Utilitarianism

The periodical literature of Victorian Britain is a treasure-trove of untold riches for the historian of philosophy, especially for anyone with an interest in utilitarianism. Here we find the major utilitarian thinkers - Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick - meeting their critics in open debate in journals and reviews. Much of this literature has been forgotten: it is astonishing to find how many of the twentieth century objections to Mill's utilitarianism repeat, quite unwittingly, points already made by John Grote, W.G. Ward and other Victorian critics. With the aid of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals , it is now possible to gather this material together and to identify its usually anonymous authors. The result is a wonderful archive of source materials which should be of abiding interest both to the intellectual historian and to the moral philosopher. To the former, it provides valuable insights into the evolving moral and political thought of Britain; to the latter, it provides a lot of high-quality moral and political philosophy and some striking anticipations of modern views. The volumes are divided chronologically: 1800-1851, 1852-1869, 1869-1875 and 1876-1900. The concentration of material in the 1860s and 1870s makes it clear that this was the high water mark of the utilitarian debate.