The political realism of Jeremy Bentham
| Author | James Vitali |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211001550 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
The political realism
of Jeremy Bentham
James Vitali
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
Jeremy Bentham is usually seen as an anti-realist political thinker, or a proponent of
what Bernard Williams has termed ‘political moralism’. This article questions that
prevalent view and suggests instead that there are good grounds for considering
Bentham a political realist. Bentham’s political thought has considerable commonalities
with that of the sociologist and political realist Max Weber: both agree that politics is a
unique domain of human activity defined by its association with power; that conse-
quently, ethical conduct is unavoidably inflected by power in politics; that a commitment
to truth in politics can only ever be contingent; and that politics has a set of basic
conditions that it would be not only misguided but dangerous to attempt to transcend.
Whilst it is often held that Bentham advanced a reductive framework for understanding
politics, in fact, his utilitarianism was a far more realistic approach to political ends and
means than has generally been acknowledged, and one that contemporary political
theory realists would benefit from taking seriously.
Keywords
Bentham, fictions, power, realism, Weber
There is an image of Jeremy Bentham as a rather unsophisticated thinker on the
subject of politics that has commanded considerable assent amongst students of
political thought. At the core of this critical judgement appears to be the view that
Bentham lacks the intellectual flexibility to tell us anything unique about politics –
that he attempts to apply his philosophical and ethical ideas dogmatically to the
political realm at the expense of the nuance required to truly understand the latter
Corresponding author:
James Vitali, University of Cambridge, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT, UK.
Email: jv399@cam.ac.uk
European Journal of Political Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/14748851211001550
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2023, Vol. 22(2) 260–280
as a unique sphere of human activity. One version of this critique is that his take on
politics is a superficial one. Bentham’s utilitarianism, based on a fundamental
psychological hedonism, seems a parochial way of understanding human behav-
iour. John Stuart Mill (1985: 92), heir to the English utilitarian tradition of which
Bentham was the progenitor, criticised Bentham’s political thought as ‘one-sided’
and devoid of any sensitivity to the non-rational dimensions of human existence.
Henry Sidgwick (2000: 195–218) essentially agreed that Bentham’s monistic con-
ception of human motivations made him an incomplete guide to politics.
The Benthamite understanding of politics was, scolded Thomas Carlyle, a ‘pig
philosophy’ (2010: 315), whilst Karl Marx described Bentham as ‘the arch-philis-
tine’ (Pitkin, 1990: 104). Though Bentham’s utilitarianism offered a neat formula
for rationalising human behaviour, arguably such a reductive account was bound
to be defective in the messy and complicated arena of politics.
A more precise, political-theoretical version of this objection to Bentham is that
his is an ‘unrealistic’ account of politics, or a version of ‘political moralism’. This
was Bernard William’s view (see Williams, 2014: 2; Runciman, 2017: 5), who
contended that Bentham’s utilitarianism emphasised the ‘priority of the moral
over the political’, such that the political was to be taken not as an activity inde-
pendent of philosophy, but as one that is properly subject to philosophical con-
siderations of things like ‘goodness’ and ‘truth’ and, indeed, utility. Political
moralism, Williams argued, makes us blind to the normative demands that politics
itself imposes on actors. Likewise, an 1843 review of the publication of Bentham’s
collected works saw in the latter’s writing the ‘blending together’ of ‘ethical and
political opinions’ (Empson, 1843: 500). In this light, Bentham’s approach appears
either hopelessly naı
¨ve, seeking to apply a set of abstract principles with no regard
to the practicalities and nuances of politics, or dangerously radical. In the second
instance, Bentham’s ostensible failure to distinguish politics from other realms of
human activity is thought to be coextensive with a failure to recognise political
constraints and realities. This was Joseph Schumpeter’s criticism of Bentham in his
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Schumpeter (1994: 250) argued that
Bentham’s ‘classical’ theory of democracy – which imagines the ‘democratic
method’ as that which posits a ‘common good’ to be realised by ‘making the
people itself decide issues’ either literally or through mandated delegates – was
dangerous because it demanded a participatory form of politics that was simply
unfeasible and would necessarily lead to frustrated expectations and disillusion-
ment with government itself. Goethe more bitingly called Bentham ‘that frightfully
radical ass’ (Pitkin, 1990: 104).
None of these views gives an accurate picture of Bentham’s political thought,
because they are all based on a fundamentally mistaken premise. In fact, Bentham
is an insightful commentator on politics precisely because he understood the spe-
cificities of politics as a unique domain of human activity. Partly, the frequent
depiction of Bentham as a political moralist is a consequence of the fact that he is
conventionally cast as engaging in the activity of political philosophy, seeking to
apply his philosophically derived ethics to politics (cf. Nussbaum, 2004; Williams,
261Vitali
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