The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

The Situation in 1990 101
teacher, Blackstone, and took up concepts developed by British
thinkers as reproduced by Swiss and Italian ones. The concept of
utilitarianism, the psychological law of association explaining mental
processes and the end of human conduct as pleasure and pain, the
principle of the happiness of the greatest number and its use as the
ultimate principle came from Locke, Burke, Hutcheson ("that Action
is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest
Numbers": An Enquiry into the Origin of ideas of Beauty and Virtue,
(1725)), John Gay's Dissertation, (1731), Hume and David Hartley
(1749). Dr. Joseph Priestly in 1768 proposed as "the great criterium"
to settle all the questions of politics "the good and happiness of the
members, that is to say the majority of the members of a state."
Claude Helvetius, the Swiss utilitarian, took up these ideas in his De
I'Esprit in 1758 and his Italian follower, Cesare Beccaria (translated
into French by Morellet), based his theory of punishment on it
(1764). Bentham credits Helvetius and Beccaria for his awakening
and the principles he adopted, but elsewhere credits Priestley: see E.
Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, (Faber, London, 1928),
p. 22.
16 Owen sought social regeneration of the labouring poor in Benthamite
psychological fashion. He was indirectly influenced by
William Godwin who published Political Justice in 1793, expressing
faith in human progress, just as Condorcet did in his Esquisse d'un
tableau historique des progres de I 'esprit humain written in 1794 while in
hiding from the Terror and shortly before his suicide. Godwin was a
thinker at once communistic, anarchistic and utilitarian. Godwin's
thought also affected Thompson, other Ricardian socialists, Proudhon
and Marx. For inter-relationships, see George Lichtheim, A Short
History of Socialism, (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970), pp. 38-42. This
is a useful account for the general reader.
17 Harmondsworth, 1975. The growth of feminist and socialist women's
movements, economic autonomy for women and the winning of the
vote are described in R. J. Evans, The Feminists: Women's Emancipation
Movements in Europe, America and Australia 1840-1920, (Croom Helm,
revsd. ed. 1979).
18 The luminous prose of A. V. Dicey, in his Lectures on the relation
between Law and Public Opinion in England during the 19th Century,
(Macmillan, 2nd ed., 1914), Lecture VI, has firmly identified "the
period of Benthamism or individualism" with laissez faire, which
Dicey described as being a presumption or prejudice in favour of
individual liberty (p. 258). Yet in Lecture VII, he also wrote of "the
growth of collectivism" increasing from 1848. From 1860 onwards,
Dicey argued that the principles of collectivism were accepted, with
it by then being denied that laissez faire was in many cases a principle