As its title suggests, this monograph examines the dissemination, reception and impact of utilitarian ideas in America from the founding of its republic until the Civil War. Previous writers on American thought or the history of utilitarianism have failed to do this topic justice. John Dewey, for example, believed that utilitarianism had little influence in the United States until postbellum pragmatists like himself began to engage the theory and incorporate elements of it into their own thinking. But James E. Crimmins, the author of several works on utilitarianism and on Jeremy Bentham, shows, to the contrary, that utilitarianism inspired a small but significant current of opinion in antebellum America.
The founders of the American republic were not utilitarian. Although influenced by republicanism and the Scottish Enlightenment, their greatest debt was to John Locke. But elements of utilitarian thought were in the air—in particular, that men naturally pursue happiness and that the general welfare is, or ought to be, the objective of government. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, for instance, took this as their starting point in the Federalist Papers. These ideas did not come from Bentham, whose writings were barely known in eighteenth-century America, but from William Paley and other writers who mixed utilitarian concerns with natural law, moral sense theory, and religion.
This changed when Étienne Dumont published the initial three volumes of Traités de législation (1802), which translated and summarized various works by Bentham. A partial retranslation of Traités into English by the American John Neal (1830) and a fuller one by his compatriot Richard Hildreth (1840) made Bentham more widely accessible. Long before this, though, Bentham began seeking an audience and possible followers in America. He had friends and acquaintances deliver copies of his writings to Americans he was keen to influence. Aaron Burr, for one, read Bentham and later met him in London. Bentham also corresponded or made efforts at corresponding with Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, among others. This did not deliver the results Bentham hoped for, but a number of other correspondents fell within his orbit.
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 examine utilitarian legal philosophy and the efforts of American reformers inspired by Bentham's ideas. Three key figures here are the aforementioned Hildreth, David Hoffman and Edward Livingston. Author of an anti-slavery novel and a six-volume history of the United States, Hildreth not only translated Bentham but also wrote his own Theory of Morals (1844). Strongly influenced by Bentham's ethical theory but differing from it on several points, the book was critical of religion and staunchly opposed to slavery and the subordination of women. David Hoffman was the first American scholar to introduce utilitarian ideas into the academic study of law, publishing A Course of Legal Study (1817), for students, and Legal Outlines (1829), a statement of his own legal philosophy. Like others in this period, he had qualms about aspects of Bentham's moral philosophy but wholeheartedly embraced the utilitarian approach to legislation. The proper objective of government is to enhance the happiness of the people—a dictate that, in his view, also coincides with natural law. Like Bentham, Hoffman was hostile to common law and was a proponent of “codification”—that is, of reducing the law to a written code to free it from the obscurities and irrationalities of common law. Codification was also the focus of Edward Livingston's energies over many years. Among other things, he put before the Louisiana state legislature a comprehensive code of penal law, subsequently expanded and published as A System of Penal Law (1833), the two volumes of which were heavily indebted to Bentham. Livingston failed in his immediate goal of systematizing Louisiana law and reforming it in a utilitarian direction, but his work inspired reformers in other states.
The next chapter surveys the lively debate over the death penalty during these years. Rights-based arguments and utilitarian arguments were advanced on both sides of the issue. Like Cesare Beccaria, Bentham opposed capital punishment. Livingston developed the utilitarian case against it but recognized, as did Bentham, that the evidence was insufficient to establish conclusively whether or not the deterrent effect of capital punishment was superior to that of imprisonment. In the short term, religious arguments in favour of it prevailed, but in the postbellum period many states abandoned capital punishment (although a number were to reverse themselves again by 1920).
Crimmins devotes a separate chapter to Thomas Cooper, an early proponent of secular utilitarianism and a strong advocate of democracy, free trade and unconstrained freedom of speech. Denounced in Parliament by Burke for his support of the French Revolution, Cooper joined his close friend Joseph Priestley, from whom he had absorbed utilitarianism, in emigrating to America. An ally of Jefferson, Cooper was imprisoned for six months for his criticisms of the John Adams administration. He taught for several years at what is now Dickinson College, but Virginia Presbyterians, upset by his materialism, stymied Jefferson's effort to appoint him to the faculty of the newly founded University of Virginia. Later, when he was professor and president of what is now the University of South Carolina, local religious leaders forced him out of office. His views were close to Bentham's, and he discussed with some subtlety various issues in utilitarianism, such as the possible divergence between people's real and apparent interests. His career, however, ended in ignominy. Although an early opponent of slavery, he inexplicably came to champion it, even abandoning his free-speech principles to support criminalizing the dissemination of abolitionist ideas in the South.
In a brief epilogue, Crimmins steps outside his chosen time frame to discuss the impact in later decades of utilitarianism on pragmatism, that distinctively American philosophy. The pragmatists took utilitarianism seriously and were admirers, in particular, of John Stuart Mill, to whom William James dedicated his famous lectures on pragmatism.
In sum, this historically and philosophically informed study illuminates well a small, neglected, yet significant aspect of early American history.
