This rich and provocative study assesses Herbert Spencer's pivotal contribution to the emergence of liberal utilitarianism and shows that Spencer, as much as J. S. Mill, provided liberal utilitarianism with its formative contours. Like Mill, Spencer tried to reconcile a principle of liberty and strong moral rights with a utilitarian, maximizing theory of good. In this powerful and sympathetic account, David Weinstein argues that Spencer's moral and political thought exhibits greater systematic integrity than received views of his thought acknowledge. However, (...) Weinstein also examines the problems and flaws in Spencer's version of liberal utilitarianism, and shows that, precisely because of these flaws, it is engaging and deserving of our critical attention. This challenging study will be of interest to graduates and scholars in the fields of political theory, moral and political philosophy, and the history of political thought. (shrink)

The 'Art of Life' is John Stuart Mill's name for his account of practical reason. In this volume, eleven leading scholars elucidate this fundamental, but widely neglected, element of Mill's thought. Mill divides the Art of Life into three 'departments': 'Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Æsthetics'. In the volume's first section, Rex Martin, David Weinstein, Ben Eggleston, and Dale E. Miller investigate the relation between the departments of morality and prudence. Their papers ask whether Mill is a rule utilitarian and, (...) if so, whether his practical philosophy must be incoherent. The second section contains papers by Jonathan Riley and Wendy Donner, who explore the relation between the departments of morality and aesthetics. They discuss issues ranging from supererogation to aesthetic pleasure and humanity's relationship with nature. -/- The papers in the third section consider the Art of Life's axiological first principle, the principle of utility. Elijah Millgram contends that Mill's own life refutes his claim that the Art of Life has a single axiological first principle. Philip Kitcher maintains that Mill has a dynamic axiology requiring us to continually refine our conception of the good. In the final section, three papers address what it means to put the Art of Life into practice. Robert Haraldsson locates an 'Art of Ethics' in On Liberty that is in tension with the Art of Life. Nadia Urbinati plumbs the classical roots of Mill's view of the good life. Finally, Colin Heydt develops Mill's suggestion that we regard our own lives as works of art. (shrink)

The classical utilitarian legacy of Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, James Mill, and Henry Sidgwick has often been charged with both theoretical and practical complicity in the growth of British imperialism and the emerging racialist discourse of the nineteenth century. But there has been little scholarly work devoted to bringing together the conflicting interpretive perspectives on this legacy and its complex evolution with respect to orientalism and imperialism. This volume, with contributions by leading scholars in the field, represents the first (...) attempt to survey the full range of current scholarly controversy on how the classical utilitarians conceived of 'race' and the part it played in their ethical and political programs, particularly with respect to such issues as slavery and the governance of India. The book both advances our understanding of the history of utilitarianism and imperialism and promotes the scholarly debate, clarifying the major points at issue between those sympathetic to the utilitarian legacy and those critical of it. (shrink)

Hans Baron, Karl Popper, Leo Strauss and Erich Auerbach were among the many German-speaking Jewish intellectuals who fled Continental Europe with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Their scholarship, though not normally considered together, is studied here to demonstrate how, despite their different disciplines and distinctive modes of working, they responded polemically in the guise of traditional scholarship to their shared trauma. For each, the political calamity of European fascism was a profound intellectual crisis, requiring an intellectual response which (...) Weinstein and Zakai now contextualize, ideologically and politically. They exemplify just how extensively, and sometimes how subtly, 1930s and 1940s scholarship was used not only to explain, but to fight the political evils that had infected modernity, victimizing so many. An original perspective on a popular area of research, this book draws upon a mass of secondary literature to provide an innovative and valuable contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history. (shrink)

This study examines Herbert Spencer's social and political thought by way of his principle of equal freedom. This principle reads, "The liberty of each, limited by the like liberty of each, is the rule in conformity with which society must be organized." ;Basically, this study attempts to demonstrate that Spencer was first and foremost an indirect utilitarian and that equal freedom was the central moral rule of his indirect utilitarianism. An attempt is also made to show how Spencer conceived moral (...) rights as derivations of equal freedom. For Spencer, moral rights were substantive specifications of equal freedom. Like their parent principle, they indirectly promoted happiness. Among other things, my analysis of equal freedom and rights endeavors to clarify how Spencer tried to accommodate a theory of stringent moral rights with utility and how negative freedom and virtue can be seen as compatible features of his theory of freedom. These two themes are meant to comprise some of the most promising rewards of this study. ;This study also explores Spencer's ethical naturalism via G. E. Moore's famous criticisms in Principia Ethica and via some of Henry Sidgwick's critical observations. While Moore's discussion is judged unsatisfactory, Sidgwick's analysis is deemed more successful. ;Finally, this study concludes by examining Spencer's theory of freedom and rights in terms of two fundamental moral rights and in terms of Spencer's vision of utopia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The New Liberalism of L. T. Hobhouse and the Reenvisioning of Nineteenth-Century UtilitarianismDavid WeinsteinIn the eyes of some, modern liberal theorizing has fallen victim to tyrannizing conceptual dualisms that have rendered it a tedious dialogue of predictable positioning and strident partisanship. On the one hand those who dream the dream of unencumbered selfhood are said to be locked in a bitter struggle with those who long for the rebirth (...) of encumbering community. On the other hand and in a not wholly unrelated way, Kantians are supposedly and forever beating back the phoenix of consequentialism. In short, the tyrannizing dualisms of individualism vs. communitarianism and Kantianism vs. consequentialism allegedly and detrimentally channel much modern liberal theorizing.But such rivalries, however real or fanciful, need not be philosophical liberalism’s singular fate. Nor do these rivalries exclusively characterize its variegated past. My aim is to challenge the cogency and expose the historical limitations of one of these tyrannizing dualisms, namely that between Kantianism and consequentialism, by way of examining L. T. Hobhouses’s new liberalism. In my view this seeming rivalry within liberalism is a convenient straw man readily weakened by more scrupulous attention to liberalism’s new liberal past. 1 [End Page 487]Principally, I hope to show that Hobhouse’s rendering of liberalism privileged good but not at the price of stultifying welfare pooling, individuality but not at the cost of pitiless individualism. Hobhouse’s version of new liberalism may not have been quite utilitarian, but it nevertheless took maximizing good seriously while retaining a firm commitment to strong moral rights and the flourishing of individuals as ends. Hobhouse’s new liberalism, then, was as robustly juridical and as authentically liberal as it was fundamentally consequentialist.The Rational Good and Moral PersonalitySelf-realization was the normative hinge of Hobhouse’s new liberalism. Self-realization, in turn, can not be understood without examining Hobhouse’s notion of the rational good. Hence, The Rational Good, published later in his life in 1921, occupies a vital position in his thought though recent scholarship has all but ignored this work. 2In this work Hobhouse begins by asking “whether there is a Rational, and therefore demonstrable, standard of values to which the actions of man and the institutions of society may be referred for judgment.” 3 For Hobhouse, such a standard exits and the remainder of the book endeavors to persuade us accordingly.In a chapter entitled “The Good,” Hobhouse claims that the proposition that something is good expresses a “disposition” and asserts a “fact.” The disposition consists of a favorable “practical attitude” towards pleasurable feelings, which certain (self-realizing) experiences invariably entail. In Hobhouse’s words “the judgment ‘This is good’ is not only the expression of an attitude but also the assertion of a fact, and the fact which it asserts is a harmony between an experience and a feeling.” 4 Hence, we deem good only those self-realizing experiences that are harmonious in the sense that they generate feelings of pleasure. A pleasure-producing experience is a harmonious experience and, assuming that it is also self-realizing, we are disposed to pronounce it “good.”Now separate harmonious experiences, unless rationally coordinated, will likely clash, thereby generating overall disharmony or pain. Experiences which we separately judge as good may turn out to be bad on the whole. A good life, therefore, is a satisfying coherent life. Only a rationally coherent life is fully self-realizing and constitutes the rational good. In short “that what we reasonably call good or what is really good must be a harmony of the [End Page 488] totality of feeling with the totality of experience so far as it affects feeling. Thus, Practical Reason is the effort of the mind towards harmony within itself, and with nature.” 5But if, for Hobhouse, practical reason is an ongoing “effort” in coordination, then the fully rational good is a formal ideal which actual lives succeed more or less skillfully in realizing. Hence, Hobhouse also introduces the “realized good” as the practically possible good, and the distance one goes in realizing his or her own good is, as Hobhouse says, “what we call character.” 6 To... (shrink)