Benthamism in England and America

The main purpose of this paper is not so much to measure the impact of utilitarianism on American political thought as to explain why utilitarian influence was so slight. The question I am seeking to answer may be phrased as follows: How did it come about that utilitarianism, the main current in English thought for two or three generations, was little more than a series of ripples, or at most a weak cross-current, on this side of the Atlantic? The problem becomes more puzzling when one reflects that the period of the rise and growth of utilitarianism in England (the first three or four decades of the nineteenth century) was an era in which intellectual relations between the two countries were especially close and one in which movements of political and social reform ran parallel courses. Quite reasonably, too, one might suppose that the qualities of Bentham's thought which contributed to its spread in England would have insured its enthusiastic reception here. A doctrine which contemptuously rejected tradition, preached hard-headed, calculating practicality, conceived of the individual as an isolated atomistic unit, and which in all its aspects and phases appealed to the virtues and limitations of the middle-class man of affairs—such a doctrine, one might think, would have flourished on nineteenth-century American soil.As preliminary to a direct attack on the problem, some definitions or distinctions are in order. “When I mention religion,” said Parson Thwackum, “I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.”