Utilitarians and Their Critics in America, 1789-1914 (History of American Thought S.) - Tapa dura

The often overlooked American utilitarians are brought back to the fore, in an important collection of sixty key primary documents. Utilitarian ideas in nineteenth-century America have been given short shrift in modern historical and philosophical scholarship. In Bruce Kuklick's recent A History of Philosophy in America - a major survey of American philosophy - there is not a single mention of utilitarian philosophy; and in Flower & Murphey's monumental study, William Paley, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, and Henry Sidgwick are mentioned only in passing, and Richard Hildreth, America's own leading utilitarian philosopher, is not mentioned at all. Clearly, there is an interesting story to tell here, in terms of (1) the place of utilitarian ideas and principles in American philosophy, (2) the absorption of utilitarian perspectives into the broader intellectual culture of nineteenth-century America, and (3) the neglect by modern scholars of this area of the history of ideas. Collecting the relevant published work together in one place is an essential starting point for any serious investigation of American utilitarians and their critics. James Crimmins and Mark Spencer have made an expert selection from scattered sources of around sixty important articles and essays. These include treatments of Bentham by his friend John Neal, editor of The Yankee, and commentaries on John Stuart Mill gathered from rare American journals. There are also discussions of utilitarian jurisprudence by the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, and pieces by many other writers. This collection, with its substantial editorial introduction, will be vital reading for historians of ideas, scholars of philosophy and political thought, and any one else interested in the fate of utilitarianism in America.

James E. Crimmins is Professor of Political Theory at Huron University College, The University of Western Ontario. His books include Secular Utilitarianism (Oxford, Clarendon, 1990), On Bentham (Belmont, CA, Wadsworth, 2004), and with Catherine Fuller (ed.), Church-of-Englandism and its Catechism Examined, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2011). Mark G. Spencer is Professor of History at Brock University and has published widely in the fields relating to American Enlightenment.