Transcript: Professor Gregory Dart – Bentham, Romanticism and the ‘Cockney College’
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Hello and welcome to The Greatest Good, a UCL Press podcast. Jeremy Bentham, the 18th and 19th century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London, the first institution in England to admit students without imposing a religious test. Bentham is widely credited with the maxim that actions should be judged by the amount of happiness that each produces. He put it simply in his advice: create all the happiness you are able to create, remove all the misery you are able to remove. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. Join me as I explore the ways in which Bentham’s thought is still relevant to the ethical problems of the 21st century. Today’s is a very special episode, where Professor Gregory Dart and I hash out the similarities and differences between Romantic and Utilitarian thought.
GREGORY DART:
OK, well, my name is Greg Dart from the English Department, and this is Philip Schofield from…
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
the Bentham Project in the Faculty of Laws.
GREGORY DART:
Fantastic. Today, we’re going to talk a bit about Bentham and the Romantics and issues around that and in relation to the formation of UCL. What interests me about this subject, at both ends historically, is the way in which the Benthamites and the Romantics are on the same side politically in the 1780s and 1790s with the outbreak of the French Revolution, and they’re all part of the left, broadly speaking, and indeed, in the 1820s, mid 1820s, when founding UCL, I think they’re all in favour of the setting up of this new godless institution. But apart from that, they seem to have very little in common, or at least they get pulled apart by history, and it’s always interested me what that’s about, what those issues are, what divides them—not least because there’s a possibility there’s still a division within the left, if you like, or within progressivism, along similar lines, around perhaps, around technology. I suppose what happens in the course of the 1790s with writers like Hazlitt and Coleridge and Wordsworth is that they begin to experience a sort of seam or a tear in the left. It’s around pauper management, but it’s also around the kind of, the philosophic calculus, the idea that trying to work out what’s best to do can be worked out through this calculation of consequences, and they, in different ways, are still bound up with what you might call a morality of intentions, of the conscience—that there are some things that are just absolutely wrong. Murder is absolutely wrong, whereas Utilitarianism says there’s no such thing.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yes, yeah, everything’s up for assessment. And the Utilitarians are always very averse to intuitionism. That was their, philosophically, their target: this idea that we have a sense, that we know what’s right and wrong, an inherent sense.
GREGORY DART:
I mean Hazlitt’s essay, ‘On Reason and Imagination’, is one of the ones where he actually, sort of, I mean, the problems for him with utilitarian ethics, as he puts it, is that it’s got no good argument against slavery. For example. I mean, Bentham was against slavery. You know, most utilitarians were so in it wasn’t. It’s not a practical argument about their politics. It’s an argument about their philosophy that, you know, from a from a greatest happiness of the greatest number principle, you could Because more, but more people benefit from it than don’t benefit from it. And, you know, so Hazlitt gets fantastically impassioned in this essay, trying to argue for what he calls, in a way, politics of the imagination, as against the reason because of that. And of course, the passion is important because it’s part of what he’s arguing for that our moral response to things, our conscience, our imagining of what it’s like to be somebody else is really important to the social idea. What does he say? Here – he says, Thus, for example, an infinite number of lumps of sugar put into Mr. Bentham’s artificial ethical scales would never weigh against the pounds of human flesh or drops of human blood that are sacrificed to produce them. In other words, you can’t. There’s no amount of measurement that will destroy the fact that slavery is just simply wrong. It’s partly an intellectual debate about moral faculties, as it were, but it’s also partly the experience of history, in a way. Okay, that if, if the French Revolution, which is such a catastrophe, in a way, you know, promised so much, was such a catastrophe, where does it leave? Where does it leave people, in terms of their, you know, free will, political action, trying to pick up the debris of the past. For me, at least one of the big breaks, one of the moments where it seems like a lot of romantics feel, oh, gosh, we’ve got a problem here is when Malthus publishes his essay on population because he, in effect, says there are mathematical reasons why you’ll never get rid of poverty, because poverty, vice and misery, says is kind of necessary to keep population down. And this is quite devastating to a lot of romantics, because they see that as a betrayal. Because suddenly, a discourse which had appeared to be quite progressive and to be looking for the, you know, towards the improvement of people, especially the poor, has now put a lid on that and said, no, you’ll never have a free and equal society, because it will overpopulate itself. Vice and misery, disease and death are absolutely necessary to the system. You know, my maths tell me this. And so, a lot of the energy in Godwin, but also Hazlitt goes into these replies to Malthus that are, you know, sort of desperate attempts in some way, you know, quite eloquent, but also desperate attempts, in some ways, to argue against that principle. And what they can see is that social science, you know, with its very firm intellectual grounding, is kind of moving away from them and taking the left, if you like, in a direction that they can’t, they can’t follow.
So, they’re left, they feel, in a kind of no man’s, political no man’s land in the middle. They’re not conservatives, but at the same time, they feel like the left has given up on its project of liberty, equality and fraternity, they feel and it’s now just become about lecturing to the poor and what Hazlitt calls petty, piecemeal improvement. So, one of the objections they have to Bentham is not that he’s not a reformer, but that his project of reform has and those of his followers is whittled down to smaller scale projects that can still be pursued by a Tory government and will sort of twiddle with the system rather than improving it wholesale, you know. And that may not be fair, but that’s how they feel. So, things like workhouse projects or new prisons and so on, they would just feel that this is state management, rather than radical reform.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
That’s really interesting and quite right, the new Poor Law of 1834 was a Benthamite response to a particular social problem. From the Utilitarian perspective, it’s better to do a little than nothing at all. And, you know, let’s do what we can, when we can, while we can. But, I mean, Bentham was probably the most radical of the Utilitarians, and his, maybe not all his circle would go as far as him in a lot of his prescriptions.
GREGORY DART:
But you can see immediately why he might be really useful for government, might be really useful for certain kinds of political decisions where you’re weighting up the least bad thing to do. But it’s not easy from Utilitarianism to get to a kind of positive ethos of how to live. All you can get is a series of indications of what not to do.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
No, I think that, I think that’s true. Well, I think Bentham’s view is very much: you leave it to people themselves to make up their own minds. So, yeah, there is no catalogue of good things which we ought to pursue.
GREGORY DART:
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that Lamb writes about in his city essays, but also Wordsworth in his Rural Lyrical Ballads, is about, around beggars. You know, the notion that beggars should be swept off the streets and put into workhouses, to be reprogrammed or to be, you know, to be improved, as it were, is one of the things they want to resist. But again, it’s a bizarre, paradoxical but also strangely powerful argument. They say, No, beggars are good for us because they remind us of our common humanity. And you know that we shouldn’t wipe beggars off the streets, because in some ways they are… they’re doing us some good, and they allow us to perform our own charity. You’re a better person after having given to a beggar, and you’ve reconnected with your common neighbour. The other thing that Lamb says, going quite counterintuitively, especially in the city, doesn’t matter if they’re pretending. You know, you pay your money to see these things on the stage. Why are you not prepared to pay your money to this guy, regardless of whether he’s got the seven, as it were, hungry children he pretends to have.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
I mean, that’s great, because Bentham, who said that beggars should be placed in workhouses, thinks that begging should be stopped, and on the grounds that the best actors get the most money.
We’ll be right back after the break.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah. I mean, can I just go back to the 1780s and 1790s in that there were no Benthamites. Then Bentham was an obscure individual who was involved with the Earl of Shelburne, who was Prime Minister 1782-3, but was at the centre of a sort of a coterie of thinkers. Shelburne sought out Bentham and took him under his wing, and Bentham, at the early part of the French Revolution, wrote a series of tracts which were aimed to help the French move from their despotic monarchy to some sort of constitutional monarchy or a parliamentary system. And then from the British perspective, it all went wrong with the Terror.
GREGORY DART:
When you say, help the French. Did they, did they ask for his help? Or did he give it anyway?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
He gave it anyway. But he, he was close to Brissot—
GREGORY DART:
Who’s a kind of moderate republican at the time?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah. He’d known Brissot when Brissot was in London as a journalist in the early 1780s and in fact they formed a sort of discussion group, which Bentham says the only people who ever attended it were himself, Brissot and Brissot’s wife, just the three of them. But he also had an entrée to Mirabeau as well. And the person who became Bentham’s translator and redactor was a Genevan called Étienne Dumont, and he was part of the Mirabeau circle. So Bentham had a way in to some of the leading figures in the French Revolution, and in 1792, he was made a French citizen by the National Assembly as an appreciation for his efforts. But with the September massacres in 1792 in Paris, when one of his contacts, who was a liberal aristocrat, was stoned to death, Bentham like the rest, like many other people in Britain, became very worried by the French Revolution, and if anything, the French Revolution turned Bentham into a conservative saying, you know, we don’t want reform at the moment, it’s too dangerous.
GREGORY DART:
But at what point does he say that Rights of Man are nonsense upon stilts?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
That’s in in a essay called nonsense upon stilts, which he wrote in 1795, it only came out after his death, but had he published it, it would have been a really major contribution to the debate on natural rights, and it’s regarded as one of the most significant attacks on, on the notion of natural or even human rights.
GREGORY DART:
Obviously, he’s very liberal, progressive, interested in a more democratic society in many ways, but he doesn’t believe in a kind of metaphysic of rights?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
That’s right. That’s right. So, you know… legal rights founded on the principle of utility, you know, he supported, but the idea of natural rights, I mean, his objection was, well, where did they come from?
GREGORY DART:
So, about the right to subsistence, the right to food or something? He would say, you’ve got the right to food if you can find it?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
No, no, what he did is, he said… Let’s take the principle of utility. If we’re promoting utility, there are four main sub ends to promote, and one is subsistence. So, everyone should be given the legal right to subsistence.
GREGORY DART:
Right, but this is a legal right, not a natural right?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah, yeah, but that’s what legislators ought to do. So, you can’t just assume that a right exists because you want it to. As he says, hunger is not bread, want is not supply. And he came up, you know, with the famous phrase: natural rights is nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights is nonsense upon stilts. So, there’s another story has to be told. How is it that Bentham became a very radical Republican, and his, what is sometimes called, his conversion to political radicalism is dated to 1809 when he started writing on parliamentary reform, but he’d been moving towards that position for, for several years.
GREGORY DART:
And is he quite vocal about that? Because that’s still quite dangerous to say, isn’t it, in your sort of post-war Napoleonic period in Britain. Of course, nobody’s an avowed republican because you were just identified with Robespierre.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
It was 1817 before he published his Plan of Parliamentary Reform. Part of it written in 1809-10, bulk of in 1816-17. And that was the first Utilitarian defence of democracy. So, in a sense, that’s when he came out of that particular political closet, to the acclaim of radicals. And by 1818, not only was he supporting parliamentary reform, which he called democratic ascendancy, but by 1818, he moved to republicanism. And so, it’s that later Bentham of the 1810s, 1820s, that we think about as the radical political Bentham.
GREGORY DART:
Right – so he gets more radical as he gets older?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah.
GREGORY DART:
He’s quite old by the 1820s?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah, yeah, he was born in 1748, so by 1809, he was just over 60.
GREGORY DART:
Would I be right to kind of characterise him as, you know, he’s a man of independent means; he writes what he wants; he doesn’t have to publish it; he can move from one idea to the other. And he’s not political, in a way. He’s not trying to develop a party or a group of followers; people are attracted to him and, you know, come to the house and talk to him, and so on, but he’s not, he’s not trying to engage with politics. He’s not actively trying to influence opinion himself.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
I think that’s true until this later stage. In a sense, in the period of the Enlightenment, let’s say up to 1790, the reforming states seemed to be those which were governed by absolute monarchs, like Catherine the Great and maybe Frederick the Great in Prussia.
GREGORY DART:
Enlightened despots?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah. So, one of his plans was that he would present a penal code to Catherine the Great, which made more sense in that his brother was in the Russian service, and being introduced to Catherine the Great, and was something of a favourite of hers, and worked for Prince Potemkin, who was her favourite, who was Catherine the Great’s lover. So, Jeremy went out to Russia with a view to present his penal code to Catherine the Great. He never did. He chickened out. But the point for him was that any regime could introduce a utilitarian code of laws, and even in the 1810s he approached the President of the United States at the same time as he approached the Emperor of Russia, with a view to them introducing or commissioning him to produce codes of penal law and civil law. By 1818, he’d come to the conclusion that it was only a democratic regime which would be motivated to introduce penal and civil codes, so that’s when we get the really radical Bentham. He sees the community divided between oppressors and oppressed, so a binary distinction. And you know, the oppressors of the church, the lawyers, the aristocrat, the whole monarchical, aristocratical despotism. And he sees the mixed constitution so lauded by British commentators as unstable, either it’s going to become a despotism, and absolute despotism, or it’s going to move to representative democracy. And so, in the 1820s for instance, he got very involved in politics and trying to influence political opinion. I mean, he corresponded with Robert Peel, Duke of Wellington. But perhaps more striking is his alliance with Daniel O’Connell, the Irish liberator, with a view to introducing law reform. So, he was hoping that O’Connell would bring petitions from the Irish Catholics that would be combined with petitions from the radicals in London and elsewhere in Britain and put pressure on parliament to introduce law reform. So, it was an important step in his view to the utilitarian codification of the law, which had been sort of his lifelong ambition, because he, you know, he saw law as crucial, you know, get the law right, then you can give people the framework in which they can pursue their own pleasures.
We’ll be right back after the break.
VOICE OVER:
[The Greatest Good’s first documentary is out on YouTube now. Learn more about Bentham and discover the hidden history of the Vere Street Coterie from leading academics at UCL. Click the link in our podcast description or search YouTube for ‘The Greatest Good: Bentham’s Defence of Sexual Liberty’.]
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
I mean, one of Bentham’s formative experiences, most formative experiences, was being forced to swear to the 39 Articles of the Church of England in order to take his degree at Oxford. And in 1818, he published ‘Church-of-Englandism and its Catechism Examined’, which he said, this is an expiation, a pudding rite, of the fact that I compromised myself by swearing to the 39 Articles. And his main argument there was that education should not be linked to a religious test. Teach religion by all means, but teach the religion of Jesus, not the religion of the Church of England, which he saw as different.
GREGORY DART:
He’s a bit John Lennon then, in that sense.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
And in the mid-1810s, Bentham had written a tract called ‘Chrestomathia’, which he took from the Greek to mean useful learning – in opposition to his own education at Oxford, which had been theology and dead languages. And so the idea was you taught useful subjects on the grounds that, what’s education for? Well, two things, one is for the happiness of the individual who is being educated, and the other is for the happiness of the society to which that individual will contribute. And that seems to be the inspiration for the establishment of University of London, which became University College London, soon afterwards. The official foundation was in 1826. Professors were appointed, I think, in 1827. Teaching started in 1828. It seems that the two main movers and shakers, if you like, were James Mill for the Utilitarians and Radicals, and Henry Brougham on the part of the Whigs.
GREGORY DART:
The Whig lawyer?
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Yeah. And very soon afterwards, the Church of England responded with the establishment of King’s College.
GREGORY DART:
I think, I mean, I think there’s an acknowledgement, isn’t there, in the Anglican establishment generally, that it’s an amazing thing, University College, but it’s also got nothing to beat, because you don’t, you just don’t get a good education at Oxford and Cambridge at the time, you know, you get classics and a bit of maths. And so the idea, I mean, a lot of the younger Romantics go to Hackney College in the 1790s, which is already a kind of proto University College, in some ways, because you get taught useful things.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
These are dissenting academies, which had quite a high reputation. Or Haileybury, where the East India Company taught people who were going out to serve in India. I know there was some sort of serious economics taught there, but what else, I don’t know?
GREGORY DART:
You know, in 1825, you know, there’s an article here I’ve got, on the London University and the Smutty Gazette, and it’s all about really trying to repudiate the establishment charge against this new, this new university, which had all kinds of mud slung at it from, you know, well, from the Anglican establishment that didn’t think such a place should exist, not least because it should have a religious foundation to it. And it’s a rather wonderful defence of, you know, the Cockney College, as it’s being called, and the kind of things that it’s going to teach and the kind of people it’s going to teach, because part of the argument against UCL is that it’s going to take its student population from what it calls, yeah, the ‘under-bred Cockneys’, the lower middle class, and that this is clearly a bad thing, as it were, because it’s going to dilute the ruling class or the professional classes in in in the wrong way. And there’s also a wonderful argument against, or, I should say rather, defense of the non religious foundation of the college, because it says just because people aren’t going to get religious instruction at the college doesn’t mean that they won’t be able to get it from elsewhere. It’s not, in other words, this is not an atheist institution. It’s just an institution that’s not going to be teaching a particular line of, or particular kind of, Christianity, i.e. Anglicanism, so don’t think of it as being anti-religious or atheistical. Just think of it as being secular. And in fact, a lot of the people who were involved early on, weren’t they, with the setting up of UCL were not atheists, they were dissenters – very religious in many ways – you know, who had, you know, a say behind the setting up of the University Church, which is right by our buildings. People like William Crabbe Robinson, actually, is a good connective figure, because he knew all the Romantics. He was a kind of diarist of the Romantics. He’s one of the only people who’s read Kant apart from Coleridge. But he also hangs around an enormously long time and is really useful for, he’s a kind of facilitator for University College for many a time, and he definitely believes in God. But he’s also a, you know, he’s one of he’s one of the good guys. He believes in progress. He believes in this sort of broad church, really, a kind of reforming institution.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
In fact, a lot of the Utilitarians were various shades of non-conformists. And of course, there seems to have been a lot of Jewish money put into the College. I think Isaac Goldsmith, a Jewish financier… We sort of don’t know enough about where the money came from. But again, that was a, you know, showed a commitment to College not being anti-religious, to the University not being anti-religious as such, but rather embracing freedom of religion.
GREGORY DART:
My sense of it is that when people move together to set up UCL, it’s a mixture of Romantics and Utilitarians. People like Thomas Campbell, Scottish poet and, you know, sort of educationist lecturer around London. And John Flaxman, the sculptor, is obviously, you know, he’s a friend of Blake. So there are people around who are very definitely on the arts, art scene really, who are cultural movers and shakers, and not that they’re not anti-utilitarian, but that they’re not associated necessarily with that, with the new social science, as it were, as well as there being lawyers and, you know, kind of Benthamite followers and so on. So interestingly, it seems as if, actually, when a project arrived that would allow for all of these variously non established or anti-establishment or non-establishment people to come together around this new university, they were quite happy to collaborate.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please make sure to leave a review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts – and tune in for next week’s episode.