Publication Date

8-1969

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Jack Thacker, Crawford Crowe, Marion Lucas

Degree Program

Department of History

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

During the period of reaction in England after the Napoleonic wars, a new generation of reformers developed, who abjured the belief in natural rights already discredited by the Jacobin excesses.1 These individuals sought a personality around whom they could center their program. Jeremy Bentham, a seemingly apolitical man, gradually became the personification of the new methodology. Crane Brinton has written, "scarcely has an English thinker left a more definite trice upon English legislation than Jeremy Bentham."2 So involved are the implications of the system and the man who introduced the new science" that interest is produced by the study itself. Largely under his name and doctrine, the English middle class moved forward to capture new political power without a revolution.

1. J. Bronowski & Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition (New York, 1960), 430.

2. Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1933), 14.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | European History | History | History of Philosophy | Philosophy

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