Utilitarianism and the Painful Orient
| Author | Piyel Haldar |
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663907082736 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
UTILITARIANISM AND THE
PAINFUL ORIENT
PIYEL HALDAR
Birkbeck, University of London, UK
ABSTRACT
The impact of Utilitarian thought on legal and quasi-legal institutions is immense. Its
language pervades at the level of agendas, goals, invectives and proscriptions. Yet, little
attention is paid to the manner in which Utilitarianism addresses the question of
fidelity. The history of Western institutional statecraft is simultaneously a history of
the profound fidelity of subjects to institutions. Does Utilitarianism have a discernible
theory of subjectivity? This article takes the case of the introduction of Utilitarian
reforms in British India in order to illustrate that the question of subjective attach-
ment most useful to modern rational thinking arises in the modes of thought that
such progressive thinking sought to exclude. In the case of British India, Utilitarian
reforms (driven by temperate pleasures) were forced to rely upon Oriental tropes of
politics that were considered illicit, despotic, and excessive. Such a case study alerts
us to the manner in which all forms of Utilitarianism remain linked to arcane modes
of address.
KEY WORDS
Bentham; British India; Durbar; excess; Fitzjames Stephens; Mill; Orientalism;
pleasure; Utilitarianism
Ius ac fas omne delere. [Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum: 1, 16, 6]
INTRODUCTION
UTILITARIANISM IS the most temperate of all philosophies, which makes
its study within the context of British India, well before the inven-
tion of efficient air conditioning systems, all the more fascinating.
This article will examine, first of all, the efforts made by Utilitarians to exclude
Orientalism as a useful pedagogic tool of colonial government and to replace
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 16(4), 573–590
DOI: 10.1177/0964663907082736
it with the more tempered ‘principle of pleasure’. Rulership over the India
of the East India Company had, up until the 19th century, been based on
Orientalized forms of government. Attention was paid to local customs,
languages and rituals. By the 19th century, missionary and Utilitarian agendas
had denounced the use, and even the scholarship, of Orientalism as unprofit-
able and corrupt. The conservative view was that the Orient was inextricably
linked to forms of illicit activities, and excess pleasure. Its association with
the violence of despotism meant that Orientalism had to be extricated from
the question of Imperial government. Anglican reforms were thus committed
to the renunciation of decadent pleasures and the eradication of non-common
law forms of behaviour as possible. The frenetic activity of colonialism
throughout the 19th century may be regarded as ‘designed to protect the
other from his jouissance,’ even at the point of destroying the other (Z
ˇiz
ˇek,
1989: 186–7). According to such an account, Indian culture ceased to be a
major source of inspiration to the English. With some exceptions, the
country became a dull and arid land where the supposed glamour of life in
the colony was confined to the specifically English rituals of afternoon tea
on the veranda, bridge at the club or drinks in the barrack rooms.
Nevertheless, the Utilitarian theory of pleasure, it will be argued, inevitably
commits itself to a structural relationship to the fantasy of excess and useless
enjoyment. It creates a space for it as a sovereign necessity; that is to say,
excess remains more than nothing, and more than an archaic vestige of
Orientalism. It is, in fact, revealed to be quintessentially necessary to the idea
of rule and legality. Such an argument, I hope, extends beyond the historical
parameters of 19th-century India and contributes to an overall understanding
of Utilitarianism. Thus, the account of Utilitarianism in the context of its
application to political governance in India bears relevance to any account of
economic utility in the present period of globalization. Current advocates
of economic pragmatism and neo-classicism, for example, stress the need to
achieve social wealth measured by the highest average welfare among indi-
viduals (Jevons, 1888). To them, the obvious counter-argument that such
approaches nearly always produce an accumulation of value among fewer
inhabitants of the world’s community holds limited purchase. To be sure,
economic Utilitarianism and the mode of market exchange between centre
and periphery may well produce a surplus among some individuals thereby
disenfranchising others (Wallerstein, 2004). And, of course, we are well used
to arguments that the late 20th- and early 21st-century avatars of Utilitari-
anism produces a mental atmosphere in which cynical pragmatism and selfish
individualism triumph (Posner, 1979). Liberal-minded apologists, neverthe-
less, seldom deny the imperfection of modern economics. For them, there is
always room to improve external legislative standards or to fix the internal
regulation of the market place in order to suit the better distribution of social
wealth and, by extension, self-determination. It is always possible, so it seems,
to mitigate the faults of a liberal and unrestrained market (Parsons, 1937).
Hence, the institutional importance placed on developmental economists such
as Amartya Sen whose work might be seen as an attempt to mitigate the faults
574 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 16(4)
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