite periodicals in the late 1820s, “The chief question between the modern (or Mill and Malthus) political economists and the communionists or socialists, is whether capital should be owned individually or commonly”.23 Though the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists generally disagreed with the Owenites’ attack on private property, they shared their British counterparts’ wish to establish workers’ associations as the key to a fairer economic system.24 Contrary to classical political economy, socialists were not interested in “the mere possession of wealth”, but in “the right distribution of it”.25 Destitution and economic inequalities were thus defined as the artificial appropriation of riches by idle profiteers and middlemen who had succumbed to the might of their selfish interests. These unproductive classes - which Saint-Simon vilified as “hornets” - had no right to the produce of labour, which should be directed solely towards the creators of wealth - i.e., the working people, or “bees” in Saint-Simon’s parlance - under a fair, co-operative or associationist system imbued with a spirit of sympathy.26 On the contrary, Bentham saw personal interest, not sympathy, as the guide of rational action. Sympathy, he argued, was as much adverse to utility as antipathy, as it led individuals to approve or disapprove of a given action out of immediate, subjective feeling, not out of a rational consideration of the good or evil of said action.27

• 28 Polanyi, Karl, Origins of our Time. The Great Transformation (New York, Farrar & Rhinehart, 1944)
• 29 Thompson, Noel, The People’s Science. The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1816 (...)

9The originality of socialist political economy was thus twofold. First, in keeping with Karl Polanyi’s “embeddedness” principle,28 it posited the constant overlapping of economic and moral issues. This was fully at odds with the liberal and utilitarian argument that the laws of the market are independent and self-regulatory, thus framing competition and the depreciation of labour that followed the rise of modern industry as necessary evils. Second, this alternative take on economic phenomena was not seen as an end in itself, but as the springboard for a new state of civilisation in which the fruits of technical innovation and progress would be enjoyed by all, for the good of all.29 This vision of the future was actually based on a reversal of the utilitarian articulation of personal and collective interests. The happiness of all would not be reached through the rational guidance of individual motives. On the contrary, as Robert Owen argued, “the happiness of self, clearly understood and uniformly practised [...] can only be attained by conduct that must promote the happiness of the community.”

• 30 Malon, Benoît, La Morale sociale (Paris, Girard et Brière, 1894) ; Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, “De la (...)
• 31 Hijikata, Naobumi, “Utopianism and Utilitarianism in Robert Owen’s Schema”, in The Emergence of Glo (...)
• 32 Eggleston, Ben, and Miller, Dave E., eds., The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism (Cambridge, Ca (...)
• 33 Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. David McLellan (Oxford, Oxfo (...)
• 34 Engels, Friedrich, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (1880), in The Selected Works of Karl Marx a (...)
• 35 Harrison, J.F.C., Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America. The Quest for the New Moral World,( (...)

10Despite these differences, the utilitarian legacy endured and even survived the collapse of early, communitarian socialism. From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, references to Bentham were still common among new socialist groups, this time active within the framework of the nation-state, such as the Fabian Society, or in the works by Eugène Fournière, Proudhon and Benoît Malon.30 But beyond a few standalone studies,31 and despite recent research on the history of utilitarianism,32 its impact on socialism remains underexplored, most notably regarding the social history of ideas. This has much to do with the stain of “utopianism” that has long plagued pre-Marxian socialism. Yet the latter has been subject to consistent scholarly reappraisal since the late 1960s, based in part on a closer, more nuanced reading of Marx and Engels - for whom their predecessors were actually “critico-utopian socialists”, a nod to the partial relevance of their systems, despite their idealism and refusal to engage in any form of class struggle.33 For instance, in a later text, Engels conceded that despite Owenism’s somewhat naive belief in the advent of a cooperative “New Moral World”, “every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself to the name of Robert Owen”.34 All seminal accounts of the history of early socialism have without exception, if only briefly, touched upon its ideological connections with utilitarianism, thus confirming that though the early critique of capitalism was “utopian” and idealistic at times, it was also very much practical and experimental.35

• 36 Marx, Karl, The Capital, I, ed. F. Engels and tr. S. Moore and E. Aveling (1887), p. 430, n. 50
• 37 “[...] although men like John Stuart Mill are to blame for the contradiction between their traditio (...)

11Marx’s comparatively greater intellectual legacy, as well as his rejection of utilitarianism and his subsequent defiance towards the moral quality of early socialism, may also account for the historiographical tendency to overlook Bentham’s impact on the latter. Not only did the Capital rail against utilitarian ethics, comparing the hedonistic calculus to the work of a “shopkeeper”. It also launched into ad hominem attacks against Bentham’s liberal leanings, calling him “the arch-Philistine [...], that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongue oracle of the ordinary, bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century”.36 John Stuart Mill received much less vitriol, as his Principles of Political Economy had denounced wage inequalities and the depreciation of sweated industrial labour.37

• 38 Mill, John Stuart, Autobiography, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 130
• 39 McCabe, Helen, John Stuart Mill, Socialist (Montreal and Kingston, Ontario, McGill-Queen’s Universi (...)

12Though Marx did not acknowledge it, John Stuart Mill was certainly, among liberal thinkers, the one closest to socialism’s economic tenets, as shown by his support for producer cooperatives and his later-life admission that he now placed himself “under the general designation of Socialists”.38 This is a reminder that the relation between socialism and utilitarianism was no one-way street, even though Mill’s “conversion” has received much more scholarly attention than the socialists reinterpretation of utilitarian orthodoxy. As shown, among others, by Helen McCabe’s recent opus, John Stuart Mill, Socialist (2021), and by Gregory Claeys’s contribution to this issue, Mill’s philosophies had much in common with Owenism, which set him apart from later forms of socialism, including communism. This included the rejection of class antagonism and direct revolutionary action in favour of gradualism and a cooperative economy. In that respect, Mill justified his support for cooperation by arguing that liberal policies offered solutions to present-day woes, while socialism paved the way to a better future. However, Mill remained a classical political theoretician to the end, insofar as he was reluctant to equate socialism with a “science of society”. Contrary to Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon and their disciples, he never showed tomorrow’s world in operation, nor did he provide a fact-based image of possible realities.39

• 40 Bellet, M. “Utilitarian Roots”, p. 41.

13This issue of the Revue d’études benthamiennes thus aims to examine the transmission and reception of utilitarian thought among various socialist schools of thought in the nineteenth-century, to shed light on their emergence, uses and legacy. By focusing on the originality and variety of these socialist reinterpretations, it builds upon renewed approaches in intellectual and political history that have successfully challenged the classical distinction between “utopian” and “scientific” socialism. Consequently, this issue brings a corrective to the tendency, on the part of established scholarship, to “confine the influence of Bentham to a movement of a type known as ‘liberal’”.40 Though the contributions to this issue focus on three European countries in the nineteenth-century (Britain, Ireland and France), it is hoped that they will provide a first step towards a more general, joint history of the relation between utilitarianism and socialism.

• 41 Bentham, Jeremy, “Principles of the Civil Code”, in Theory of Legislation (London, K.Paul, Trench (...)

14Following a chronological outline, the first two papers shed light on how early European socialists sought to reinterpret key Benthamite principles to provide ethical foundations to their own theories of social, political and economic regeneration in the industrial age. Mark J. Kaswan’s thus examines how the Irish socialist and cooperator William Thompson reinterpreted Bentham’s four “principles subsidiary to utility”, laid out in his “Principles of the Civil Code” - subsistence, abundance, equality, and security-41 thereby turning them into the foundations of cooperative socialism. The paper analyses in particular how the concept of security was wed to Thompson’s labour theory of value, and how the workers’ “right to have the full produce of their labour secured to them” subsequently informed key aspects of his socialist thought, namely his theory of surplus value and his defense of gender equality. The paper concludes by assessing the impact and continued relevance of Thompson’s ideas on the past and present cooperative movement.

• 42 Drolet, Michael, and Frobert, Ludovic, “The ‘Science of Education’ and Owenism: The Case of Joseph (...)

15The second contribution, by Michael Drolet and Ludovic Frobert, builds upon the authors’ extensive research on Joseph Rey, a key, if somewhat forgotten, figure in the history of early socialism.42 While shedding light on Rey’s intellectual formation and main writings, Drolet and Frobert argue that his body of work epitomises how socialists engaged with Benthamite utilitarianism and philosophical radicalism. Indeed, while reinterpreting the utility principle by positing that individuals were fundamentally social beings, Rey situated individual action and the possibility of rational progress within a cooperative, egalitarian system that largely leaned upon Owenite principles. In doing so, Rey prefigured, and in many ways surpassed, John Stuart Mill’s later reworking of classic utilitarianism.

• 43 Claeys, Gregory, Mill and Paternalism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013); McCabe, H., Jo (...)

16In the third contribution to this issue, Gregory Claeys reassesses John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and the current debate surrounding his later-life socialist leanings.43 Far from being a textbook of classical liberalism, On Liberty, Claeys argues, was actually informed by philosophical necessitarianism, itself a bedrock of Owenite socialism. The paper uncovers the historical roots of such intellectual circulations, starting with Mill’s acquaintance with London’s Owenite circles around 1825. It then addresses how leading British socialists such as Charles Bray and Henry Travis responded to Mill’s own take on Owenism.

• 44 See also Dubois, Laurence, L’asile de Hanwell. Un modèle utopique dans l’histoire de la psychiatrie(...)

17The next paper, by Laurence Dubois, explores the combined influence of utilitarianism and utopian socialism on lunacy reform in 1830s Britain and its implementation at Hanwell Asylum, near London. While Jeremy Bentham’s impact on prison reform is widely acknowledged, it is little known that his utilitarian philosophies also made their mark on a nationwide movement for the reform of the asylum system that took place in the years 1830-1850. The paper focuses on the case study of Hanwell Asylum and its director, John Connolly, who was an admirer of Bentham’s, a close collaborator of Robert Owen and a moral-force Chartist. It shows how this combination of ideals informed Connolly’s groundbreaking advocacy of non-restraint, occupational therapy and re-education, thus shaping a form of psychiatric orthodoxy that would endure in Britain until the late 1860s.44