Enlightenment and Utility: Bentham in French, Bentham in France

Description

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of classical utilitarianism, was a seminal figure in the history of modern political thought. This lively monograph presents the numerous French connections of an emblematic British thinker. Perhaps more than any other intellectual of his time, Bentham engaged with contemporary events and people in France, even writing in French in the 1780s. Placing Bentham's thought in the context of the French-language Enlightenment through to the post-Revolutionary era, Emmanuelle de Champs makes the case for a historical study of 'Global Bentham'. Examining previously unpublished sources, she traces the circulation of Bentham's letters, friends, manuscripts, and books in the French-speaking world. This study in transnational intellectual history reveals how utilitarianism, as a doctrine, was both the product of, and a contribution to, French-language political thought at a key time in European history. The debates surrounding utilitarianism in France cast new light on the making of modern Liberalism.

Emmanuelle de Champs is Professor of British History and Civilisation at Universite Cergy-Pontoise (France) and a former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure de Fontenay-Saint Cloud. She is a founding member of the Centre Bentham Ecole de droit de Sciences-Po, Paris, the leading French research centre in utilitarian studies and collaborates with the Bentham Project, University College London, on Bentham's French manuscripts. De Champs has published numerous articles on Bentham and classical utilitarianism, aw well as two monographs: Bentham et la France: fortunes et infortunes de L'utilitarisme (2009) and 'La deontologie politique' ou la pensee constitutionnelle de Jeremy Bentham (2008). She is a member of the Committee, Bentham Project, University College London, and a Board Member for the International Society of Utilitarian Studies.

'An impressive addition to the Cambridge University Press 'Ideas in Context' series, Emmanuelle de Champs' Enlightenment and Utility: Bentham in French, Bentham in France gives us a Bentham who is both familiar and strange. This new French Bentham guides us through a transatlantic matrix of utilitarian liberal reform ideas that began in the eighteenth century, spanned the French Revolution and dissipated only in the mid-nineteenth century. Fluent and authoritative, de Champs' narrative demonstrates the way in which historical contextualisation - which depends not only on erudition but on intelligent and imaginative judgements about how to construct a relevant context - can alter the landscape of scholarship both on well-mined figures in the history of political thought and on traditions of thought.' Cheryl B. Welch, French History